Until recently, teacher quality was largely seen as a constant among education's sea of variables. Policy efforts to increase teacher quality emphasized the field as a whole instead of the individual: for instance, increased regulation, additional credentials, or a profession modeled after medicine and law. Even as research emerged showing how the quality of each classroom teacher was crucial to student achievement, much of the debate in American public education focused on everything except teacher quality. School systems treated one teacher much like any other, as long as they
had the right credentials. Policy, too, treated teachers as if they were interchangeable parts, or "widgets."
The perception of teachers as widgets began to change in the late 1990s and early aughts as new organizations launched and policymakers and philanthropists began to concentrate on teacher effectiveness. Under the Obama administration, the pace of change quickened. Two ideas, bolstered by research, animated the policy community:
1) Teachers are the single most important in-school factor for student learning.
2) Traditional methods of measuring teacher quality have little to no bearing on actual student learning.
Using new data and research, school districts, states, and the federal government sought to change how teachers are trained, hired, staffed in schools, evaluated, and compensated. The result was an unprecedented amount of policy change that has, at once, driven noteworthy progress, revealed new problems to policymakers, and created problems of its own. Between 2009 and 2013, the number of states that require annual evaluations for all teachers increased from 15 to 28. The number of states that require teacher evaluations to include objective measures of student achievement nearly tripled, from 15 to 41; and the number of states that require student growth to be the preponderant criteria increased fivefold, from 4 to 20
This paper takes a look at where the country has been with regards to teacher effectiveness over the last decade, and outlines policy suggestions for the future.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Productivity is clearly a priority in state education agencies (SEA). The first two volumes of The SEA of the Future made the case for a "productivity mindset" in our country's state education agencies. Authors in these volumes argued that SEAs must fight against focusing exclusively on regulatory compliance to find more ways to provide local autonomy and consistently measure, assess, and hold themselves, their districts, and schools accountable for both performance and costs. Though these essays sharply challenged the traditional work of SEAs, state leaders responded enthusiastically, saying, "Yes. Where do we start?"
In this third volume of the series, we introduce the "productivity infrastructure." The productivity infrastructure constitutes the building blocks for an SEA committed to supporting productivity, innovation, and performance -- from the state chief to the classroom. These building blocks include:
* Policies to expand the flexibility of district and school leaders and allow them to make choices about resource use.
* State funding arrangements that fund students, not programs.
* Information systems that allow district and school leaders to accurately assess the productivity of policies and practices.
The essays in this volume offer a rich discussion of each of these elements.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Education and Literacy;Peace and Conflict
The road to higher education can be long and challenging. The demands of academic work combined with employment,
family, friends, and social life prove insurmountable for somestudents. Students who are now servingor have served their country in the Armed Forces and want to attend college may face unique obstacles that impede their progress. In this report, we consider the needs of student service members and veterans and the readiness of campuses across Indiana to serve them. We also highlight innovative programming across the nation that addresses gaps in support
for student service members and veterans.
The United States is currently experiencing the longest and largest-scale sustained involvement in war in recent history. Over 1.6 million deployments have occurred to support Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in Iraq and/or Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan and over 420,000 troops have served on multiple deployments. The drawdown in the
size of the Armed Forces during the 1990s increased the role of the National Guard and Reserves in our nation's military.
As a result, members of the National Guard and Reserves are currently serving longer, more frequent deployments than since World War II, with approximately 38% deployed, and 84,000 deploying more than once. When they are not on active
duty, many members of the National Guard and Reserves are students at institutions of higher learning. After completing
their service, many active duty military members pursue higher education using the benefits they receive via the GI Bill. The presence of student service members and veterans on college campuses -- and their families -- is likely to increase given recent expansions in GI Bill benefits and continued large-scale deployments.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Education and Literacy;Health;Peace and Conflict
Service members and veterans transitioning from deployment to higher education bring with them a degree of maturity, experience with leadership, familiarity with diversity, and a mission focused orientation that exceed those of nearly all of their peers. They may be expected to emerge as campus leaders; to enrich any class focused on history, politics, or public
policy; and to serve as an engine for innovation on their campuses. However, many veterans acquired these assets at great personal expense, including battlefield injuries.
