Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education programs help to enhance the nation's global competitiveness. Many federal agencies have been involved in administering these programs. Concerns have been raised about the overall effectiveness and efficiency of STEM education programs. GAO examined (1) the number of federal…

The Department of Education (Department) is required to use negotiated rulemaking to develop proposed regulations for programs authorized under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended (HEA). Under negotiated rulemaking, the Department works to develop the proposed regulations in collaboration with representatives of the parties…

This report analyzes the NCLB waiver applications submitted in the second round by 26 states and Washington, D.C. to the U.S. Department of Education in February 2012. Among the findings in the report is that, like the first round of applications, these states are proposing new accountability systems that will lead to greater complexity both…

States and districts are under increasing pressure to ensure all students complete high school in four years; however, many students who fall off-track on the way to graduation take longer than the traditional four years to earn a high school diploma or its equivalent. Unfortunately, those schools and districts serving overage, under-credit…

In the past 30 years, the prevalence of obesity in children has increased to epidemic proportions. The obesity rate among children ages 2 to 5 has more than doubled (from 5 percent to 10.4 percent); more than quadrupled (from 4.2 to 17 percent) among children ages 6 to 11; and more than tripled among adolescents ages 12 to 19 (from 4.6 to 17.6…

Ask Antonio White what he thinks of Race to the Top--President Barack Obama's signature K-12 initiative--and the Florida teacher will tell you the competitive-grant program is a "difficult pill to swallow." Merit pay for teachers based partly on student test scores is "a joke," he says. He's also not a fan of expanding charter…

In this article, the author describes their digital conversion initiative at Mooresville Graded School District. The project has placed a MacBook Air laptop in the hands of every 3rd through 12th grader and their teachers in the district over the past four years, with over 5,000 computers distributed. But they believe their academic successes have…

An unlikely promoter of tribal development, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has set the bar for collaboration and capacity building. At first glance, the NSF was an unlikely and even unpromising administrator for a program promoting tribal development. Unlike the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Department of Education, the NSF did not have a…

An unprecedented amount of attention in recent years has been focused on turning around low-performing schools. Drawing on insights from Tyack and Cuban's (1995) "Tinkering Toward Utopia," the article analyzes the forces behind the school turnaround phenomenon and how they have evolved since passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. The…

This article explores the research on turning around low performing schools to summarize what we know, what we don't know, and what this means for scaling school turnaround efforts. "School turnaround" is defined here as quick, dramatic gains in academic achievement for persistently low performing schools. The article first considers the…

This study examined the extent to which an evidence-based preschool curriculum (Head Start REDI) was sustained by 20 teachers during the year following a randomized controlled efficacy trial, when teachers were no longer required by the research project to implement the curriculum. Two quantitative measures of sustainability (teacher ratings, REDI…

A three-level growth-curve model was applied to estimate perceived impact growth trajectories, using multi-year data from project and school surveys on outcome and program implementation collected from 59 sites and approximately 1165 participating schools in the Safe Schools and Healthy Students Initiative. Primary interest is to determine whether…

The Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) Initiative offers a unique opportunity to conduct large-scale, multisite, multilevel program evaluation in the context of a federal environment that places many requirements and constraints on how the grants are conducted and managed. Federal programs stress performance-based outcomes, valid and reliable…

This paper is a transcript of a letter written by the author, Cornelia M. Ashby, Director, Education, Workforce, and Income Security Issues, to June St. Clair Atkinson, State Superintendent of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. In this letter, the author reports that she and her colleagues have examined the efforts of selected…

Purpose: This study compared the official poverty rate for adults aged 65 years and older with alternative measures that portray the true resources and needs of older adults. Design and Methods: The analysis used data from the 2004 Health and Retirement Study on income, assets, in-kind transfers, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. It also…