Maine has two initiatives that build on Early Head Start (EHS). The first initiative, Fund for a Healthy Maine, has since 2001 provided tobacco settlement money to existing Head Start and EHS programs to expand the number of children who receive full-day, full-year services. Local programs have the option of using these funds for EHS, depending on…

The Urban Institute conducted an implementation and participant-outcomes evaluation of the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program (ANSEP). ANSEP is a multi-stage initiative designed to prepare and support Alaska Native students from middle school through graduate school to succeed in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)…

This mixed methodology study investigated the relationship between administrator and teacher perceptions of leader decision making regarding five variables (reading training, reading curriculum, program evaluation, financial support, and student assessment) and student achievement (in the single content area, reading, at the 3rd grade level) in…

The program profiles presented in this paper provide background for the research report "Building Local Leadership for Change: A National Scan of Parent Leadership Training Programs." The full report describes four types of parent leadership training programs identified in the scan and gives examples of each. These four types are: (1)…

Research suggests that high quality early care and education programs can have a significant impact on improving the cognitive, academic and social skills of all children, especially those most at risk for later school failure. A number of states are developing Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) to assess and improve the quality of…

Adult language, literacy and numeracy are essential ingredients for greater workforce participation, productivity and social inclusion. Both national and international research demonstrate the relationship between increasing levels of language, literacy and numeracy proficiency and positive outcomes for individuals, as well as for communities and…

The Obama Administration is currently using more than $4 billion in federal stimulus funds in a controversial program called Race to The Top in an attempt to improve student achievement in public schools throughout the country. However, this study analyzes a different approach to spending stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify significant external and internal challenges that state organization leaders face in promoting science-based teen pregnancy prevention programs within their states. The state organization administrators were chosen because their organizations were funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control…

Even as the number of students attending college has more than doubled in the past forty years, it is still the case that nearly half of all college students in the United States will not complete their degree within six years. It is clear that much remains to be done toward improving student success. For more than twenty years, Vincent Tinto's…

From 2005 to 2011, the Gateway Institute for Pre-College Education partnered with three public entities in New York City--the Department of Education, the City University of New York and the Health and Hospitals Corporation--to introduce, educate, and prepare urban high school students for careers in the health professions. Gateway was launched in…

Purpose/Objective: This case study identified common elements of three diverse New England school districts that were real-world models of improving school meals. Methods: School districts that had greater than 1,000 students, [greater than or equal to]3 schools, and [greater than or equal to]40% of students who qualified for free- or…

In 2001, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a 10-year, multi-million dollar initiative, the Washington State Achievers Program (WSA), to increase opportunities for low-income students to attend postsecondary institutions in Washington State. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation granted funds to the College Success Foundation…

The Community Connections preschool program (herein referred to as Community Connections) was developed to help prepare children in home-based child care for success in school and in life. It has three goals: (1) to make state prekindergarten classroom experiences available to children in home-based care, (2) to extend classroom learning…

Head Start is a federal program that has provided comprehensive early childhood development services to low-income children and their families since 1965. The comprehensive nature of the program includes educational, health, nutritional, and social services. These services are intended to prepare children to enter kindergarten and to improve the…

There is persistent debate over the role of scale of operations in education. Some argue that school franchises offer educational services more effectively than small independent schools. Skeptics counter that large centralized operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and foster diseconomies of scale and that small schools are more effective…