Cognitive injuries are among the most prevalent of these battlefield injuriesfor today's returning service members. By some estimates, individuals who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan have as much as a 40 percent chance of acquiring such an injury by the time they have completed their service. Predominant among these cognitive injuries are traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Consequently, to allow and encourage this transitioning population to realize the greatest gain from postsecondary education, campus faculty and staff must recognize the potential learning challenges associated with these invisible injuries and make adjustments or implement accommodations to help ensure their students' academic success.
To support faculty and staff who seek a better understanding of TBI and PTSD, this guide focuses on functional limitations commonly associated with these conditions and provides forms of classroom accommodations and modifications, also known as academic adjustments, responsive to these limitations. However, this information should not be divorced from the bigger picture, that individuals with combat-related TBI and PTSD will see themselves not as individuals with disabilities, but as veterans and service members. Campuses that are already well-prepared to serve veterans and service members in general will have far less need to specifically adapt to persons with cognitive impairments than campuses that have developed few veteran-specific programs or resources.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Education and Literacy;Peace and Conflict
The United States is in the process of bringing more than 2 million service members home from Iraq and Afghanistan and reducing the size of America's military. Today's veterans are the beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which has provided unprecedented financial support for attending college. More than 500,000 veterans and their families have utilized Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits since the law's enactment in 2008. Many returning veterans -- as well as service members in the active and reserve components of the armed forces -- will enroll in higher education to enhance their job prospects, achieve career goals, expand their knowledge and skill sets for both personal and career enrichment, and facilitate their transition to civilian life.
How well prepared is higher education to serve these new students, and what changes has it made in response to the first wave of Post-9/11 GI Bill recipients on campus? Despite the long history of veterans' education benefits and presence of veteran students on campus, current research is still catching up to the veteran and military student population. This report represents the second assessment of the current state of programs and services for veterans and service members on campuses across the nation, based on survey results from 690 institutions.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
This report takes a broad look at the overall makeup of public schools in Boston, combining results from the Boston Public Schools and the city's Commonwealth Charter schools to provide a snapshot of how school structures and student performance have been affected by reforms that have expanded autonomy to larger numbers of schools.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Northeastern)-Massachusetts-Suffolk County-Boston
This report details our visits in 19 vibrant communities and 47 impressive classrooms across Minnesota. We hope the proof points that educators and community leaders shared will inspire fellow teachers, administrators, community leaders -- and policymakers -- in classrooms and at the capitol. It's critical to learn from and collaborate with Minnesotans working to make great public schools available to all kids.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Midwestern)-Minnesota
Education and Literacy;Employment and Labor;Women
Nearly 50 years after the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women continue to earnless than men do in nearly every occupation.Because pay is a fundamental part of everyday life, enabling individuals to support themselves and their families, the pay gap evokes passionate debate. Although the data confirming the persistence of the pay gap are incontrovertible,the reasons behind the gap remain the subject ofcontroversy. Do women earn less because they make different choices than men do? Does discrimination play a role? What other issues might be involved?
This report explores the pay gap between male and female college graduates working full time one year after graduation.
You might expect the pay gap between men and women in this group of workers of similar age,education, and family responsibilities to be small or nonexistent. But in 2009 -- the most recent year for which data are available -- women one year out of college who were working full time earned, on average, just 82 percent of what their male peers earned. After we control for hours, occupation, college major, employment sector,and other factors associated with pay, the pay gap shrinks but does not disappear. About one third of the gap cannot be explained by any of the factors commonly understood to affect earnings, indicating that other factors that are more difficult to identify -- and likely more difficult to measure -- contribute to the pay gap.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
