How do you stay focused on increasing student learning when budget cuts threaten everything you are striving for? This book offers a comprehensive framework to enhance student achievement in good times and in bad. School reform expert Allan R. Odden outlines a school improvement action plan focused sharply on student learning and then shows how to…

This fall, the nine states that finished as runners up in last year's groundbreaking Race to the Top competition will have an opportunity to reapply for a grant. The winners will receive a combined $200 million to help implement the bold education reform plans they developed last year. Many of the eligible states already have clear roadmaps toward…

The top priority for the U.S. Department of Education's new Race to the Top-District (RTT-D) competition is to create personalized-learning environments to bolster student achievement: "Absolute Priority 1: Personalized Learning Environments. To meet this priority, an applicant must coherently and comprehensively address how it will build on…

In 2009, the federal government committed over $3 billion nationwide to help states and districts turn around their worst-performing schools. The U.S. Department of Education intended for the School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to spur dramatic change. This report looks at the results of a field study of the first-year implementation of those grants…

The impact of education decentralization on high-quality education has been mixed at best. This can be attributed to a variety of factors including decentralization itself, ineffectual implementation, political-economic friction, and poor design. This paper focuses largely on the issue of design, contending that if governments or donors aim to…

With the current emphasis in educational policy on improving teacher effectiveness, states and school districts are quickly developing and implementing new models of teacher evaluation. However, few models address the unique challenges in accurately measuring achievement growth of students with disabilities (including those participating in…

Off-campus parties are a major source of underage and excessive drinking among college students and cause alcohol-related problems for students and residents. This checklist is a brief, evidence-based guide for campus-based prevention professionals. It is designed to give the basic information needed to develop, implement, and evaluate an…

Response to Intervention provides a continuum of instruction across intensity levels through multitiered intervention models. A lot of work to date has been devoted to how to configure tiers to ensure the appropriate increases in intensity. Much less work has been devoted to making adjustments "within" tiers to attempt to forestall the need for…

Response to Intervention (RtI) has gained increased attention with the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. Since RtI was introduced at the policy level as a mechanism for use in the learning disability identification process, much of the implementation work has focused on this application. School-based…

Academic libraries have traditionally collected reference statistics using hash marks on paper. Although efficient and simple, this method is not an effective way to capture the complexity of reference transactions. Several electronic tools are now available to assist libraries with collecting often elusive reference data--among them homegrown…

Over the past several years I have taught a career orientation course at St. John Fisher College. This course was designed to increase student awareness of potential careers following their undergraduate studies in our Biology program. Additionally, the course has also been used as a model for similar experiences in our Psychology, Chemistry,…

Secondary school administrators are increasingly finding themselves in the position of implementing Response to Intervention (RTI). This system of providing progressively intensive levels of intervention for the purposes of preventing academic failure and identifying children with learning disability may be useful at the secondary level. However,…

This article describes the process of replacing a modest Master's level school leader preparation program with an innovative Ed.D. program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The new doctoral program is intensive, highly selective, intellectually rigorous, and field-based. The authors provide side-by-side comparisons of the difference…

In an age of technological advancement, video games have been found to be effective teaching aids in middle school science classrooms. A National Science Foundation (NSF) project at Ohio University, known as STEAM, (Science and Technology Enrichment for Appalachian Middle Schoolers), has examined Second Life as a curriculum aid through the design,…

A quick look at today's business job postings and advertisements solidify that our future business graduates will be less likely to compete successfully or interview for the new corporate job openings without business process integration skills. Our credibility, reputation and visibility as an institution of higher learning is at stake--given that…