The primary purpose of the District Capacity Assessment (DCA) is to assist school districts to implement effective innovations that benefit students. The "capacity" of a district to facilitate building-level implementation refers to the systems, activities, and resources that are necessary for schools to successfully adopt and sustain…

A Regional Education Agency (REA) functions as a partner with local districts and the State Educational Agency (SEA). REAs provide training, guidance and support intended to enable school districts to operate efficiently and improve their student outcomes. The primary purpose of this Regional Capacity Assessment (RCA) is to assist regional…

Family-focused early learning programs aim to assist parents in supporting their young children language and literacy development. This study examined program access and learning opportunities for diverse families across a wide range of community-based settings in one eastern Canadian province. As well, the study examined practitioners'…

The purpose of the District Capacity Assessment (DCA) Technical Manual is to provide background information on the technical adequacy of the DCA (Ward et al., 2015). This current version draws upon a rich history and background of previous work assessing district capacity. Notably, the current version includes significant modifications from…

Orienting and welcoming first-year students to campus and to honors programs are often key components of program development. At an institutional level, successful orientation programs can positively affect retention rates from the first to second year. The greater a student's involvement and integration into the life of the university, the less…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine how the technology beliefs of New York State Career and Technical Education Board of Cooperative Education Services administrators influenced their leadership behaviors. The participants were from a purposive selection from five suburban and rural Boards of Cooperative Education Services in…

This descriptive study investigates the development of a district leadership coaching program. Specifically, the study examines the creation of a coaching program for elementary principals, the first six months of monthly meetings between the coaches and district leaders, and the perceived utility of the meetings by the district coaches.…

This guide is a product of a study of factors associated with exemplary inclusive high schools and focuses on the key factor of leadership. The study identified four schools and studied them for 2 years using various data collection methods. This resulting document describes what school and district leaders can do to build inclusive programs and…

In response to ongoing concern about unacceptable levels of AOD (alcohol and other drug) use on campuses, in 1998 Congress authorized the Department of Education to identify and promote effective prevention through a model grants program. In 1999, OSDFS (Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools) launched an important component of the Department's…

This SPEC Kit and Flyer focus on performance evaluation of library directors. The survey, included in the SPEC Kit, was sent to all 121 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) directors; 76 directors (63%) responded. The survey asked about factual attributes of director review processes, including frequency of review cycles, participants, and…

An effort to build a curricular framework for doctoral study at the University of Texas-Pan American, using themes and standards proposed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and others, is described. A small faculty group undertook to simultaneously develop a curricular sequence of course topics while initiating a new doctoral program…

The Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) Career Academy was initiated at Worthing High School (WHS) in the Houston (Texas) Independent School District at the beginning of the 1994-95 school year. The career-oriented program operated as a "school-within-a-school" program and was designed to meet the needs of students at risk of…

This model of teacher supervision was designed to improve instruction in the Aspinwall Elementary School in the Fox Chapel School District, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The project sought to accomplish three things: improve the achievement level of underachieving students, increase teacher instructional effectiveness, and change the teachers'…