Education Law Center's "Making the Grade" is an annual overview of the condition of school finance in the states. Using the most recently available data from the 2021-2022 school year, the report ranks and grades each state on three measures to answer the key question: How fair is school funding in your state? The three fairness measures…

Each state participates in the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), which prescribes certain types of activities and organizational structures for states to direct federal investments in workforce development. Participation in WIOA requires a state to create a workforce investment board with duties such as developing, implementing and…

A career pathway system is made up of multiple programs that span educational institutions, workforce entities and support service partners. These systems are oriented around a shared understanding of the needs of industries. Career pathway systems are one of many policy models states use to help connect education and workforce in the K-12,…

Research confirms what common sense dictates: Students learn less when their teachers aren't there. According to multiple studies, a ten-day increase in teacher absence results in at least ten fewer days of learning for students. Clearly, some absences are unavoidable--teachers are only human. But compared to their counterparts in other industries…

Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD), California's thirteenth largest school district, faces a looming deficit and must make significant budget adjustments to avoid state intervention. This case study explores how the district reached this point, how its finances compare with other districts in Sacramento County, and what the…

This report takes a first step toward filling the need for more information on time allocated to schooling. Data from the federal Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), the only nationally representative data source available for identifying variations in time across schools, are used to measure and document in-school time among the nation's…

Created by the U.S. Congress in 2006, the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) represents the first federal initiative targeted directly at state and district efforts to introduce performance measures into educator compensation. TIF responds to a growing body of evidence that existing pay structures do not respond to labor force realities or adequately…

Teen birth rates and teen pregnancy prevention strategies vary widely across individual states in the US, which has the highest overall teen birth rate among developed nations. California and Texas, the two most populous states currently accounting for a quarter of all teen births, have taken very different approaches to addressing adolescent…

This report serves as a quick reference guide for elected officials to compare key education policies and data in their states to the rest of the nation. The first section highlights major state policies for all 50 states in both table and chart formats (see Summary Charts ). The second section provides key state data, such as per-student spending…

The National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities (NDPC-SD) was assigned the task of analyzing and summarizing Indicator 1--Graduation--from the 2006-07 Annual Performance Reports (APRs) and amended State Performance Plans (SPPs), which were submitted by states to the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in February of…

Math experts developed Formative Assessment Lessons that teachers can incorporate throughout the year's curriculum. Both tools target the "instructional core." A study by Research for Action (RFA) examining the first year of piloting the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) and Math Design Collaborative (MDC) tools (2010-11) found…

The National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities (NDPC-SD) was assigned the task of analyzing and summarizing Indicator 1--Graduation--from the 2005-06 Annual Performance Reports (APRs) and amended State Performance Plans (SPPs), which were submitted by states to the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in February of…

The National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities (NDPC-SD) was assigned the task of summarizing Indicator 1--Graduation--for the analysis of the 2005-2010 State Performance Plans (SPP), which were submitted to the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in December of 2005. The text of the indicator is as follows: Percent…

Because of the individual authority of each State for its own educational program, practices and policies differ widely among them in many respects. Yet in the midst of differences there are also common elements of development. The U. S. Office of Education, in presenting this series of monographs, has attempted to point out those common elements,…

The statistical survey in this bulletin includes a general summary of the statistics showing the enrollment in public and private schools and institutions of various types, the estimated expenditures for those schools in 1921-22, the distribution of teachers among those schools, and certain combined statistics of public and private high schools…