The U.S. Department of Education's proposed guidelines for awarding $4 billion in Race to the Top Fund money send a strong message that any state hoping to land a competitive grant should expect to allow student test scores to be used in decisions about teacher compensation and evaluation. The draft plans outlined by department officials last…

That advisories in secondary schools are fairly pervasive around the country may be one of the great unintended consequences of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) reform effort. While no CES Common Principle explicitly states that advisories should exist in schools, as Coalition Schools evolved, advisories became one of the logical ways for…

In this age of accountability and limited funding, community colleges are achieving more with less. Efficiency and effectiveness are keys to innovation. NorthWest Arkansas Community College's Nonacademic Assessment and Improvement Program (NAIP) collects data to study strengths and weaknesses. These efforts culminate in a measurable improvement…

Students' engagement at school has emerged as a critical factor across hundreds of dropout prevention and recovery programs in the United States. By supporting and improving academic, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement, we can mitigate the risk of dropping out. This article describes the history of school dropout, predictors of…

President Obama announced a plan to spend an unprecedented $12-billion over 10 years to improve programs, courses, and facilities at community colleges. The money, the president said, will position two-year institutions to produce five million more graduates over the next decade and to play a leading role in rebuilding the economy. But after the…

In this short discussion article I develop some earlier writing on the theme of education, improvement and sustainability (see references). It builds upon my primary criticism of the school improvement movement that it is accustomed to thinking of education as good in and of itself. As David Orr suggests candidly in his essay in the early 1990s,…

Without deliberate and resourced translation, research evidence is unlikely to inform policy and practice. This paper describes the processes and practical solutions used to translate evaluation research findings to improve the readability of print materials in a large scale worksite health programme. It is argued that a knowledge brokering and…

New Extension educators experience a steep learning curve when attempting to develop effective Extension programs. Formative evaluation is helpful to new, and experienced, Extension educators in determining the changes necessary for making programs more effective. Formative evaluation is an essential part of program evaluation. However, its use…

This 10th edition toolkit was developed for use in states and districts taking part in Wallace Foundation-funded efforts to improve school leadership. It includes rubrics on candidate admissions, course content, pedagogy-andragogy, clinical practice, performance assessment, and graduate performance outcomes, and was designed to help principal…

For more than 10 years, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) regional accrediting body has required all of the nearly 800 institutions under its umbrella to prepare and execute a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) as part of the reaccreditation process that occurs every 10 years. Pursuant to the…

This article describes the creation of a First Year Experience learning community in a teacher education program. The First Year Experience model was adopted by the university because of declining enrollment, retention, and graduation rates and has been generally successful in the education department. With little information available for teacher…

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…

"The Impact of Alignment Coaching on Christian Teachers' Worthy Performance" uses Human Performance Technology and "teleonomics" (Gilbert 2007) to document several intersecting vantage points as one performance improvement system of alignment coaching (AC). Coaching relationships and accomplishments of consistently (daily) reading the Bible,…

In 1998, Washington State had 51,512 classroom teachers, but only 29 of them were National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs). By 2009, the number of NBCTs in Washington had grown to 3,975--5th in the nation in total numbers, and 2nd in the nation in new teachers certifying that year. The state's successful strategy for increasing the number of…

How can schools respond to the call to equip all students with the math skills required in college and the workforce when students are working at widely varying skill levels? Offering extended instructional time in algebra, or double-dose instruction, offers one potential solution to this dilemma and has become an increasingly popular approach for…