The Obama Administration has signaled that it will include a $1.35 billion expansion of the "Race to the Top" (RTTT) fund in its FY 2011 budget. This is in addition to the $4.35 billion for RTTT included in last year's stimulus bill. Under the Department of Education's (DOE) guidelines for RTTT, states must meet certain requirements to…

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…

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation created the Early College High School Initiative in 2002, opening more than 200 hundred early college programs across the nation and every year a new report is created to evaluate the progress of the program (Berger, Adelman, & Cole, 2010). Staff at the Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast (REL-SE)…

The U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top competition has provided an unprecedented opportunity for states to advance public elementary and secondary education reform. The competition's requirements encompass reforms ranging from overhauling teacher assessment to adopting common educational standards to eliminating restrictions on the…

Child care teachers and staff are important influences on preschoolers' nutrition and physical activity habits, and their views may be influenced by education level, years of field experience, and program involvement. For the 360 participants surveyed, responses on 5 of 18 survey items significantly differed by education level (e.g., less…

Public school districts in the Mississippi (MS) Delta are under severe pressure to make rapid and adaptable changes in response to the federal legislation No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the MS Plan for Student Achievement: Assessment, Accreditation, and Accountability. These reform Acts require higher student performance standards and new…

Educators in the Chula Vista Elementary School District determined what kind of instruction students needed through a "response to intervention" (RTI) process, which provides extra help to struggling students with an aim of reducing the number of referrals to special education. As RTI catches on throughout the country, the district is on…

Purpose: To examine the impact of an experimental consumer-choice voucher benefit on the selection of independent and agency personal assistance services (PAS) providers among rural and urban Medicare beneficiaries with disabilities. Methods: The Medicare Primary and Consumer-Directed Care Demonstration enrolled 1,605 Medicare beneficiaries in 19…

The federal government's annual budget process was kick-started this year with a bold proposal that has implications for anyone who provides child care. But keeping child care front and center in Washington will take a lot of effort in 2010. On February 1, the Administration released the Budget Proposal for Federal Fiscal Year 2011. It calls for…

For 20 years, Advocates for Children of New Jersey has published the Newark Kids Count Data Book, a one-stop source for child well-being data on our state's largest city. Newark Kids Count includes the latest statistics, along with five-year trend data, in the following areas: demographics, family economic security, food insecurity, child health,…

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) initiated the Growth Model Pilot Project (GMPP) in November 2005 with the goal of approving up to ten states to incorporate growth models in school adequate yearly progress (AYP) determinations under the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" ("ESEA"). After extensive reviews, nine states…

Using a qualitative approach, this study investigated the perceptions of motivating factors for persistence and completion of the doctorate among low income, first generation and students of color that participated in the federally funded Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program. Purposive sampling was used to obtain a pool of nine…

Of the numerous public policy debates currently taking place throughout the United States, perhaps no issue receives more attention than the persistence of "chronically" low-performing public schools. As of 2009, approximately 5,000 schools--5% of the nation's total--qualified as chronically low performing (Duncan, 2009d). Certainly,…

This article discusses the recent changes to the Higher Education Opportunities Act (HEOA), P.L. 110-315, which have resulted in providing greater access to college programs to students with intellectual disabilities (ID). Prior to the amendments to HEOA, only students who were enrolled full time in a degree bearing program were eligible to…

The author analyzes the growth and nature of internal evaluation from the 1960s to the present and suggests that internal evaluation has been on the increase because of its perceived importance. Although the 1960s were characterized by a rich intellectual development of evaluation theory and practice, the fiscal conservatism of the 1980s ushered…