Across the nation, states and school districts face a persistent shortage of educators with expertise in promoting both the English proficiency and academic achievement of English learner (EL) students. To help improve educators' qualifications and classroom instruction for ELs, the National Professional Development (NPD) program has awarded…

Improving student achievement is a continual focus of educational and political leaders. The strategies used to impact student achievement are varied as are the results. The United States Department of Education provides grant funding to states and local educational agencies with the goal of impacting student achievement through the use of…

This article is a critical interpretive study of residential group homes as school preparatory environments for children and youth in their care. Utilizing social pedagogic analytics, the paper analyzes the role of residential group homes in the education of the children and youth under their care. Evidence gathered in this study suggests that…

Using a sociological framework this article explores the emergence and possible consequences of the 2015 U.S. Department of Education's proposed federal regulatory policy on teacher education programs and alternative route providers. After describing the key features of the policy, we examine the research literature looking for evidence of the…

The aim of this dissertation is to identify effective educational interventions in Sub-Saharan African with an impact on student learning. This is the first meta-analysis in the field of education conducted for Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper takes an in-depth look at twelve different types of education interventions or programs and attempts to not…

Proficiency-Based Education is a contemporary instructional model that grew out of the competency-based education movement of the 1980's and 90's. It is based on the premise that TIME is flexible and that students work at their own pace until they have mastered necessary content and skills. As students demonstrate proficiency, then move on to more…

The Indiana Commission for Higher Education's College Readiness Reports are designed to provide information on students entering college. The reports encompass the first year of college for students who graduated from high school during the previous academic year, and the College Readiness dashboard provides a closer look at longer-term outcomes…

The U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Duncan are set on a "moon-shot" goal to get America on track and to return to being number one in the world in high school and college graduation rates, school readiness, academic achievement, college matriculation and retention, and completion rates. The "Obama Effect" and the American Recovery and…

Early last week the U.S. Department of Education announced an unexpected 16 finalists for the first round of Race to the Top (RTT) funding--a veritable traffic jam in the Race to the Top. The finalists have requested a total of $6.5 billion in funds, but only $4.3 billion is up for grabs, and that needs to be spread over two rounds of competition.…

The Investing in Innovation (i3) program is a U.S. Department of Education competitive grant program supporting innovation in public schools. To encourage projects focusing on rural education in its first round of grants in 2010 the Department offered two bonus points in the scoring system for "projects that would implement innovative practices,…

For as long as there have been struggling schools in America's cities, there have been efforts to turn them around. But overall, school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations. Quite simply, turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America's troubled urban school systems. Fortunately, findings from…

Character education has become one of the fastest growing reform movements in K-12 education today, partially in response to unacceptable levels of student misbehavior and inadequate endorsement of good character values (Williams 2000). Between 1993 and 2009, 36 states passed laws mandating or recommending some aspect of character education in…

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced the finalists for the second round of the Race to the Top (RTT) competition, with the winners to be announced in September. Round one of the competition yielded just two awards earlier this year, with Delaware and Tennessee claiming approximately $600 million of the available funds. Thirty-five…

This volume, the third of a three-part handbook of Federal educational policies, programs, and proposals, analyzes and classifies the Federal training and educational programs under the headings of (1) method of administration, (2) levels of education concerned, (3) geographic areas affected, and (4) number and types of persons affected. In…

A Washington research group is raising questions about the wisdom of the U.S. Department of Education's favored strategies for turning around the lowest-performing schools with stimulus funding, saying that its research shows that similar federal approaches to school restructuring have not been effective. The questions raised by the new study were…