Documenting and improving early childhood program quality is a national priority, leading to a rapid expansion of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRISs). QRISs document and improve the quality of early childhood education programs and provide clear information to families about their child care choices. The current study described how…

Even after decades of use, designing and implementing worthwhile educational administrative internships remains a work in progress. What appears to be a logical conclusion that this experience would enhance the training of aspiring building leaders defies the gathering of definitive empirical evidence. The quest to validate what constitutes a…

The purpose of the paper is to review some previous researches examining ICT efficiency and the impact of ICT on educational output/outcome as well as different conceptual and methodological issues related to performance measurement. Moreover, a definition, measurements and the empirical application of a model measuring the efficiency of ICT use…

Interest in setting high educational standards is at the forefront of many school reform programs in the United States. States' pursuit of high standards can be advanced through implementation of programs such as High Schools That Work ("HSTW"), which emphasizes high expectations and rigorous academics for all students, including Career…

Public schools in America carry the enormous responsibility of educating students to reach their full potential and become productive citizens. Our democracy, culture, and way of life depend on an educated population to sustain the freedoms and liberties that we've come to enjoy in the United States of America. To continue this trajectory, public…

In June 2010, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Offices (CCSSO) released the Common Core State Standards. The stated aim of the Common Core standards is to define the knowledge and skills students should achieve in order to graduate from high school ready to succeed in a…

Policy shapes practice, and the increasingly important realm of professional development is no exception. In order to identify effective professional development policies and strategies, a Stanford University research team examined the policy frameworks supporting high levels of professional development activity in four states. The…

Many educators and researchers have proposed reforms for dealing with the ongoing adolescent literacy crisis. Progress in strengthening young people's literacy now depends on schools a) choosing appropriate programs and b) implementing them consistently and effectively. Yet the history of school reform is littered with reforms that were adopted…

A school improvement program that provided support to poor-performing schools on the basis of needs identified in a school improvement plan was implemented in 72 government schools in Jamaica, from 1998 to 2005. In this independent evaluation of the program, we use propensity score matching to create, post hoc, a control group of schools that were…

"High Schools That Work" (HSTW) is a school improvement initiative that was inaugurated by the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) in 1987. The main purpose of this concurrent validity study is to evaluate one or more measures by investigating their relationship to other commonly used and established measures given at or about the…

The No Child Left Behind legislation has drawn a great deal of attention to the gap' that exists between the academic performance of Black and Hispanic students as compared to their White counterparts. While numerous reform efforts have been implemented to address this disparity, to date little research has been done to connect a teacher's sense…

In this paper, we follow up the important class size reduction randomized experiment in Tennessee in the mid 1980s (Project STAR) to attempt to further understand the long-lasting influences of early education interventions. While STAR led to large test score benefits during the intervention, these benefits quickly faded at its conclusion.…

The importance of the beliefs and attitudes of teachers and building-level administrators in achieving school reform has come to be widely acknowledged. As University of Wisconsin professor Kent Peterson put it: "You can implement a good-quality improvement plan and knowledgeable, data-driven decision making, but if the [staff] doesn't…

A cost-effectiveness analysis was conducted of Gordon, Kane, and Staiger's (2006) proposal to raise student achievement by identifying and replacing the bottom quartile of novice teachers, using value-added assessment of teacher performance. The cost effectiveness of this proposal was compared to the cost effectiveness of voucher programs, charter…