This issue of Policy Insights draws on findings from WICHE's report Accelerated Learning Options: Moving the Needle on Access and Success, to lay out some of the important policy issues that decision makers might consider when adopting new state policy related to accelerated learning or modifying policies already in existence. The publication…

This paper summarizes what is known and what is not known about mentoring programs focused on youth and related to college-going. Several aspects of mentoring are reviewed so that the concept and some program variations--such as peer and adult mentors, informal and formal mentoring, compensated and uncompensated mentoring, one-to-one and group…

This paper explores efforts to link early childhood education and care (ECEC) with schools in countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), other than the United States. The first part of the paper discusses the context for children's transitions from ECEC to school, the ways in which transitions are understood,…

Everybody knows what happened to educational reform in the Los Angeles Unified School District. As former mayor Richard Riordan once told the author, "That's simple; LEARN failed." Indeed, the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Reform Now, which in the 1990s created a massive civic reform coalition, fell far short of building a…

Along with the efforts to increase the competitiveness of universities in Korea, one of the foci of higher education reforms initiated by the Korean government in 1995 was to diversify its higher education system. However, it is commonly believed that its attempts to diversify its universities system have not been successful. By examining the…

To give states the information they need to sustain hard-fought education reform effectively, Achieve conducted research on state education reforms that have been sustained successfully for over a decade or more. Funded by the GE Foundation, Achieve hopes this work will help other state leaders, wherever they may be on their road to reform,…

The study used an adaptation of Provus' discrepancy evaluation model to evaluate a distance teacher education program in the University of Cape Coast, the premier teacher education institution in Ghana. The study involved comparing performance data of the program as perceived by students and faculty/administrators to standards prepared from the…

School finance adequacy litigation has become a widely-used means in the efforts to improve educational outcomes for children. This form of litigation has been attempted in nearly every state over the past two decades. Despite its prevalence, its effectiveness remains questionable due to a lack of study relating finance litigation to student…

The goal of this study is to apply a conventional education cost-function approach for estimating the sensitivity of cost models and predicted education costs to the inclusion of school district level racial composition variables and further to test whether race neutral alternatives sufficiently capture the additional costs associated with school…

A cost-effectiveness analysis was conducted of Gordon, Kane, and Staiger's (2006) proposal to raise student achievement by identifying and replacing the bottom quartile of novice teachers, using value-added assessment of teacher performance. The cost effectiveness of this proposal was compared to the cost effectiveness of voucher programs, charter…

This report presents findings stemming from the first-year evaluation of the Texas Educator Excellence Grant (TEEG) program, one of several statewide performance incentive programs in Texas. In June 2006, Governor Perry and the 79th Texas Legislature created the Governor's Educator Excellence Award Program, one component of which is the TEEG…

A new report published by the Manhattan Institute for Education Policy, "The Effect of Special Education Vouchers on Public School Achievement: Evidence from Florida's McKay Scholarship Program," attempts to examine the complex issue of how competition introduced through school vouchers affects student outcomes in public schools. The…

A cornerstone of Mississippi's 1982 Education Reform Act, the Assistant Reading Instructor Program sought to improve basic skills acquisition by placing assistant reading instructors in primary grades. The program has not been effective in meeting its objectives. On standardized tests, students who had assistant reading instructors in the primary…

Addressed to both social scientists and to nonacademic readers, this book provides an overview of the United States child care market, analyzes the main aspects of child care and child care policy, and proposes a new child care policy. The main thesis of the book is that the child care market functions much better than is commonly believed.…

Over the past decade, the standards-based reform movement in education has focused attention on the responsibility of schools and school systems to produce results in student learning. Nationally this focus is most evident with the implementation of accountability provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. However, even…