Approximately 450 community colleges nationally are part of formal statewide or national initiatives to implement guided pathways reforms to improve student success, and many other colleges are implementing guided pathways practices on their own. Because guided pathways is a whole-college reform--and because it takes several years to fully…

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…

Equity and access to advanced learning opportunities have been issues of concern for educators in the field of gifted education for decades. Gifted programs are noted as some of the most segregated learning environments in schools today. This study was designed to investigate how school districts have addressed educational equity through the…

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, K-12 schools are under immense pressure to meet the diverse needs of students. But policies and practices have not evolved quickly enough to meet those needs -- and as a result, the system continues to fail far too many young people. In "Levers of Change: How State Policies Support District…

COVID-19 profoundly affected teacher preparation during the 2019-20 school year. Based on survey responses from nearly all Washington state teacher education programs (TEPs), Kathryn Choate, Dan Goldhaber, and Roddy Theobald find that the pandemic had predictable but concerning effects on teacher preparation. Most notably, student-teaching…

The pandemic hit the already vulnerable early childhood education (ECE) workforce especially hard, causing almost 40 percent of child care providers to shut their doors and many teachers to lose their jobs. In 2021, enrollment in state-funded preschool also dropped for the first time in 20 years--a nearly 20 percent decline that erased a decade of…

On June 11, 2020, the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) released the "Reopening Washington Schools 2020 District Planning Guide" (ED606044) as a resource for local education agencies in planning for a safe and healthy start to the 2020-21 school year. The guidance was developed in collaboration with the state…

In 2014 the Washington state legislature approved career- and college-ready (CCR) requirements for high school graduation that better align with admissions standards at the state's public universities than previous requirements did and that aim to equip students with the skills to pursue the career of their choice. The requirements took effect for…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe how elementary school principals adjust their leadership practice in response to Washington's new teacher evaluation policy. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted a modified content analysis of open-ended survey responses collected from elementary school principals in Washington State.…

In 2014 the Washington state legislature approved career- and college-ready (CCR) requirements for high school graduation that better align with career pathways and with admissions standards at the state's public universities than previous requirements did. The CCR requirements increased the total number of credits needed to graduate, from 20 to…

These are the appendixes for the report, "Implementation of Career- and College-Ready Requirements for High School Graduation in Washington" (ED606463). The study looked at differences in the percentages of 2018 graduates who met the requirements and of 2018 graduates who did not across student groups (by socioeconomic status, English…

A comprehensive high school in Bellevue, Washington, embraces problem-based learning as its strategy for improvement. Supported by a federal i3 grant, the school spent five years preparing for a widespread launch of PBL at the school. After several years of implementation, researchers learned that students perform the same or better on…

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education made grants to eleven school districts under the Technical Assistance for Student Assignment Plans (TASAP) program. The impetus for the program came from the Council of Great City Schools, which was concerned that school districts would respond to a recent Supreme Court decision by dismantling policies…

Purpose: Public schools in Washington State have a growing and increasingly diverse English Learner (EL) student population that is subject to the standards and accountability outlined in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). For high school ELs in particular, academic standards and their corresponding assessments, along with the necessary task of…