Any organization--a small business or start-up, a large established company, a nonprofit, and every level of government--depends on leadership to achieve more than the sum of its parts. The same is true for schools, where a single principal shapes the practice of dozens of teachers and the learning of hundreds--sometimes thousands--of students.…

This master data collection protocol describes the data that Mathematica collected for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge Study of Tiered Quality Rating and Improvement Systems. This study was conducted for the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. The data were collected from reviews of applications, documents, and…

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…

This document contains remarks delivered by the Secretary of Education who spoke at the 2009 Governors Education Symposium. Secretary Duncan spoke about uses of Recovery Act funding to drive reform in four core areas of education: (1) Robust data systems that track student achievement and teacher effectiveness; (2) Teacher and principal quality;…

A nationally watched showdown between the U.S. Department of Education and Utah state officials over the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act came down to a cliffhanger in the last days of the legislative session when a final vote on a bill that calls for state education laws to take priority over the federal law was postponed. The feud…

A survey of state legislators was conducted to determine their views of what vocational education should be doing and how it could be improved as well as their perceptions about federal and state roles relative to vocational education. Findings were based on 45 percent of the sample of 209 members of the National Conference of State Legislatures…