Since 2005, the Chinese government has vigorously extended influence over American education. While well-researched in some areas, that influence is merely noted elsewhere. This report fills a gap in previous work by examining the role of Mandarin education in Communist China, how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) developed language as a tool of…

State policymakers are in a unique position to enable the innovations in education necessary to prepare students for a rapidly changing world. Working with 8,000 educators nationwide, the Aurora Institute identified the top 10 issues to address in state policy for transforming the K-12 education system: (1) Profile of a Graduate; (2) Innovation…

On February 24, 2017, all of the authors of the state-of-the-state manuscripts published in the "Journal of Education Finance" met in Cincinnati, Ohio, to participate in a roundtable discussion focused on recent legislative actions in 38 states. A majority of those papers were revised to reflect a final report on legislative actions…

A vision statement and call to action from Deans for Impact--a group of deans committing themselves to a set of principles intended to elevate the performance of educator preparation programs and the status of teachers. Their objectives include: Develop a consensus around a professional knowledge base for teachers; create a tighter connection…

Despite advances in improving CCR for students with disabilities, a great deal of work is needed to help more students achieve their full potential. The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA) provides states with flexibility over the design of their educational systems and offers additional provisions to support CCR for all students, including…

REL Pacific at McREL, one of 10 Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), serves educators in American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap), Guam, Hawai'i, the Republic of the…

The education system of the United States is not adequately preparing a large proportion of its students for college, career-training, and, ultimately, jobs that provide enough income to support a middle class standard of living. Because the education system has failed to attain hoped-for outcomes, some states are investigating new systems,…

As educational attainment grows increasingly more essential to individual and societal prosperity and simultaneously more expensive, policymakers' appetite for evidence of the return on the investment in a college education has swelled and they increasingly want to equip prospective college students and their families with concrete information…

A striking convergence of research, documentation, commentary, and policy in the past five years strongly suggests that an almost exclusive focus on academic knowledge and skills is an incomplete solution. Additional behaviors, skills, and mindsets--sometimes called metacognitive skills or 21st-century skills--are just as necessary for academic…

"Assessing Student Threats: A Handbook for Implementing the Salem-Keizer System" is a manual for the implementation of a threat assessment system that follows the recommendations of the Safe Schools Initiative and the prescriptive outline provided by the FBI. Written from an educator's perspective with contributing authors from law…

Oregon's Legislature in 2011 affirmed a clear and ambitious goal for the State, known as the "40-40-20" goal, which states that by 2025 all adult Oregonians will hold a high school diploma or equivalent, 40% of them will have an associate's degree or a meaningful postsecondary certificate, and 40% will hold a bachelor's degree or…

With conversations about the best ways to evaluate teacher performance proliferating across the nation, preservice preparation could be the next stop on the teacher-quality continuum to receive a similarly high level of scrutiny. New models for preparing teachers, such as the yearlong apprenticeship or "residency" model, have received…

This article describes the University of Consortium for Catholic Education (UCCE) as an example of collaboration between Catholic colleges, universities, schools, and other stakeholders. The UCCE supports a collaborative cadre of primarily Catholic colleges and universities as they design and implement graduate-level teaching service programs for…

Few states have established systems for overseeing dual enrollment programs to encourage institutions to align their practices with quality standards. Five states (Arkansas, Indiana, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota), have established incentives or requirements for post-secondary concurrent enrollment providers to pursue the National Alliance of…

In 2009, Excelencia in Education launched the Ensuring America's Future initiative to inform, organize, and engage leaders in a tactical plan to increase Latino college completion. An executive summary of Latino College Completion in 50 states synthesizes information on 50 state factsheets and builds on the national benchmarking guide. Each…