Partnership for Student Success: Providing Youth with Quality Programs Through the FY2013 Quality Enhancements in After School and Out of School Grant
This report documents the After School and Out of School Time (ASOST) Quality Enhancement Grant (line item 7061-9611) that provides high-quality expanded learning opportunities (ELOs) before school, after school, and during the summer months to students across the state of Massachusetts. Through this grant, public school districts, non-public schools, or community based organizations (CBOs) with… Read More ›
Continued Progress: Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning
This report examines achievement in 62 public charter and district schools that are pursuing a variety of personalized learning practices, and examines implementation details in 32 of those schools. Researchers obtained achievement data for personalized learning students and a matched comparison group of students attending other schools serving similar populations. They also collected and analyzed… Read More ›
What Are Teachers’ and School Leaders’ Major Concerns About New K–12 State Tests?
This report shares U.S. principals’ and teachers’ main concerns about testing, drawing upon new survey tools for understanding educators’ perspectives and implementation of major education policies: RAND’s American Teacher Panel and American School Leader Panel. The findings are drawn from the ATP and ASLP surveys fielded in February 2015, before the full administration of most… Read More ›
Competency-Based Education in Three Pilot Programs
This research brief summarizes findings of the RAND evaluation of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Project Mastery grant program, which was created in 2011 to support competency-based education initiatives in large school systems that serve a high proportion of disadvantaged youth. Competency-based education meets students where they are academically, provides students with opportunities for choice,… Read More ›
Measuring Hard-to-Measure Student Competencies
This report provides guidelines to promote thoughtful development of practical, high-quality measures of interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies that practitioners and policymakers can use to improve valued outcomes for students. Efforts to prepare students for college, careers, and civic engagement have traditionally emphasized academic skills, but a growing body of research suggests that interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies—such… Read More ›
Making Mastery Work: A Close-Up View of Competency Education
This report focuses on the experiences of students, teachers, and administrators in a select, but varied group of schools that are ahead of the curve in implementing competency education. A team of researchers spent a year and a half examining 11 high schools in New England. The report is organized in sections that provide both… Read More ›
Integrated STEM Education through Project-Based Learning
This paper outlines the research underlying successful project-based STEM education and refers educators to a unique curriculum that supports teachers to implement a project that encourages students to solve problems in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. It includes an overview of a project-based learning process that takes students through the reflection, research, discovery,… Read More ›
Students at the Center Hub Recommends: Smart Parents
The Students at the Center Hub team occasionally finds something that makes our lives much easier: a fantastic resource aligned with our framework, that we consider a go-to for a large portion of our audience. Smart Parents, a blog series on the site Getting Smart, provides people invested in their children’s education with a series… Read More ›
Developing Excellent School Principals to Advance Teaching and Learning: Considerations for State Policy
This report emphasizes that every state faces a unique blend of educational, political, and financial circumstances and that, therefore, each state’s approach should fit its needs and particularities. “There is not a cookbook recipe for policy development or implementation that will work equally well in all states,” it says. “State and local adaptations will be… Read More ›
Making Time for Instructional Leadership
This three-volume report describes the “SAM process,” an approach that about 700 schools around the nation are using to direct more of principals’ time and effort to improve teaching and learning in classrooms. Research has shown that a principal’s instructional leadership is second only to teaching among school-related influences on student success. But principals often… Read More ›
Deeper Learning and Equity: Two New Resources
Originally posted on Education Week’s blog on November 6, 2015 A year and a half ago, in a post to this blog, Jal Mehta made the memorable assertion that “deeper learning has a race problem.” Judging by who attends its conferences and teaches and studies at its exemplary schools, he notes, the deeper learning movement… Read More ›
Voices on Policy to Promote College and Career Readiness
Originally posted on Education Week’s blog on November 4, 2015. In October, Jobs for the Future’s Students at the Center initiative hosted Turning the Corner, a convening of researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and other influential figures from across the education world. We asked participants to discuss a couple of questions in particular: As the No Child… Read More ›