The California Department of Education (CDE) provides adult literacy services to one-fifth of adults enrolled in the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA) program in the United States. The adult education program addresses literacy needs of individuals by providing adults with the skills and knowledge necessary to (a) gain employment or…

Minnesota Reading Corps is the largest AmeriCorps State program in the country. Its mission is to help every Minnesota child become a proficient reader by the end of third grade. To meet this goal, the Minnesota Reading Corps and its host organization, ServeMinnesota Action Network, engages a diverse group of AmeriCorps members to provide…

Parallel efforts in principal evaluation and educator preparation are prompting new conversations among states, higher education programs, private foundations, and professional associations about strengthening school leadership development pipelines. A strong school principal pipeline has many elements, but each element supports the evaluation and…

The Tuition Opportunity Program for Students (subsequently renamed the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, or TOPS) was created via ACT 1375 during the 1997 Regular Legislative Session. The first college freshman class to receive TOPS awards entered postsecondary education in the fall of 1998. ACT 1202 of the 2001 Regular Legislative Session…

The 18th edition of "The State of Preschool," the National Institute for Early Education Research's (NIEER) report on the annual survey of state preschool policies, includes information for every state on child enrollment, funding, staffing, and quality standards. It also includes information about where children are served, preschool…

Enrollment in state-funded pre-K programs prior to kindergarten entry has become increasingly common. As each state develops its own model for pre-K, rigorous studies of the impacts of state-specific programs are needed. This study investigates impacts of the Arkansas Better Chance (ABC) initiative at kindergarten entry using a…

Many Californians face difficulties connecting to good jobs because of limited education. This is especially true for poor families who receive cash assistance from the state's CalWORKs (California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids) program. Few CalWORKs parents have more than a high school degree, and many struggle to balance family and…

This study examines the community-wide effects of investments in two early childhood initiatives in North Carolina (Smart Start and More at Four) on the likelihood of a student being placed into special education. We take advantage of variation across North Carolina counties and years in the timing of the introduction and funding levels of the two…

In Fiscal Year 2015-16, the California Children and Families Act has appropriated an average of $440 per child from the state tobacco tax revenue to support early development of children ages 0-5. Based on the proportion of live births in each county, First 5 Kern administered over $10 million of the state funding to support 41 programs in Child…

An extensive body of research has demonstrated that the use in a K-12 classroom of technology, such as the Internet, computers, and software programs, enhances the learning of mathematics (Cheung & Slavin, 2013; Cohen & Hollebrands, 2011). In particular, growing empirical evidence supports that certain types of technology, such as…

This study includes a randomized control experiment, but that component could only be implemented in a limited number of schools with more applicants than seats in the pre-k program. Informative as that component is about the effects of Tennessee Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten (TN-VPK), the participating schools do not provide a representative sample…

Background: Massachusetts is one of a very limited number of states exclusively employing participant-direction to deliver autism waiver services to children. A crucial element of this waiver program is the work conducted by the state's Department of Developmental Services (DDS) staff and state-approved providers with waiver families to facilitate…

The well known 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" recommended that individuals preparing to teach should meet high education standards and demonstrate an aptitude for teaching and competence in an academic discipline--adding also that college and university teacher preparation programs should be judged by how well their graduates meet these…

This study is a secondary data analysis of data collected on preschool and kindergarten-aged children in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the fall of 2006 to study the effects of school and community-based public early learning programs on children's cognitive and social-emotional outcomes. Children in the study participated in the state-funded pre-k program,…

What happens when teachers are given funding and time to identify and develop targeted and innovative professional learning? This article focuses on lessons learned from grants funded through the California Department of Education that were designed to do just this. As the state and the nation consider the best approaches to professional learning…