Since their inception in the 1950s, community-based college access programs have focused on preparing students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds for college and helping them complete the necessary steps to matriculate. Until about 10 years ago, however, most programs had little, if any, involvement with students after high school.…

Over the last ten years, in Washington community and technical colleges (CTC) there has been a great leap forward in access and use of data for setting and measuring goals, monitoring progress, and identifying equity gaps. Despite much progress, faculty members in career and technical education (CTE) programs still often have difficulty accessing…

The Mastery-based Learning (MBL) Work Group has examined opportunities to increase student access to relevant and robust mastery-based academic pathways aligned to personal career goals and postsecondary education, and reviewed the role of the High School and Beyond Plan (HSBP) in supporting mastery-based learning. The Work Group members believe…

Schools are experiencing unprecedented disruption, forcing educators to think differently about how they engage with their students and forcing changes to longstanding systems that have been established to deliver education. This presents an opportunity to not only discover ways to address education during the coronavirus pandemic, but also to…

One stated purpose for the use of the edTPA is to guide teacher preparation program improvement (Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity, 2013). The Washington State Legislature included teacher preparation program reform on its agenda, and requested that the Professional Educator Standards Board identify ways in which the edTPA…

As the first major effort to use a behavioral economics lens to examine human services programs that serve poor and vulnerable families in the United States, the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project demonstrated the value of applying behavioral insights to improve the efficacy of human services programs. The BIAS…

Many social policy and education programs start from the assumption that people act in their best interest. But behavioral science shows that people often weigh intuition over reason, make inconsistent choices, and put off big decisions. The individuals and families who need services and the staff who provide them are no exception. From city…

Integrated data systems are often used to inform decision making at the top tiers of local or state government. Policymakers use analyses based on large numbers of integrated data system (IDS) records (from which personal identifying information has been removed) to understand the overlap between cases that receive services from different systems…

An integrated data system (IDS) that links information from separate administrative data systems offers policymakers, program administrators and researchers a powerful tool to analyze interactive effects across systems and make more informed decisions to improve outcomes for vulnerable families. This case study discusses how two states (Washington…

A central problem of practice for professional preparation programs--especially those that are well established and have developed a reputation for doing their job successfully--is to take a careful and critical look at their work at periodic intervals. It is too easy to rest on reputation. And it is also easy to ignore the evolving context for…

More than 70 percent of the students who access higher education in Washington do so first at a two-year institution. Washington's two-year colleges account for a higher percentage of public and private college student enrollments (49 percent) than in the United States in general (34 percent). The Higher Education Coordinating Board's (HECB)…

Early care and education can prepare children for school, but while some preschool and child care programs do an excellent job, others are inadequate and some may even harm healthy development. This study focuses on child care center directors to better understand why there is so much variation, and how public initiatives can better help…

In cities and towns across America, millions of children and youth get out of school by mid-afternoon but have neither a safe, supervised place to go nor a structured or engaging activity in which to participate. Because the hours between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m. are when young people are most likely to be affected by crime or to engage in risky…

What happens when teams from 57 cities building afterschool systems gather to discuss two key system responsibilities--improving afterschool programs and using data for informed decision-making? Lots of rich discussion. This report covers a national afterschool conference held in February 2013. It details what mayors, program providers, system…

One of the greatest challenges that community colleges face in their efforts to increase graduation rates is improving the success of students in their developmental, or remedial, education programs--the courses that students without adequate academic preparation must take before they can enroll in courses for college credit. Emphasizing results…