The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awards grants to provide shelter and services to runaway and homeless youth through the Basic Center, Transitional Living and Street Outreach Programs. In response to a mandate for a review of the grant award process for these programs in the Reconnecting Homeless Youth Act of 2008 (Pub. L. No.…

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…

Andrew Kelly, the director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute, shares his views on the concept of risk-sharing in higher education. The author presents the question: How would a risk-sharing policy--where colleges bear some financial responsibility for a portion of the federal loans that their students do…

This fact page briefly discusses the following facts on digital learning in California's K-12: (1) As California implements new tests in its K-12 schools, technology infrastructure is a key concern; (2) Many districts are confident that they had enough bandwidth for online field tests; (3) Digital learning will require significantly greater…

This article uses the framework of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK; Mishra & Koehler, 2006) to analyze findings across projects from the U.S. Department of Education's Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) initiative. Approaches such as mentoring methods course faculty, teachers, and creating technology-rich…

State and local educators encountered both opportunities and obstacles in their first year of implementing the School Improvement Grants (SIGs) funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). In 2009, the ARRA, better known as the economic stimulus package, provided $3 billion for SIGs to help reform persistently low-achieving…

Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, or GEAR UP, is a federally-funded system of grants that focuses on preparing low-income students to enter and succeed in postsecondary educational programs. GEAR UP grants extend across 6 school years and require that funded districts begin providing grant services to students no…

This report introduces systems for approving professional development providers as they currently operate in two State education agencies (SEAs) and two professions outside of education. It derives from a request that officials with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) made to the Reform Support Network (RSN)…

Teacher preparation programs play an essential role in this nation's elementary and secondary education system, which relies on them to recruit, select, and prepare approximately 200,000 future teachers every year. Strong programs recruit, select, and prepare teachers who have or learn the skills and knowledge they need to be hired into teaching…

Over 42 million meals--31.2 million lunches and 11 million breakfasts--were served on a typical school day in fiscal year 2009 to children through USDA's National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs. School food authorities (SFAs) operate local school feeding programs and deliver the meals to the schools. SFAs must serve appealing,…

Nearly all governors have designated a state early childhood advisory council to advise policymakers in the state on how to best meet the needs of children from birth to school entry. Early childhood advisory councils in the states vary in their structure and scope, but all of them provide recommendations on improving the quality, availability,…

As college costs have soared and the U.S. economy struggles to move out of the recession, more and more Americans have relied on federal student financial assistance programs to help them meet their postsecondary expenses. Data from the Federal Student Aid (FSA), an office of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), show that the number of students…

Since 1964, the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program has provided funds to subsidize the wages of student employees, but it has never been studied directly. I use an instrumental variables difference-in-difference framework with administrative data from West Virginia to identify causal effects, comparing eligible and ineligible students across…

The present quantitative study evaluated the effects of Supplemental Educational Services (SES), a federally mandated component of No Child Left Behind, on student achievement in reading and mathematics. SES provides free tutoring outside of school to disadvantaged students who attend Title I schools in their third year of failing to achieve…

Two schools in Michigan received ARRA SIG (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act School Improvement Grants) funds to enable them to implement their improvement efforts. This paper describes the outcomes of these two ARRA SIG recipient schools: (1) Phoenix Elementary-Middle School; and (2) Arthur Hill High School. The experiences of these…