The transition from adolescence to adulthood can be difficult for many students, particularly those with mild disabilities. It's an unfortunate reality that students with disabilities continue to perform lower in terms of post-school outcomes in comparison to their peers without disabilities. The issue of improving post-school outcomes for…

Accountability has pushed principals to use data to drive and inform decisions in schools to positively impact student achievement. Research has shown that principals are the second most important impact on student achievement, second only to teachers. Principals who can lead change in schools based on data driven response have a positive impact…

Teachers' perceptions of long-term career success are largely related to the levels of support they receive early on in their careers. This study on teacher retention and the factors that influence teacher choice to remain in the field after the first five years of employment, examined three schools of varying demographics and socioeconomic status…

To best train and support school leaders in their evolving roles, they require high-quality preparation and in-service pipelines that both address the changing demands on their positions and acknowledge the cascading effects that well-prepared leaders have on both student outcomes and in school culture and retention. Including school leaders in…

As school districts face shortages of well-qualified and willing candidates to assume the role of school principal, the development of internal succession planning programs, along with the strategic use of external hires for school leadership positions is becoming more common. Based on a multi-year study of five (5) Central Florida school…

The George W. Bush Institute's School Leadership Initiative (SLI) District Cohort Research Project is a five-year effort with four school districts to test two frameworks--Principal Talent Management (PTM) and Effective Implementation. This collaboration is designed to improve how districts prepare, recruit, support, and retain principals. This…

Recent research has demonstrated that elementary school leaders, under pressure to meet benchmarks set by state and federal governments, have begun "staffing to the test," moving to tested grades and subjects teachers whose previous students made substantive learning gains. This is particularly true in lower-performing schools or schools…

Justine Finley, newly appointed principal of Northside Elementary, had been tasked with increasing her school's grade under the state accountability system and keeping neighborhood families from choosing to enroll in the charter school down the street. The superintendent made these priorities very clear. After spending the first 3 months observing…

This study used interview and observation data to investigate how school principals approached both the promotion and implementation of lesson study. Using distributed leadership and sensemaking, the study found that the principals received a lack of formal guidance and they used prior knowledge to adapt the model. To capture buy-in, the…

Research shows that effective teachers are one of the most important in-school contributors to student learning. To improve low-income minority students' access to effective teaching, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IP) initiative in the 2009-2010 school year. The program was…

Increasingly, states and districts are combining student growth measures with rigorous, rubric-aligned teacher observations in constructing teacher evaluation measures. Although the student growth or value-added components of these measures have received much research and policy attention, the results of this study suggest that the data generated…

In 2018, The RAND Corporation and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) published an evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IP) initiative, which was designed to improve achievement among low-income minority (LIM) students. The initiative provided support for several reforms that…

School districts increasingly push school leaders to utilize multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, such as observation ratings or value-added scores, in making talent management decisions, including teacher hiring, assignment, support, and retention, but we know little about the local conditions that promote or impede these processes. We…

Since the Florida State Department of Education promoted lesson study as a stateside teacher professional development model using the Race to the Top funding, school districts across the state have taken various approaches to promote lesson study. However, we do not know yet how district leaders made sense of this new model of teacher professional…

Teacher and student sorting within and between schools has historically garnered national attention and controversy. Scholars have recently examined how school leaders make data-driven decisions to create more equitable schools, particularly through teacher and student assignment practices. School leaders use student test scores to strategically…