This paper is a transcript of a letter written by the author, Cornelia M. Ashby, Director, Education, Workforce, and Income Security Issues, to June St. Clair Atkinson, State Superintendent of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. In this letter, the author reports that she and her colleagues have examined the efforts of selected…

Community colleges have maintained a mission and commitment to open access. Likewise, Federal Pell Grants have historically served as a primary means for low income populations to afford higher education. Thus, community college students and Federal Pell Grants are important parts of the American higher education landscape and a mode of social and…

This publication describes new ways that States redesigning their educator effectiveness systems are measuring growth in student achievement, including value-added models and student learning objectives. The publication concludes with a brief discussion of communicating the results of student growth measures, such as monitoring correlations…

Federal education funding has often been overlooked by districts in search of sources of support for prevention. This guide is intended to help school districts take advantage of those funds by identifying K-12 grant programs in the U.S. Department of Education (ED) that could be used to implement prevention efforts in elementary and secondary…

Using two sources of representative data: the 2005 National Household Education Survey and the 2007 RAND California Preschool Study, this paper describes child care and early learning arrangements for the approximately 2.8 million California children ages 0 to 5 who are younger than the age at which they would enter kindergarten. The focus is on…

The federal school nutrition programs are the keystones to the diets of millions of American children. Schools have the opportunity to support healthy nutrition habits early in life by creating environments that encourage the consumption of healthy foods and beverages. This paper provides resources which offer general information about the…

Grant recipients risk losing millions of dollars in Race to the Top money if they fail to live up to their promises, federal education officials make clear. By threatening to revoke Hawaii's $75 million Race to the Top award for failing to make "adequate progress" on key milestones of its education reform plan, U.S. Secretary of…

Since the initiation of PL 94-142 enacted by the United States Congress in 1975, special education has been mandated, funded and regulated by the federal government. There have been both benefits and drawbacks to this initiative. In positive terms and most importantly, children who require different educational services are identified, and…

An overview of the history of the Federal Writers' Project, hitting on critical reference points for our vision of what the project might look like today: the 1930s' FWP's cross-disciplinary integration of literature and history; the rejection of strict divisions between high and low culture; and the bottom-up approach to history that had begun…

Education leaders in Congress are signaling that they're prepared to collaborate with the White House on a long-stalled reauthorization of the main federal law for K-12 education, after President Barack Obama sought to move education back to the top of the national agenda in his State of the Union address last week. Precollegiate policy is widely…

More than a dozen education programs--including high-profile efforts focused on literacy, teaching, and learning--face the prospect of a permanent federal funding loss after they were chopped from a stopgap spending measure signed into law by President Barack Obama last week. The temporary spending law, intended to keep the government running…

"Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2017" contains the Budget Message of the President, information on the President's priorities, and summary tables. President Obama's 2017 Budget makes critical investments while adhering to the bipartisan budget agreement he signed into the previous fall, and it lifts sequestration in…

This publication is intended for financial aid administrators and counselors who help students begin the aid process--filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®), verifying information, and making corrections and other changes to the information reported on the FAFSA. The Federal Student Aid Handbook consists of the Application…

For more than 25 years the Public School Forum of North Carolina has isolated state and federal spending to examine the capacity and effort counties make to support their schools. The intent of the annual Local School Finance Study is not to blame counties for their effort to support schools, but to examine the capacity and actual effort the…

The past year highlighted and heightened California's key challenges. Millions of Californians lost jobs and income during the COVID-19 crisis; low-income families, communities of color, and women were hit hardest. As schools and universities shifted rapidly to remote learning, educators and parents scrambled to provide all students with…