In 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation extended grants to three organizations involved with competency-based education approaches. RAND examined these organizations' implementation, student experiences, and student outcomes.
Competency-based education meets students where they are academically, provides students with opportunities for choice, and awards credit for evidence of learning, not for the time students spend studying a subject. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation asked RAND to evaluate three competency-based education grants in terms of implementation, students' experiences, and student performance.
Summarizing a larger report, this briefing presents evidence of the effect that New Leaders, a nonprofit dedicated to preparing principals to lead schools to greater achievement, has on student achievement.
New Leaders is a nonprofit organization that partners with school districts to prepare and support principals. This report describes how the New Leaders program was implemented in partner districts, and it provides evidence of the effect that New Leaders has on student achievement.
This document presents technical appendixes to supplement the main evaluation report Preparing Principals to Raise Student Achievement: Implementation and Effects of the New Leaders Program in Ten Districts (RR-507-NL).
States and school districts can play an important role in helping principals be more successful and guide their schools more effectively by undertaking actions in four key areas.
In July 2012, the City of Santa Monica Human Services Division and the Santa Monica–Malibu Unified School District contracted with the RAND Corporation to conduct an assessment of child care programs in Santa Monica. The project sought to assess how well Santa Monica's early and school-age care programs meet the needs of families. Recommendations for improvement focused on advancing access, quality, service delivery, and financial sustainability.
Many children in low-income families in the United States are not able to access and use technology in the same ways as their more-advantaged peers. This means they may not be able to benefit from enhanced educational opportunities, and they will have fewer chances to develop the workforce skills they will need to succeed in later life. This Perspective explores the potential role of early childhood education in addressing the digital divide.
Summarizes how testing of K–12 students affects teaching practice, and identifies characteristics of assessment systems that can promote deeper-learning skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving.
The U.S. military services have traditionally used a tiering system including education credentials as one element of gauging the likelihood of a recruit persevering through his or her first term of service. To assess the continuing value of this system, the authors compared attrition rates for those with distance learning or homeschool credentials to those of high school diploma holders.
This report reviews the literature on how assessment affects teaching practice and the conditions that moderate that relationship. The authors identify a wide variety of effects that testing might have on teachers' activities in the classroom and a number of conditions that affect the impact that assessment may have on practice.
How to effectively increase access to and quality in higher education in developing countries is a highly debated topic.
India has joined a worldwide trend in which nations are seeking to improve the quality of their higher education systems by giving greater autonomy and accountability to higher education institutions. In this report, the authors review India's and other countries' higher education systems and suggest seven policy actions that the Indian national government and other stakeholders can take to improve higher education by linking funding to quality.
Quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs) constitute an ambitious policy approach to improving early care and education practices and child outcomes.
This report examines how changes to the current military-civilian faculty composition at the United States Air Force Academy might affect cadets' officership and academic development, cost, staffing challenges, and officer career development. Based on the study's findings, the report makes recommendations for a faculty composition that best balances these key factors and is sustainable into the future.
In an effort to determine the feasibility of requiring all Air Force officers to attain a specific level of proficiency in a second language, the authors conducted a survey of current Air Force officers. The results suggest that such a requirement is not currently feasible. However, it would instead be desirable to offer incentives for a variety of efforts made toward achieving proficiency, both before and after commissioning.
Efforts to improve school leadership may improve student outcomes. Evaluators and policymakers should allow time for improvements to show, use multiple evaluation measures, and interpret findings carefully before applying them to others.
Given the focus on accountability in education, stakeholders are interested in evaluating whether efforts aimed at improving school leadership show results; the key criteria are student outcomes. This report describes challenges that states, districts, and other entities can expect to encounter as they evaluate efforts targeting school leadership as a way to improve student outcomes and offers suggestions for dealing with those challenges.
Examines how California school districts responded to increased financial flexibility in the face of budget cut.
Much of California's school funding is allocated through programs whose funding comes with requirements that districts use the money to support specific programs. In 2008–09, the strings were taken off 40 of these programs as part of a deal that also reduced their funding. This report presents the results of a survey of California's district chief financial officers (CFOs), describing how they made decisions in light of this new state policy.
Presents a summary of research on first-year principals' experiences, actions, working conditions, and outcomes; the research is intended to inform efforts to promote school improvement and principal retention.
Principals new to their school face a variety of challenges that can influence their likelihood of improving their schools' performance and their likelihood of remaining the principal. The authors present research on first-year principals' experiences, actions, working conditions, and outcomes. The research is intended to inform efforts to promote school improvement and principal retention.
Many children gained substantial weight in elementary school, especially in grades 1-3. Gains were not just among children who were already overweight or obese; children who entered kindergarten at normal weight also gained substantially.
To improve schools, federal policymakers should consider state capacity, cost, and state politics and design policies that support more experimentation, evaluation, and dissemination of new knowledge while avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach.
Federal involvement in states' provision of education has grown since the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, which could be reauthorized in 2011. This report reviews the literature on the state and federal roles in education, examines the effectiveness of states' ongoing school-improvement efforts, and considers options for framing future federal guidance and support of state school-improvement efforts.
