The Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA) was originally designed to attract the "best and brightest" into the teaching profession, particularly those who might otherwise have pursued more lucrative career paths. However, the role that Educator Preparation Programs (EPPs) play in communicating the opportunities offered by TIA to preservice…

A growing number of schools have begun experimenting with giving students cash rewards to improve academic performance. This practice has come to be known as "cash-for-grades." In this article, I examine some of the philosophical and ethical questions involved with cash-for-grades programmes, rather than focusing on whether such…

The Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) provides grants to support performance-based compensation systems for teachers and principals in high-need schools. The study measures the impact of pay-for-performance bonuses as part of a comprehensive compensation system within a large, multisite random assignment study design. The treatment schools were to…

Over both recent years and many decades, California districts have produced a range of substantively different approaches to teacher evaluation, demonstrating both the potential for district-level action generally and specific design options. In this report, the authors focus on teacher evaluation programs and further focus on the features of…

Argentina has traditionally stood out in terms of educational outcomes among its Latin American counterparts. Schooling of older children, however, still shows room for improvement especially among the more vulnerable. Fortunately, during the last years a sizeable improvement in attendance rates for children aged 15 through 17 took place. This…

The purpose of this paper is to review and critique a groundbreaking research report. The research article under review in this paper is: "A Big Apple for Educators: New York City's Experiment with Schoolwide Performance Bonuses: Final Evaluation Report" (see ED521920). In 2007-08, a program called the Schoolwide Performance Bonus…

The Apollo 20 Program is a "turnaround" initiative with an emphasis on improving student performance in math. The key strategies of the turnaround initiative include having effective principals and effective teachers on the campus, more instructional time, using data to drive instruction, creating a campus culture of high expectations,…

More than 5 million adults lack both functional literacy (below level 1) and numeracy (below entry level 3); an estimated 11.5 million adults do not have basic digital skills; and one in five adults do not have basic financial capabilities. Around 850,000 people have English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) needs. At the same time,…

This report describes ACT's multiyear commitment to increasing the number of eligible high school students enrolled in dual enrollment programs across the nation. The report also offers four policy recommendations to expand dual enrollment programs, as well as examples of each from selected states. [The following organizations collaborated with…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed into law in 2001, fueled by bipartisan concern about the standardized test scores of U.S. students in comparison with their international cohort and dissatisfaction with gaps in achievement between certain student groups--low income, English-language learners, special education, and students of…

The Student Achievement Initiative (SAI), adopted by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges in 2007, is one of a growing number of performance funding programs that have been dubbed "performance funding 2.0." Unlike previous performance funding models, the SAI rewards colleges for students' intermediate…

Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) are institutions for inducing firms to produce environmental goods beyond legal requirements. A comparative perspective on VEPs shows how incentives to sponsor and participate in VEPs vary across countries in ways that reveal their potential and limitations. Our brief survey examines conditions under which…

The Apollo 20 Program is a "turnaround" initiative with an emphasis on improving student performance in math. The key strategies of the turnaround initiative include having effective principals and effective teachers on the campus, more instructional time, using data to drive instruction, creating a campus culture of high expectations,…

We analyze the effects of a school-based program that offers children an opportunity to win prizes if they walk or bike to school during prize periods. We use daily child-level data and individual fixed effects models to measure the effect of the prizes, with variation in the timing of prize periods across different schools allowing us to estimate…

In 2010-2011, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) launched the Apollo 20 Program in four high schools and five middle schools in the district as a "turnaround" initiative with an emphasis on improving student performance in math. The key strategies of the turnaround initiative included having effective principals and effective…