Since their inception in the 1950s, community-based college access programs have focused on preparing students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds for college and helping them complete the necessary steps to matriculate. Until about 10 years ago, however, most programs had little, if any, involvement with students after high school.…

The Mastery-based Learning (MBL) Work Group has examined opportunities to increase student access to relevant and robust mastery-based academic pathways aligned to personal career goals and postsecondary education, and reviewed the role of the High School and Beyond Plan (HSBP) in supporting mastery-based learning. The Work Group members believe…

Schools are experiencing unprecedented disruption, forcing educators to think differently about how they engage with their students and forcing changes to longstanding systems that have been established to deliver education. This presents an opportunity to not only discover ways to address education during the coronavirus pandemic, but also to…

As the first major effort to use a behavioral economics lens to examine human services programs that serve poor and vulnerable families in the United States, the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project demonstrated the value of applying behavioral insights to improve the efficacy of human services programs. The BIAS…

Many social policy and education programs start from the assumption that people act in their best interest. But behavioral science shows that people often weigh intuition over reason, make inconsistent choices, and put off big decisions. The individuals and families who need services and the staff who provide them are no exception. From city…

Integrated data systems are often used to inform decision making at the top tiers of local or state government. Policymakers use analyses based on large numbers of integrated data system (IDS) records (from which personal identifying information has been removed) to understand the overlap between cases that receive services from different systems…

An integrated data system (IDS) that links information from separate administrative data systems offers policymakers, program administrators and researchers a powerful tool to analyze interactive effects across systems and make more informed decisions to improve outcomes for vulnerable families. This case study discusses how two states (Washington…

Purpose: A burgeoning literature investigates the importance of student teaching placements for teacher candidate development, but an important perspective that is largely missing from the existing literature is that of the school districts that host student teachers. In this paper, we describe the student teaching process from the perspective of…

The ability to significantly increase and sustain gains in early literacy for students with disabilities and a desire to bridge the gap between compliance and results-driven accountability (RDA) led Washington State to innovate a solution. This state spotlight will focus on Washington's improvement strategy to address this early literacy challenge…

More than 70 percent of the students who access higher education in Washington do so first at a two-year institution. Washington's two-year colleges account for a higher percentage of public and private college student enrollments (49 percent) than in the United States in general (34 percent). The Higher Education Coordinating Board's (HECB)…

What happens when teams from 57 cities building afterschool systems gather to discuss two key system responsibilities--improving afterschool programs and using data for informed decision-making? Lots of rich discussion. This report covers a national afterschool conference held in February 2013. It details what mayors, program providers, system…

One of the greatest challenges that community colleges face in their efforts to increase graduation rates is improving the success of students in their developmental, or remedial, education programs--the courses that students without adequate academic preparation must take before they can enroll in courses for college credit. Emphasizing results…

Teachers in the Federal Way (Wash.) Public Schools had no shortage of student data. Standardized test scores, unit tests, and report card grades were as familiar to educators as reading, writing, and arithmetic. With the onset of statewide testing in the 1990s, data analysis was expanded to cover a multitude of state learning goals in grades 4, 7,…

Discusses the strengths and weaknesses of administrative databases, issues with their implementation and data analysis, and effective presentation of their data at different levels in child welfare organizations. Focuses on the development and implementation of Washington state's Children's Administration's administrative database, the Case and…

The seventh annual evaluation report of vocational education in Washington State is presented. Section 1 is a summary of the thirteen recommendations made by the Advisory Council; under each recommendation is a description of the original response of the Commission of Vocational Education to the recommendation, actions taken to date on the…