It started with a dream: to create a national best practices teaching and learning center that would not only provide the best available care and education to children ages 0 to 5 years old, but would also serve as a model for adult learners and like-minded entities and individuals in the early education arena. Committed to elevating the quality…

The nation is in an era of policy reform aimed at improving the productivity and effectiveness of higher education. Major philanthropies and policy groups have converged around variations of the ambitious college completion goals announced by President Obama at the beginning of his administration. But at the same time, many state governments,…

The 12 winners of the federal Race to the Top competition have experienced near-universal challenges in turning their sweeping, multifaceted proposals into reality, among them a limited state capacity to execute fast, dramatic change and deeply rooted teacher-evaluation systems that have proved hard to transform. Reports unveiled by the U.S.…

In the aftermath of the devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, international humanitarian groups and volunteers poured into the country, bolstering what was already one of the world's hot spots for nongovernmental organizations. But the magnitude of the disaster--an estimated 300,000 were killed and one million left homeless out of a…

This study investigated a Tier 2 intervention in the context of a response-to-intervention (RTI) model for 123 fourth-grade students identified as having a high probability of reading failure. A randomized control trial was used to evaluate the effects of a 24-session multicomponent supplemental intervention targeting fluency and expository…

The Building Blocks for Student Engagement (BBSE) protocol was designed to provide a consistent framework of common language and a visual point of reference shared among students, teachers and school leaders to keep a laser-like focus on the instructional core and student engagement. Grounded in brain-based learning and implemented in urban,…

Maryland public schools continue to pick up honors and receive recognition for the work going on in their classrooms. For the second straight year, Maryland's education system has been ranked as number one in the nation by "Education Week", the nation's leading education publication. The "College Board" followed that up by…

This research developed a survey that measures the degree to which challenges are experienced by school and district leaders, and teachers, when attempting to implement legislatively required District Improvement Plans (DIPs). The data indicate that there are certainly challenges when implementing DIPs and that teachers report experiencing a…

These days, Response to Intervention (RTI) is everywhere, and there are lots of claims about what RTI is and how to do it. At last, here's a book that helps you cut through the quackery and ensure that your approach to RTI represents the very best of what is known about assessment, instruction, and intervention. Author Margaret Searle provides you…

Context: Accrediting bodies and universities increasingly require evidence of student learning within courses and programs. Within athletic training, programmatic assessment has been a source of angst for program directors. While there are many ways to assess educational programs, this article introduces 1 systematic approach. Objective: This…

Assessing the effectiveness of an assessment program is essential and can be accomplished through analysing the quality of closing the loop actions and through gathering faculty feedback. In this article we present closing the loop data from over 3 years of learning assessment reporting and from findings garnered through a faculty survey. Results…

From 2001 to 2006, following a request from the Scottish Executive, HMIE gathered evidence about the implementation of "A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century", the tri-partite agreement prepared in 2001 by Scottish Executive, COSLA and the teachers' unions. This "teachers' agreement" had been drawn up in response to the…

High-achieving kids from low-income families too often fall into the achievement trap; as they progress up the grades, their academic performance falls, and they are far less likely to remain star students than are middle-class or wealthy high-achievers. So says the first U.S.-wide analysis of high-achieving students from poor families (published…

Recent international declarations stress the importance of partnerships between and amongst donors, the state and civil society, in order to improve service delivery and promote qualities of good governance, particularly in key sectors such as education. However, in conditions of state fragility--where high levels of distrust between and amongst…

This article examines what occurred within schools successfully implementing and sustaining Schoolwide Positive Behavior Supports through the lens of leadership capacity. Leadership capacity, a broad-based, skillful participation in leadership, promotes the capabilities of many organizational members to lead. Researchers used quantitative analysis…