Positive youth development programs such as those offered by Boy Scouts of America (BSA) provide sources of support and opportunities for leadership and character development. Programmatic experts from BSA collaborated with researchers to develop a visual theory of change (pathway model) for youth development in Scouts BSA and for adult volunteer…

Promise programs are discussed as a policy movement that began with the 2005 launch of the Kalamazoo Promise. Since then, programs bearing the Promise label or sharing similar features have spread across the higher educational landscape, appearing in most states and across postsecondary sectors. Simultaneously, scholarly literature discussing…

With a growing consensus that students require more than purely academic support, schools across the country have increasingly adopted the community school model, a comprehensive approach to education focused on holistic student development. In these schools, centrally located site coordinators leverage partnerships with local organizations to…

Ongoing or recently completed across the United States are a series of lawsuits via which teacher plaintiffs are contesting how they are being evaluated using value-added models (VAMs) as part of states'/districts' teacher accountability systems. To investigate the empirical and pragmatic matters addressed in court, researchers conducted a case…

Home visiting connects expectant parents, new caregivers, and their young children with a support person, called a home visitor. The home visitor meets regularly with the family, develops a relationship with them, and supports them to achieve their goals and meet their needs. To reach the thousands of additional families who could benefit from…

By design, randomized experiments (XPs) rule out bias from confounded selection of participants into conditions. Quasi-experiments (QEs) are often considered second-best because they do not share this benefit. However, when results from XPs are used to generalize causal impacts, the benefit from unconfounded selection into conditions may be offset…

A growing literature uses value-added (VA) models to quantify principals' contributions to improving student outcomes. Principal VA is typically estimated using a connected networks model that includes both principal and school fixed effects (FE) to isolate principal effectiveness from fixed school factors that principals cannot control. While…

Guided pathways is arguably the most widespread whole-college community college reform movement in decades. In this report, the authors present findings from a study on the scale of adoption of guided pathways practices across community and technical colleges in three states--Ohio, Tennessee, and Washington--where there are state-level efforts to…

This manuscript aims to answer the research question: What data are collected by teacher residency programs and a network of teacher residency programs, and how and why do faculty and NCTR staff use this data to advance both individual programs and the teacher residency model nationally? This paper explores how individual teacher residency…

This quantitative, correlational study aims to determine if a predictive relationship exists between teacher perceptions of Tennessee's teacher evaluation and the linear combination of teacher gender, years of experience, and school-level taught (elementary, middle, high). Although teachers have recognized the current teacher evaluation system,…

Teachers contribute more to reading and math outcomes than any other factor of schooling. However, teacher shortages are pervasive. How can schools and districts recruit high-quality educators, hold onto to the ones they already have, and reflect the diversity of their students? This infographic highlights innovative models beyond the traditional…

We develop a conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then empirically examine how teacher shortages vary geographically and by subject using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee traditional public schools during Fall 2019. We find that teacher…

As part of its Partnership for Pre-K Improvement (PPI) initiative, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored the RAND Corporation to study the cost of high-quality pre-K programming. The RAND study included three states--Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington--that were partnering with the foundation under PPI. The objective of the study was to…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has been increasingly emphasized in educational research and practice for promoting children's wellbeing. Perhaps the most well-known SEL framework is the model provided by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). This framework has become the dominant framework informing state SEL…

The clinical teaching experience is one of the most important components of teacher preparation. Prior observational research has found that more effective mentors and schools with better professional climates are associated with better preparation for teacher candidates. We test these findings using an experimental assignment of teacher…