The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has presented various challenges for education agencies and their whole school community partners. From creating plans to help ensure continuity of teaching and learning via in-person, virtual, or hybrid models to adjusting plans to help ensure that feeding and food distribution can continue, school…

Strategic Performance Management (SPM) is a multistep process that guides an organization's leadership in designing and revising a system of strategic performance management. Communication is key to the success of any change initiative. SPM provides a logically coherent process for linking strategic planning with performance management, ultimately…

The Multistate Longitudinal Data Exchange (MLDE) facilitates data sharing between states from K-12 education, higher education, and labor agencies. Its goal is to provide practitioners, policymakers, and researchers with a comprehensive data source to understand educational and career trajectories, including how these trajectories can cross state…

Strategic planning and performance management are not new concepts; however, education agencies and other nonprofit organizations have struggled to embrace and use the concepts, especially in unison. The strategic performance management (SPM) process provides a mechanism to bring performance management to state education agencies (SEAs), local…

Schools can work toward achieving safe, positive environments by integrating a behavioral support framework for students with a systematic approach to identifying students in need of mental health services. This study of the U.S. Department of Education's School Climate Transformation Grant (SCTG) program examined how participating states and…

The Now is the Time initiative, introduced following the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, includes among its goals making schools safer and increasing access to mental health services. To address these aims, the U.S. Department of Education launched its School Climate Transformation Grant (SCTG) program, which aims to promote more…

Providing access to robust connectivity is critical to ensuring today's students are college and career ready. As such, federal, state, and district-level leaders have dedicated a significant amount of time, effort, and resources toward improving our schools' external broadband access, including both Internet access and wide area network (WAN).…

Certain aspects of the implementation of language immersion programs in Delaware are unique given the state's size, demographics, and role in national education initiatives including Race to the Top, Common Core, and Smarter Balance. The Delaware experience typifies what every state, district, or even school goes through as they try to provide…

Drawing on deep expertise and diverse experiences in the sector, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) and the Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) have collaborated to identify a set of key policies and practices that could dramatically accelerate the replication and growth of high-performing charter schools and charter…

In recent years, schools have been forced by rising costs and shrinking budgets to stretch their resources further than ever before in order to meet the educational needs of today's students. Energy costs continue to rise, placing unprecedented stress on limited funds. In fact, K-12 schools in the United States spend more than $8 billion every…

The U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top competition has provided an unprecedented opportunity for states to advance public elementary and secondary education reform. The competition's requirements encompass reforms ranging from overhauling teacher assessment to adopting common educational standards to eliminating restrictions on the…

Examines transference issues in school effectiveness and improvement, including the relationship between within-school and across-school improvement. Describes how the head of a successful history department in an innercity high school changed the entire school from low achieving to high achieving after being appointed head teacher. (Contains 57…

The report examines systems developed by Indiana, Wisconsin, and Louisiana to monitor interagency coordination of educational related services for handicapped children. The background and development of special education legislation in each of the three states are reviewed along with the structure of the state education agency (SEA). Each state is…

California State Department of Education officials visited Azusa Unified School District as part of their study on the governance of education after Proposition 13. This article summarizes, from the District's perspective, the discussions on categorical programs and ways the State Department could help the district to improve education.…

A new professionalism for teachers will only be possible when the following constituencies collaborate for educational change: (1) teachers; (2) education school deans and faculties; (3) chairs and members of university arts and sciences departments; (4) local school administrators and committee members; (5) state departments of education; and (6)…