OSEP's Results Driven Accountability is designed to assure educators have the supports necessary to address the needs of all children, including children with disabilities. OSEP-funded Centers are encouraged to support state education systems as they take charge in making systemic changes that lead to improved outcomes for students. Data are now…

California's new Statewide System of Support is grounded in the fundamental principles of the Local Control Funding Formula, especially its emphasis on the central role of local educators in determining the best approaches to improvement. This report examines the early implementation of the System of Support, with a focus on the work of the county…

California's school accountability and support system, the Statewide System of Support (System of Support), was designed to transform California's approach to school improvement. Rather than focusing on punitive consequences for underperformance, the System of Support is designed to provide education leaders and educators with needed support to…

The author reflects on challenges faced by teacher educators when Kentucky's Educational Professional Standards Board mandated a new Co-Teaching model for all of the state's student teachers in 2013. This article analyzes the overwhelmingly positive responses of cooperating teachers and the experiences of teacher candidates (student teachers) with…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act required states to adopt accountability systems measuring student proficiency on state-administered exams. The federal legislation contained several strict requirements for NCLB implementation, such as escalating student proficiency targets that reach 100% proficiency by 2014. But it also gave states…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for K-12 English language arts/literacy and mathematics, released in 2010, have been adopted by 49 states and territories; the District of Columbia; and the U.S. Department of Defense schools, which serve the children of U.S. service members around the world. The widespread adoption of the CCSS is a major…

"Changing the Course of Family Literacy" re-examines the importance and value of family literacy programming and offers several policy recommendations to focus attention on the four-component model used in Even Start. This paper explores the current status of Family literacy and, after gathering information from 47 states, found that 11…

Although there have been any number of national reading reform efforts over the years, there is little evidence that such efforts have been sustained in schools over time. This study focused on addressing 2 questions: To what extent have Reading First schools in 2 states sustained the key elements of this reform over time? To what extent has…

Herein, we address the reformation of Ontario early learning. Over the next 3 years, all 4- and 5-year-olds in Ontario (Canada) will be able to attend full-day early learning with child care, before and after school provided by the Government of Ontario Ministry of Education. The benefits of such a change are both academic and societal and are…

The popularity and use of handheld technologies cannot be denied in today's society. "300,000 first generation iPads were sold before midnight on their first day of sales and an additional 500,000 first generation iPads was sold by the end of that week" (Waters, 2010). The demand forced the iPad's sales to be delayed in Europe (Banister,…

All of the states in this study have recently been involved in school accountability system reform. Since 2011, the states have taken advantage of a federal program to give them flexibility around certain requirements of the "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 (NCLB), the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary…

To remain internationally competitive, states needed clearer, higher, and comparable K-12 learning standards aligned with college and career expectations, and as ambitious as those of the countries that lead the world in education. Idaho's old academic standards were not preparing students for postsecondary education, which contributed to the…

States are in various stages of reforming how they evaluate their educators, all striving for a new system that can assess a range of abilities and practices over long periods of time and capture the full nature of an educator's performance. The strongest systems look at teaching in a more comprehensive way than evaluations have done in the past,…

This report provides six mini-case studies of higher education policy reforms enacted in other states, exploring the important role that state policy leadership played in developing, promoting, and implementing these policies aimed at improving higher education outcomes, and discussing the relevance of each reform effort for California. This…

For nearly a decade, states have had flexibility in collecting and reporting graduation rate data for state and federal accountability purposes. But in 2008, the U.S. Department of Education issued new guidelines that require all states to report a new rate--the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate--beginning in the 2011-2012 school year.…