The following profiles address how the state departments of education are helping educators prepare for and implement their states' new college- and career-readiness standards and aligned assessments, through professional learning. SREB researchers examined each state's major professional development efforts around its new standards in order to…

In this article, Gwen Taylor describes the West Kentucky Community and Technical College (WKCTC) groundbreaking program, "Accelerating Opportunity" (AO), which targeted students who are deficient in math, reading, or writing. The program uses the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges' (2013) Integrated Basic…

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…

Quality Rating Systems (QRS) are currently operating, under development, or being piloted in over 25 states or local areas. As the QRS model becomes integrated into the landscape of child care and education service delivery, policy, and the decisions parents make about child care across the United States, there is an increasing need for…

Although a growing body of research points to the critical need to foster reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking skills for students in order to ensure their success in college, careers, and life, these efforts have tended to focus more on developing literacy skills in the early years, often ignoring secondary students. The outcome has…

The challenge of producing the systemic changes that are needed to boost educational attainment and economic competitiveness across the country falls heavily on entities that coordinate public postsecondary institutions. Coordination of postsecondary education, whether of a single system of institutions or across an entire state, requires…

The effort to leave no child behind is a major threat to high-ability students, whose cognitive and affective needs are increasingly falling by the wayside from default, according to gifted education advocates. They argue that the No Child Left Behind Act, with its unprecedented, high-stakes focus on students performing below grade level, leaves…

By 2012, all of the states in this study had started implementing new or revised teacher and leader evaluation systems. There are many and varying updates to these systems, and some of them have been made to meet conditions for a state's federal "Race to the Top" (RTT) grant. Other updates have been made to meet conditions for a state's…

High-quality out-of-school-time (OST) programs have a positive effect on youth development, but many cities have found it difficult to address the challenges of expanding and improving the quality of programs offered to underserved and high-need students. In response, The Wallace Foundation sponsored an initiative to help five cities increase…

This report is based on an almost 5-year continual study of selected collaboratives engaged in education reform and improvement with a focus on science, math, and technology in schools serving K-12 students in rural America. This version of the final report of the study is primarily intended for use by educators, decision makers, and others who…

This program was developed by Community Coordinated Child Care (4-C) of Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky, to improve nutritional services to 2,146 infants and preschool children enrolled in fifteen area day care centers, by developing the role of a sponsoring organization and by developing standards of expectations for other sponsoring…