Response to intervention began as a way to identify and teach struggling readers and special education students. It's fast becoming a way to change schooling for everyone. This special report examines the many forms the approach is now taking, its research base, its influence on the educational marketplace, and the federal regulations that both…

Billionaire businessman Eli Broad, one of the country's most active philanthropists, founded the "Broad Superintendents Academy" in 2002 with an extraordinarily optimistic goal: Find leaders from both inside and outside education, train them, and have them occupying the superintendencies in a third of the 75 largest school districts--all in just…

The use of "value added" information appears poised to expand into the nation's teacher colleges, with more than a dozen states planning to use the technique to analyze how graduates of training programs fare in classrooms. Supporters say the data could help determine which teacher education pathways produce teachers who are at least as…

An external panel that includes several prominent critics of teacher education has been tapped to craft the performance standards for the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), the new organization's leaders announced last week. Among the standards under consideration: how programs ensure that candidates know their content;…

A new study by a public and labor economist suggests that "value added" methods for determining the effectiveness of classroom teachers are built on some shaky assumptions and may be misleading. The study, due to be published in February in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics," is the first of a handful of papers now in the…

This article reports on the results of a study undertaken by the U.S. Department of Education on the impact of the Reading First program, which offer little insight into which parts of the program are worth saving and which need revamping. The study found that the $6 billion spent on the program has helped students with basic decoding but not with…

The 12 winners of the federal Race to the Top competition have experienced near-universal challenges in turning their sweeping, multifaceted proposals into reality, among them a limited state capacity to execute fast, dramatic change and deeply rooted teacher-evaluation systems that have proved hard to transform. Reports unveiled by the U.S.…

Federal officials plan to overhaul the reporting requirements for higher education-based teacher preparation in favor of leaner, outcome-based indicators of program quality, according to plans outlined in the president's fiscal 2012 budget request. To bolster the overhaul, the budget also proposes a $185 million new formula grant program, dubbed…

A variety of federally financed grants based on performance pay are providing insights into how districts and teachers can collaborate to implement sustainable programs designed to improve teaching and learning. The question of whether those Teacher Incentive Fund grants will yield measurably higher student achievement, applicant pools with…

In 1958, a group of international scholars met in Hamburg, Germany, and hatched an idea for a huge study to measure student learning around the globe. They saw the world as one big educational laboratory, with each country acting as its own naturally occurring experiment. If tests could gauge the effects of those experiments, the researchers…

This article reports on a study conducted by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. of students in four abstinence programs, as well as peers from the same communities who did not participate in the abstinence programs. A federally mandated report said that students who participated in sexual-abstinence education programs partially funded by the federal…

This article reports on new findings from a forthcoming research review which analyzes 207 studies of school-based programs designed to foster children's social and emotional skills. Roger P. Weissberg, the president of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, the Chicago-based group that sponsored the four-year…

Disadvantaged students who regularly attend top-notch after-school programs end up, after two years, academically far ahead of peers who spend more out-of-school time in unsupervised activities, according to findings from an eight-state study of those programs. Known as the Promising Afterschool Programs study, the new research examined 35…