This tool is designed for individuals who want to formatively assess a research-practice partnership (RPP) in collaboration with its members. It provides guidance on how to set and monitor progress on quarterly RPP goals aligned to five critical dimensions that researchers and practitioners must address to build and sustain an effective RPP. This…

As community colleges across the country implement large-scale reforms to improve student success, they need timely and actionable metrics to determine if the changes they are making in a given year or term will likely improve student outcomes in the long run. In this brief, the authors examine how well nine measures of students' progress in their…

The purpose of this re-examination is to further study the effectiveness of a 5-year plan to turnaround failing schools. The original study, published in 2013, utilized 16 urban schools to investigate the role of climate and leadership in the transformation process. The authors asserted that utilizing academic gains as the single indicator in…

This is the second in a series of policy notes and related publications exploring prospects for developing indicators of teaching quality. The first examined federal databases that include information about teachers, demonstrating that almost none of the measures in these datasets provides indication of teaching quality. This policy note takes the…

In districts across the country, school practitioners rely on early warning indicator systems (EWI) to identify students in need of support to graduate high school and be prepared for college. By organizing pieces of data on student performance into indicators, practitioners can develop and test school strategies to improve students' educational…

The Ontario Ministry of Education and Training's Task Force on University Accountability first proposed key performance indicators (KPIs) for colleges and universities in Ontario in the early 1990s. The three main KPIs for Ontario universities are the rates of (1) graduation, (2) employment, and (3) Ontario Student Assistance Program loan default.…

State support in higher education (HE) is often justified on the grounds that HE is important for the development of the country. However, little analysis is normally done in order to assess the impact of education quality initiatives. The Mexican government has been engaging in a policy of HE quality improvement that can be traced to 1989. In…

Taking the students' perspective, Education Policy Outlook 2018: Putting Student Learning at the Centre analyses the evolution of key education priorities and key education policies in 43 education systems. It compares more recent developments in education policy ecosystems (mainly between 2015 and 2017) with various education policies adopted…

To what extent school improvement processes can be initiated and sustained from the outside has been a relevant question for policy-makers seeking to increase quality in education. Since 2008, the Chilean Government is strongly promoting the use of external technical support (ETS) services to support school improvement processes, as part of the…

In October 2010, WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) won an i3 "Validation" grant to scale up and validate the Reading Apprenticeship (RA) model in three core secondary content area classes: U.S. history, biology, and English language arts. SLI's proposal stated two goals. Goal 1: To transform academic literacy teaching and…

This exploratory study sought to determine if a popular school-based drug prevention program might be effective in schools that are making adequate yearly progress (AYP). Thirty-four schools with grades 6 through 8 in 11 states were randomly assigned either to receive Project ALERT (n = 17) or to a control group (n = 17); of these, 10 intervention…

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) targeted substantial School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to the nation's "persistently lowest achieving" public schools (i.e., up to $2 million per school annually over 3 years) but required schools accepting these awards to implement a federally prescribed school-reform model.…

Every school is confronted with many concerns about improving students' achievement and well-being and enhancing school climate. While the emphasis shifts, there is constant pressure to do more about learning problems; bullying, harassment, and other forms of violence and acting out behavior at school; substance abuse; disconnected students;…

This paper reports an experiment in over 3,000 Indonesian villages designed to test the role of performance incentives in improving the efficacy of aid programs. Villages in a randomly-chosen one-third of subdistricts received a block grant to improve 12 maternal and child health and education indicators, with the size of the subsequent year's…

Recent reform initiatives, such as the Title I School Improvement Grants and Race to the Top, recommended a principal change to jump-start school turnaround. Yet, few educational researchers have examined principal change as way to improve schools in a state of systematic reform; furthermore, no large-scale quantitative study has determined the…