Over the last year, no education story has garnered more enthusiastic or sustained positive attention than Race to the Top, the $4.35 billion federal program intended to spur and support groundbreaking state-level reforms. The White House called state responses to the competition "overwhelming." Columnist David Brooks wrote that it was…

This paper exploits a source of variation in the eligibility for federal nutrition programs to identify the program effects on food insecurity. Children are eligible for the WIC [Women, Infants and Children] program until the day before they turn 61 months old. The result is an age discontinuity in program participation at the 61-month cutoff.…

We tested the incremental impact of a job-related set of variables for explaining a utility judgment training effectiveness variable, that is, course completion skill preparedness, beyond background and course-related variables. Our respondents were two different emergency medical service samples, 415 basics and 742 paramedics, from the 2008 US…

The Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) provides grants to support performance-based compensation systems for teachers and principals in high-need schools. The study measures the impact of pay-for-performance bonuses as part of a comprehensive compensation system within a large, multisite random assignment study design. The treatment schools were to…

The Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) provides grants to support performance-based compensation systems for teachers and principals in high-need schools. The study measures the impact of pay-for-performance bonuses as part of a comprehensive compensation system within a large, multisite random assignment study design. The treatment schools were to…

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Technical Assistance and Dissemination (TA&D) Program is the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) primary vehicle for providing technical assistance (TA) to individuals and organizations responsible for serving children with disabilities and their families. The evaluation is part…

This article provides an initial look at Race to the Top as it relates to professional development for arts educators. Topics include the philosophy of Race to the Top education reform, data informed professional development, performance pay, and how these changes may affect arts educators.

Since 1999, Nebraska's Early Head Start Infant/Toddler Quality Initiative has supported Early Head Start (EHS) and community child care partnerships to improve the quality and professionalism of infant and toddler care. EHS programs apply to receive funding to establish partnerships with center-based or home-based child care.The initiative has…

Merit pay programs for educators -- sometimes referred to a "pay for performance" -- attempt to tie a teacher's compensation to his/her performance in the classroom. While the idea of merit pay for classroom teachers has been around for several decades, only now is it starting to be implemented in a growing number of districts around the…

As the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law moves through the reauthorization process, it is important to understand the basic performance impacts of its central structure of accountability. In this paper, I examine the effects of failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under NCLB on subsequent student math and reading performance at the school…

This ethnographic case study investigated second year college students who participated in the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program at a technical college in northeastern Pennsylvania. In order to understand how learners stayed motivated in a college setting, I selected participants who were in their second year of the TAA program. A total of…

This dissertation investigates the prevailing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate as an effective platform to improve schools. The data compiled for use in this study represented 426 high schools in Pennsylvania and were retrieved from publicly accessible, state-sponsored sources. The statistical methodologies from the Pennsylvania Value-Added…

The Race to the Top Assessment program was authorized as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). In September 2010, the U.S. Department of Education (Department) awarded competitive, four-year grants to two consortia of states, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter…

Schedule redesign is only one small part of the much larger approach to turning around low-performing schools. Even so, most states' No Child Left Behind waiver applications show a disappointing lack of detail on learning time. While they've done some careful thinking about schedule redesign, states must continue to think critically and…

Major federal education initiatives, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, have highlighted the importance of teacher quality in improving student achievement. The federal government has committed significant funding and resources to professional development programs for teachers through Title II of the Act and other initiatives. There…