The change in allowing school districts to use the more prevalent discrepancy model or the new addition of response to intervention to determine whether a disability is present has sparked discussion among educators. As districts decide which method to use, it is important to base decisions on factual and researched information. The authors hope…

For several years, WestEd's Measure to Learn and Improve (MLI) project team has kept California state policy leaders informed about the statewide implementation of the California Academic Standards in English language arts and mathematics, by summarizing and disseminating results from the RAND Corporation's annual American Educator Panel (AEP)…

Rhode Island's School Accountability system is in a period of transition to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The accountability data released October 2017 is based on the 2016-17 administration of the PARCC assessment. Results from the Multi-State Alternate Assessment in ELA/literacy and mathematics are also included. The results of this…

Concerns are arising in the United States that a majority of secondary school students fail to achieve mathematics and science proficiency due to teachers who lack adequate knowledge of the subjects. The concerns over shortages of mathematics and science teachers have also reached new heights. In Texas high schools, the teaching areas in…

In this autoethnography, I examine the challenges I faced as a private-to-public-sector novice CFO entering a resource-constrained 41-thousand-student K-12 urban school district in Colorado. This study chronicles how I deliberately slowed down my interactions within a complex adaptive system (CAS) through ethnographic interviewing to identify the…

In California, as in many other states across the nation, implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has been a complex endeavor impacting every public school educator. Not surprisingly, California districts have encountered bumps along the way in their efforts to provide much-needed support to all K-12 teachers as they continue to learn…

School district officials have faced the urgent task in recent years of ensuring that all schools, not just a lucky few, benefit from sure-footed leadership by professionals who know how to focus on instruction and improve it. The question boils down to this: How can districts develop a pipeline of great school principals? Research about a Wallace…

Empirical evidence that horizontal alignment of policies and practices from preschool through the early elementary grades sustains the effects of quality preschool and contributes to children's learning is scarce, as discussed above, but there are nevertheless good reasons to expect benefits to such alignment. Moreover, many districts and schools…

"Ripe for Change: Garden-Based Learning in Schools" takes a big-picture view of the school garden movement and the state of garden-based learning in public K--8 education. The book frames the garden movement for educators and shows how school gardens have the potential to be a significant resource for teaching and learning. In this…

In fulfillment of Ohio Revised Code 3333.041 (A) (1), the Chancellor of the Department of Higher Education has published a listing by school district of the number of the 2014 high school graduates who subsequently attended a state institution of higher education in academic year 2014-2015. The listing provides the percentage of each district's…

Maryland's demanding new Kindergarten Readiness Assessment was administered statewide for the first time. Its results are revealing and sobering. Many states do not even check in any systematic way on their children's readiness for kindergarten, and in previous years, Maryland used metrics based on modest expectations, outdated standards, and…

This mixed-methods study inquired about characteristics of districts which influence changes in student achievement and how those characteristics are developed. Staff in 49 Ontario districts were surveyed to estimate the status of nine district characteristics on changes in provincial tests of math and language achievement over five years. A…

The Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD) was created in 2011 to rapidly turn around the lowest performing schools in the state by authorizing high performing charter management organizations to operate the schools. A lack of enough quality applicants, however, led the district to directly run a group of schools. This research investigates…

This "water cooler" column features e-mail conversations between Erin Koning and three teachers--Beth, Jenna, and Patrice--and is a reflection of their participation in a Chicago Public School (CPS), professional development series designed to support the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in grades K-12. At the…

States in the midst of implementing evaluation reforms face a common dilemma: how to ensure that all your districts are implementing quality educator evaluation systems while still providing them with the flexibility to design systems best suited to their own unique needs. One answer is to create an equivalency process (also known as an approval…