Over the past half-century, billions of dollars have been spent across the nation on efforts to transform low-performing public schools -- most of them urban, most of them low-income, and most of them disproportionately enrolled with students of color -- into models of success. It hasn't worked. The failure of attempts to remedy the state of urban…

Within Massachusetts alone, 23,000 students are experiencing homelessness. And, with the expiration of COVID-era protections like an eviction moratorium and rental assistance, many experts predict that number will increase. Child and family homelessness is associated with a host of negative outcomes including poor physical and mental health, lower…

This brief reviews state plans submitted to the U.S. Department of Education as of October 1, 2017. It focuses on three key topics for early learning in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): setting clear goals and policy priorities for early learning, integrating early learning into school improvement, and supporting early childhood educator…

Teacher residency programs are a relatively new method for building stronger teacher pipelines. Research assessing the impact of these programs is still limited, but some early reports suggest that residency programs hold promise for improving teacher effectiveness and retention rates (Barrett, Hovde, Hahn, & Rosqueta, 2011; Papay, West,…

This article describes an innovative assessment tool designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a food safety skills curriculum for learners receiving special education services. As schools respond to the increased demand for training students with special needs about food safety, the need for effective curricula and tools is also increasing. A…

Blended or hybrid course offerings in higher education are commonplace and much has been written about how to design a blended course effectively. This study examines publically available guides, documents, and books that espouse best or effective practices in blended course design to determine commonalities among such practices. A qualitative…

Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) and the National Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) have teamed up to bring you a ground-breaking policy brief that examines the role of school districts in promoting family engagement. "Seeing is Believing: Promising Practices for How School Districts Promote Family Engagement" spotlights how six…

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…

In the current english-only programs in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts only a small percentage of students are learning English and subject matter content. This violates the success in practice prong of "Castaneda v. Pickard" (1981). Further, these program failures bolster the claim that these programs also violate castaneda's…

The purpose of this study, funded by Jobs for the Future through a grant to the Massachusetts Community Colleges Executive Office, was to: (1) provide an update on the status of developmental education within Massachusetts community colleges; (2) shed light on the alignment between research-based best practices to advance success among…

Massachusetts is heralded nationally for being the first in the nation to enact a state policy to redesign and expand the learning day for all students to advance academic achievement, broaden enrichment opportunities, and improve instruction. The Expanded Learning Time (ELT) Initiative has gained momentum over the past several years due to the…

For young people who have dropped out of school, are out of work, or lack connections to family or other caring adults, there are often no easy answers. Their hopes for a better life are frequently no different than those harbored by their more advantaged peers, but their path to adulthood is rendered more difficult by tangled combinations of…

This document describes the mentoring relationship from the perspectives of several virtual schools that have built mentoring programs to assist their new teachers. Each school's mentoring program is unique and has been designed specifically for the school's staff, size, and instructional approach. These schools have learned that a successful…

In much research, learners' perspectives tend to be considered in light of a program's expectations or U.S. society's definitions of learner needs, rather than considering how learners would define and make sense of their own experiences, hopes, and needs. In contrast, this study considers learners' meanings as the fundamental starting point for…

The authors carefully followed for a year or more the inner experiences of learning and change of 41 ABE/ESOL (Adult Basic Education/English for Speakers of Other Languages) learners from all over the world. They were enrolled in three distinct U.S. programs (a community college, a family literacy site, and a workplace site), each oriented to…