The College and Career Readines and Success Center closed on September 30,2019 because the grant cycle for the U.S. Department of Education Comprehensive Centers ended. The information on this website will no longer be updated. Visit www.air.org for updates on college and career readiness.
This report from the Alliance for Excellent Education advocates an increase in teacher induction programs - such as Connecticut BEST, Santa Cruz New Teacher Project, Tangipahoa FIRST, and The Toledo Plan - to better prepare, retain, and support educators in their first years of service. It also provides follow-up resources and suggestions for ongoing teacher professional development.
Authored by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, this report outlines a framework for redefining high schools in the 21st century by incorporating traditional high school core academic subjects with 21st century skills and content.
This meta-analysis of 31 studies examined whether reading interventions could assist elementary, middle, and high school students with reading difficulties and learning disabilities. Overall, results showed that students who received a reading intervention outperformed students in the control group. This positive effect was also found for students with disabilities across all measures. Further, with few exceptions, studies that examined reading comprehension found that reading interventions could have a positive effect on reading comprehension.
This ACT, Inc., policy report discusses and investigates the inconsistencies between a typical high school curriculum and what a student needs to know in order to be prepared for the workforce or postsecondary education. The report also stresses that the lack of academic rigor found in many high schools plays a part in the ensuing disconnect.
This report, commissioned by the California Teachers Association’s (CTA) High School Restructuring Task Force and authored by WestEd, synthesizes the major initiatives on high school reform taking place nationally and in California. The publication provides: 1) clear synthesis of the problem and context; 2) research on high-performing high schools, comprehensive school reform models, and the barriers to improvement; 3) current reform proposals and their research base; and 4) suggestions for further discussion and exploration by CTA.
This report from MDRC looks at how three different high school reform models--Career Academies, First Things First, and Talent Development--addressed five challenges found to be obstacles to successful reform implementation in low-performing high schools. According to this report, the pillars of high school reform are structural changes to improve personalization and instructional improvement. The report offers tangible solutions as well as supporting evidence and various resources.
This paper from the Center for American Progress examines high schools that implement an extended learning day as part of a required educational program for all students, explores issues related to implementing such a program, presents examples of how schools accomplish this, and analyzes the implications for school design, capacity, and financing.
This examination of the high school graduation rates by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) highlights the necessity and need for a comprehensive, universal formula to be used across states, a vision shared by many stakeholders in high school reform.
The Alliance for Excellent Education conducted a meta-analysis on 11 research-based practices aimed at improving the writing skills of fourth to 12th graders. The practices are: (1) writing strategies, (2) summarization, (3) collaborative writing, (4) specific product goals, (5) word processing, (6) sentence combining, (7) prewriting, (8) inquiry activities, (9) process writing approach, (10) study of models, and (11) writing for content learning. The results of the meta-analyses indicate that the practices examined had a large to medium effect size on students’ writing skills.
This National High School Center report focuses on successful high schools, highlighting the ways in which many superintendents, principals, and teachers are setting and meeting high expectations for all students. Developed specifically for state leaders, it provides them with suggestions on how they may support initiatives that are linked with accelerated learning.
