In recent years, career and technical education (CTE) programs that include quality work-based learning (WBL) opportunities for students have gained significant traction among educators, policymakers, and stakeholders as an effective way to prepare students for the labor market. However, a lack of data on WBL--which many CTE students participate…

Districts across the country are facing severe shortages of teachers--especially in certain subjects (math, science, special education, career and technical education, and bilingual education) and in specific schools (urban, rural, high-poverty, high-minority, and low-achieving). The severity of the teacher shortage problem varies significantly by…

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…

Properly defining a population ensures that resources, such as funding and access, meet the needs, expectations, and intended outcomes for those represented. Ethical concerns arise when a target population, such as the English Language Learner population, is defined in numerous yet incomplete ways, and differently in research and in state policies…

The evidence that teacher preparation programs have an impact on teacher quality is often limited. Progress in research on this topic will remain rather limited in its influence on practice until more proximal measures of teacher education outcomes can be established. The dearth of variables to measure the impact of teacher preparation programs on…

Over the past two decades, community organizing has emerged as an effective force for school improvement. In the context of shrinking education funding, stubborn opportunity and achievement gaps between low-income and wealthy children and between children of color and White children, and polarizing debate on school reform, community organizing…

Methods and results are described of a study to determine if elementary classroom teachers in Colorado (1) have knowledge of the valuing education process; (2) have a preference for teaching values as opposed to values clarification, other valuing processes, or moral reasoning; and (3) can define the terms values and valuing. Ninety-two teachers…

This study examines various factors that influence school district spending and spending from locally raised taxes in Colorado and Minnesota. The factors include the levels of state and federal aid; the nature of the state general aid formula; local fiscal characteristics including the average market value of residential housing, the percent of…

Several Colorado schools hired data analysts to help with school improvement efforts. The analysts are teachers who participate on school leadership teams and who support school action research teams. They collect and organize baseline data, help teams measure results of proposed changes, and evaluate results after implementation. Because they are…

By 2025, 22 percent of the U.S. college-age population will be Latino, a level already exceeded in four states: California, Florida, New York, and Texas. However, today, only seven percent of Latinos ages 18 to 24 have an associate's degree or higher compared to 9 percent of African Americans, 16 percent of white, and 25 percent of Asians of the…

In order to define long-term curriculum trends and to understand more fully the reasons for curriculum change and continuity, course lists for six Colorado Springs school districts were compared for the years 1961-62, 1970-71, and 1976-77. In addition, confidential questionnaires were distributed to 108 administrators and teachers in the six…

As the college-age Latino population continues to increase throughout the nation, meeting the country's future human capital and workforce needs make it imperative to improve outcomes for Latino students today. As public attention is focused on existing achievement gaps, educators and policymakers are seeking ways to improve educational outcomes…

To measure the extent of student opportunities to learn relative to educational reform goals, the Colorado Educational Policy Consortium at the University of Colorado-Denver designed and administered teacher and student surveys about instructional and assessment-related processes statewide. This study uses data from the 1997 teacher survey to…

Current regulations and guidelines established by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for the maintenance of confidentiality in educational research are summarized. Key terms, such as "system of records" are defined and elaborated upon. The responsibilities of the funding agency and its research contractors are enumerated and…

The school-to-work transition of high school and community college vocational program completers in 1990-1992 was examined by analyzing administrative records and employment and earnings data of vocational program completers from state education agencies in Colorado, Florida, Missouri, and Washington. A consistently high percentage of vocational…