Issue/Policy Brief

Implementing response to intervention (RTI) in high schools requires educators to work across traditional boundaries. This brief presents a portrait of RTI implementation in three Colorado high schools as well as the state and district practices that support implementation at the school level.

This series of fact sheets From Achieve provide strategies, key talking points and resources for discussing the college-and career-ready agenda. These resources may be most useful to state and local administrators in discussing the college and career readiness reforms within their state or district.

This brief from Achieve provides advice to policymakers and practitioners on how to promote college and career readiness to the community at large. The document contains practical suggestions on phrasing when to help change the perception others may have of education reform being implemented.

This document states the need for statewide longitudinal data systems that can help facilitate sharing of student-level data across the education spectrum. The brief notes that doing this could help schools answer policy questions critical to increasing college and career readiness among students. Example questions include the number of high school graduates that have taken the required coursework to prepare for college, how many students are "on-track" for future success, etc.

This brief from Achieve identifies the key areas that state policymakers should consider in order to implement the new Common Core State Standards with fidelity. The brief provides suggestions for aligning these new standards with their existing standards and course requirements, as well as aligning assessments for collecting data and measuring achievement. The brief lists steps each state can take to ensure they are implementing the standards effectively.

This policy brief discusses the growing second-language learner population in schools. Through case studies of schools in Austin and the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, it provides state and federal policymakers recommendations for policy changes that can help schools increase student achievement among this population.

This brief discusses the findings from a poll, funded by Achieve, Inc., to gain insight on how the general public perceives the college and career-ready agenda in education. The results indicate that there is strong agreement that postsecondary education and training of some sort is needed in order to succeed and that strong standards and assessments are needed to ensure students graduate ready for postsecondary education.

This brief from ACT illustrates that taking core work in high school does not guarantee the student will graduate or be prepared for life after high school. Further, it examines the gap between secondary and postsecondary education in the U.S. The author recommends a focus on successful strategies for eliminating this gap so that all high school graduates learn the essential skills they need to be successful in college and work.

This series of policy briefs from the Center on Education Policy (CEP) discuss a variety of information that school exit exams reveal about student achievement. The first brief discusses the shift in ways of determining how students earn a high school diploma - previously using minimum competency exams to current and future wide use of end-of-course exams. The second brief discusses use of exit exam pass rates to determine gaps in low performing students.