Local districts can benefit from a collaborative process for refreshing their master schedules to increase teacher planning time. Alongside national models for organizing the school day, local districts must account for regional factors such as resources, historical practices, community expectations, changing state requirements, negotiated…

Purpose: Annually, the National Association of School-University Partnerships (NASUP) awards individuals with the Exemplary PK-20 Boundary Spanner Award. The award goes to a university-based or a PK-12 school or school district-based individual who "innovates the systems or practices to enhance the learning of all of those involved in the…

The Forum Guide to Data Quality provides best practices from districts and states for maintaining quality data as these agencies regularly review and revise their methods for working with data, as well as their expectations for all staff who are responsible for education data and their quality. This resource is intended to help districts and…

Teacher attrition is increasing (Torpey, 2018), and approximately 100,000 teachers will leave this field annually from 2016 to 2026. Addressing wellbeing constructs retain more employees and decrease presenteeism (Hemp, 2014). Teachers cite a lack of job satisfaction and burnout as their main reasons for attrition (Brasfield et al., 2019; Fisher,…

Improving equity of education funding is a key to addressing social injustices in education. Weighted student funding systems are a relatively novel approach a number of large urban and suburban districts have used to try to improve the equity of school funding. In a weighted student funding (WSF) system, the dollars distributed to schools are…

There is an epidemic of race-related suspension disparities in a local school system within the State of Maryland. Minority students are more incessantly referred for disciplinary actions and suspended at higher rates than their white peers. Research shows there are significant contributors to race-related suspension disparities. These disparate…

While the science of reading offers a powerful approach to literacy, implementing it can be both beneficial and challenging. This Spotlight will help readers identify how state leaders have approached reading policy implementation; review districts' experience moving to a 'knowledge-building' curriculum; evaluate best practices for teaching…

The Charter School Programs (CSP) State Entities (SE) grant's primary goal is "to award grants to state entities to enable them to award subgrants to eligible applicants to enable such eligible applicants to open and prepare for the operation of new charter schools and to replicate and expand high-quality charter schools." Another…

Purpose: We examine considerations regarding the positive contributions of evidence accountability and challenges that frustrate educators in gaining access to the needed product information. Design/Approach/Methods: We review the research literature on the multiple characteristics of evidence relative to consumer (practitioner) interests. We then…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between a principal's level of hope and school climate. Hope is a motivational state of mind that is initiated by setting a goal and sustained by a person's agency and perceived routes that can be or will be used to achieve that goal (Snyder et al., 1991). The National School Climate…

In this brief, we examine an important but obscure form of state spending on K-12 education-state subsidies of school district pension costs. In 2018, this exceeded $19 billion across 23 states. To put that amount into perspective, 2018 federal spending on Title I programs was $15.8 billion. This revenue stream is often ignored in analyses of…

One of the areas that was the topic of discussion amongst educational stakeholders was behavior. This includes incentives, intervention systems, awards, and consequences, addressing an individual vs addressing an entire group, triggers, and/or past influences, to name a few. Behavior is a broad topic and naturally, educators are interested in…

Coaching is an important component in multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) such as school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports (SWPBIS), but little is known about which coaching activities are most related to sustained implementation of this school-wide framework. A survey was developed to examine the amount of receipt and…

This article examines how school and non-school policies interact to reinforce or disrupt school segregation in the context of suburban communities and how these systems are maintained by structural and institutional mechanisms. Methodologically, we use a case study approach to delve deeply into the interpretation and implementation of school…

School districts have increasingly adopted weighted student funding (WSF) formulas that allocate dollars, rather than staff positions, to schools in the name of equity and flexibility. While research to date has studied equity in some of these districts, there is no research that examines the entire cohort of WSF districts together. This paper…