This topical brief compares selected state policies related to educator effectiveness that have been enacted in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The brief also includes examples of projects R5CC and state leaders in Tennessee and West Virginia are implementing to increase educator effectiveness.

Students pursuing postsecondary education opportunities are increasingly considering the return on investment that these opportunities provide, seeking higher wages and additional career opportunities that are associated with the accumulation of human capital. With limited human and financial resources, states need to be selective in which student…

This research investigates whether teachers' unions influence student academic achievement in Southern states that prohibit collective bargaining. Our data are from the School and Staffing Survey and the Stanford Education Data Archive. We measure the strength of teachers' unions by union membership rate and meet-and-confer status of a district…

More than 427,000 undocumented students are enrolled in U.S. higher education institutions. That's an impressive number, considering the many hurdles they must overcome on the road to college and a degree, including restrictions on their ability to enroll in higher education institutions; limits on access to in-state tuition, state financial aid,…

Debates over the efficacy of tenure are longstanding but tenure reform is now more prominent in the public eye given recent high-profile legislative battles in states like Ohio and Wisconsin. This focus on tenure also is a natural outgrowth of the large body of research showing that differences between individual teachers can have profound effects…

In this multiple case study, we apply sense-making theory to examine and compare how middle school special and general educators perceive and respond to teacher evaluation reform, including formal classroom observations, informal walk-throughs, and student growth measures. Our findings reveal that special educators experience conflict between the…

We apply a utilization-focused evaluation [UFE] approach to an evaluation of Virginia's latest comprehensive accountability policy--the Standards of Accreditation (SOA). Our study focuses on the implementation experiences of district and high school level administrators in four urban districts. This study is significant in two important ways.…

Earning college credit in high school matters to students and parents. Students who earn college credits by taking a college-level course while in high school are more likely to enter college and succeed. Through these experiences, students become familiar with college expectations, academic behaviors, and habits of mind; get a head start on…

Bully victimization is associated with lower academic performance for individual students; however, less is known about the impact of bullying on the academic performance of the school as a whole. This study examined how retrospective administrator reports of both the prevalence of teasing and bullying (PTB) and the use of evidence-based bullying…

"Promoting Student Achievement through Improved Health Policy" is a quick primer of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] CDC's "Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child" model, which highlights 10 important areas for connecting health and learning: health education; physical education and physical activity;…

Community colleges are an increasingly important component of the higher education systems in the United States. Community college as a pathway toward a better educated workforce has been emphasized at a national and state level. Virginia's policy makers set an ambitious goal of producing 100,000 new baccalaureate degrees in the Commonwealth by…

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…

This fact sheet provides demographic information for the young Dual Language Learner (DLL) population in Virginia, based on Migration Policy Institute (MPI) analysis of U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS) data pooled over the 2011-15 period. DLLs, defined as children ages 8 and under with at least one parent who speaks a language…

Federal legislation requires that all students participate in state accountability systems. Most students with disabilities participate in the regular assessment, with or without accommodations. Students with more significant cognitive disabilities participate in the Alternate Assessment based on Alternate Achievement Standards (AA-AAS). A few…

Online learning has steadily become a more integral strategy for schools and districts in their efforts to offer students greater access to the courses they need. Where in the past, much of the online learning activity happened at the state level or regional level, more and more schools are exercising greater control over their online and digital…