Educator Effectiveness/Quality

This brief presents an approach for state education agency staff to guide state, district and school practitioners in creating coherence among Common Core State Standards, teacher evaluation systems, and job-embedded professional learning to improve instruction in a way that ensures students are college- and career-ready. The brief provides an overview of each of these three reforms and presents the connections between them that support a coherence-buidling process. 

This brief focuses on the role that career and technical education (CTE) teachers can play in ensuring college and career readiness (CCR) for all students. The authors introduce who CTE teachers are and how current policies support and integrate them into schools. The authors argue that these teachers are critical to meeting the needs of students who may wish to enter a career without obtaining a 4-year college degree or for those who wish to gain experience in a field before obtaining a higher degree.

Part of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) guidelines for a statewide college- and career-ready agenda, these guidelines are provided to support states, districts, and schools develop teacher development plans for senior-year transitional courses. The guidelines include seven specific policy recommendations for the development of statewide teacher development plans for transitional courses and shares promising practices and policies from the states in the SREB region.

This report provides a progress update on the work the Southern Regional Education Board and its partner states completed on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded grant project, Strengthening Statewide College/Career Readiness Initiative (SSCRI). The grant focused on strengthening the college- and career-readiness initiatives in five states: Florida, Kentucky, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. This report focuses on the progress these states have made in regards to the design and implementation of transitional courses in reading, writing, and mathematics.

This brief identifies key issues associated with the college readiness gap and causes of this gap, as well as outlines steps state policymakers and educators can take close the college readiness gap in their states. In order to ensure students are prepared for postsecondary success, a statewide college readiness agenda should be in place. Components of this college readiness agenda include: readiness standards, assessments, curriculum, teacher development, college placement, and state accountability. 

This brief, authored by the Business Roundtable, is designed to provide states with concrete policy recommendations that will help ensure that students are properly prepared to become effective and highly skilled members of the workforce.

This report presents a review of improvement strategies and reforms that educators and policymakers can develop and implement to support low-performing high schools. The report explains the theories that drive each reform strategy, reviews the evidence supporting the strategies, and provides suggestions for implementing the reforms. Some of the reform strategies include dual enrollment, early college high schools, learning communities, career academies, and charter high schools.