Standards can aid educators as they work to produce strong student writers who can create meaningful and skillfully crafted authentic pieces of writing. This once-a-month, yearlong professional development program, conducted during the school day, shifted a district's kindergarten writing program to a writing workshop model that enabled the…

Data on student achievement are increasingly being used to support effective policy and practice, and to move education systems towards more evidence-informed approaches to large-scale improvement. In this paper, we outline strategies used in Ontario, Canada to create, enhance and apply a range of data to support educational improvement. These…

States significantly increased buy-in from local teachers' unions in round two of the Race to the Top competition, but made far less progress in enlisting districts or expanding the number of students affected by the states' education reform plans. Those patterns emerged from an "Education Week" analysis of applications from 29 states…

Although school performance feedback is available in schools all over the world, there is a dearth of information about the use made of feedback and about the effects of its use. This paper presents case study research into the use of school performance feedback and its perceived effects. All schools used the feedback in writing school improvement…

The Study of School Turnaround examines the improvement process in a purposive sample of 35 case study schools receiving federal funds through the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program over a three-year period (2010-11 to 2012-13 school years). This evaluation brief focuses on 11 of these SIG schools with high proportions of English Language…

The purpose of this literature and field review is to understand previous efforts at scaling up performance assessments for use across districts and states. Performance assessments benefit students and teachers by providing more opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge and complex skills, by providing teachers with better…

Key stakeholders who implement Supported Education may find themselves asking two questions: (1) Has Supported Education been implemented as planned?; and (2) Has Supported Education resulted in the expected outcomes? Asking these two questions and using the answers to help improve Supported Education are critical for ensuring the success of one's…

At least 5,000 public schools have failed to meet their academic achievement targets for at least five consecutive years. The underlying causes of such failure are usually a combination of weak leadership, inadequate skill levels among teachers, and insufficient high-quality teaching materials. In 2009, the National Governors Association Center…

Across the country, states and school districts are focusing on turning around the nation's lowest-performing schools. Unprecedented federal Race to the Top and School Improvement Grant funding accompanied by a more prescriptive approach for using the funds has raised the profile of turnaround efforts. This focus on school turnaround, while…

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), jobs in computer systems design and related services--a field dependent on high-level math and problem-solving skills--are projected to grow by 45% between 2008 and 2018. Further, more than one in four (26%) of all new jobs created in the U.S. economy during this time will be in the healthcare and…

The author has over the past several years been involved with Hawai'i's Kamehameha Schools on a project called the Hawaiian Cultural Influences in Education (HCIE) study. Kamehameha Schools was established to provide educational opportunities to improve the capability and well being of people of Hawaiian ancestry. In this paper the author…

Before and during the tenure of Florida's former education commissioner, Eric J. Smith, the state made bold moves toward incorporating charter schools, began corporate "scholarship" programs that provide funding for students to attend private schools, implemented class-size caps that voters approved via referendum, and earned $700…

The Yakutia Republic is currently working to update its early childhood development (ECD) system. Its goal is to ensure a high quality environment for early learning and child care and to enable higher enrolment levels. Currently, a high priority for the Government of Yakutia is to increase access to pre-school education, given the significant…

Concept papers and quality circles help future dissertation advisors improve doctoral student success in the completion of the Ph.D. and increase retention. Through these tools, students navigate the conceptual development of a topic and evaluate final drafts of chapters. Implementation of these innovations indicates positive trends in the…

Introduction: No educational method or combination of methods will facilitate implementation of clinical practice guidelines in all clinical contexts. To develop an empirical basis for aligning methods to contexts, we need to move beyond "Does it work?" to also ask "What works for whom and under what conditions?" This study employed Success Case…