This research examines the short term success of a postsecondary federal financial aid program, the SMART Grant, designed to increase this stock of scientific human capital. An exploration of the success of this program provides the opportunity to address two critically important research questions. Do financial incentives encourage students to…

To ensure that students have access to the full range of financial aid they may need to succeed, colleges must be able to confidently and responsibly offer federal student loans. The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS) and the California Community Colleges Student Financial Aid Administrators' Association (CCCSFAAA) support…

This study aims to determine whether educational accountability promotes educational triage. This study exploits a natural experiment in North Carolina in which standards increased first in math in 2006 and second in reading in 2008 to determine whether an increase in educational standards caused an increase in educational triage at the expense of…

The National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs, administered by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), are key components of the nation's food security safety net, providing free or low-cost meals to millions of schoolchildren each day. To qualify their children each year for free or…

Educational leaders continue to be challenged in terms of accountability measures for increased student achievement, as mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). In particular, schools must show adequate yearly progress (AYP) reaching 100% proficiency levels for all students in the areas of English language arts and mathematics by…

A number of costs are associated with the implementation of trade agreements not the least of which is the cost to the American workforce. The information age ushered in an era of globalization unlike anything the world economy had experienced before. As countries raced forward to dominate emerging markets and grow market share, millions of…

If Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney wins the November election, his ascension could endanger--or dismantle--key Obama administration education initiatives and lead to a slimmed-down and less activist U.S. Department of Education. Scaled back Education Department and cloudy prospects for Obama initiatives are among the scenarios. But…

Value-added models and growth-based accountability aim to evaluate school's performance based on student growth in learning. The current focus is on linking the results from value-added models to the ones from growth-based accountability systems including Adequate Yearly Progress decisions mandated by No Child Left Behind. We present a new…

There is widespread interest in using various statistical inference tools as a part of the evaluations for individual teachers and schools. Evaluation systems typically involve classifying hundreds or even thousands of teachers or schools according to their estimated performance. Many current evaluations are largely based on individual estimates…

For over two decades the State of Ohio has been reforming its education system. This article focuses on the 2006 reform initiatives: a newly elected governor pledged to review and revise its 2002 kindergarten to twelfth grad (K-12) academic content standards and benchmark them to international "best-in-class" measures, given Ohio's need…

This paper presents a mixed-method approach to measuring the functioning of Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) Initiative partnerships. The SS/HS national evaluation team developed a survey to collect partners' perceptions of functioning within SS/HS partnerships. Average partnership functioning scores were used to rank each site from lowest to…

What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) quick reviews (QRs) are designed to provide education practitioners and policymakers with timely, preliminary objective assessments of the quality of the research evidence from recently released research papers and reports that have received coverage in the media. These reviews focus primarily on studies of the…

In the United States, government mandates for educational accountability have prompted an increase in testing in K-12 and higher education settings, resulting in a generation of millennial students who have undergone repeated assessment over the course of their educational careers. The cumulative effects of testing may range from increasingly…

Programs of study are the most recent in a series of federal efforts to create a more transparent and rational system for school-to-work transition for all youth. The current article places this construct in the context of today's labor market and the new focus on college and career readiness for all students. It then provides evidence indicating…

The K-12 student population is becoming increasingly diverse in the United States. In particular, the number of English Language Learners (ELLs) rose from 4.7 million in 1980 to 11.2 million in 2009, more than doubling from 10% to 21% of the student population (U.S. Department of Education n.d.). At approximately 1.8 million, the state of…