Competitive Grant Making and Education Reform: Assessing Race to the Top's Current Impact and Future Prospects by the American Enterprise Institute. This report argues that federal policymakers could learn from Race to the Top’s strengths and weaknesses before diving into new competitive grant programs in the future.
International Benchmarking: State Education Performance Standards from the American Institutes for Research. This report uses international benchmarking to examine the expectations gap between what students are expected to learn in some states and what students are expected to learn in others.
Student Learning Expectations Gap Can Be Twice the Size of National Black-White Achievement Gap from the American Institutes for Research. This report finds that the gap in what students are expected to know in each state varies so greatly that the difference in student expectations between the states with the most rigorous assessments and those with the least stringent is twice the size of the national black-white achievement gap.
Degree Completion Beyond Institutional Borders: Responding to the New Reality of Mobile and Nontraditional Learners from the Center for American Progress. This report describes the avenues that colleges, states, and other organizations take to recognize prior learning and transfer credit, and it points out the flaws in these policies that block students from efficiently garnering credit as they move through and among higher education institutions.
Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness: How Teacher Performance Assessments Can Measure and Improve Teaching by Center for American Progress. This report describes the ways in which performance assessments can be used to influence teacher licensure and training as well as explaining progress in the field of teacher assessment development and potential policies to advance the field of teacher preparation.
Uncertain Recovery: Access and Funding Issues in Public Higher Education from the Education Policy Center at the University of Alabama. This report finds that the recession has hit community colleges hard, and the sector's financial fortunes are unlikely to improve soon.
Putting Data Into Practice: Putting Data into Practice written by Managing Director Bill Tucker at Education Sector. This report looks at New York City's efforts to create an evidence-based and collaborative teaching culture. Few other districts have embraced the use of data like the nation’s largest school system. As such, its experience offers valuable lessons for other schools and systems seeking to maximize the use of data to drive and inform classroom-level instruction.
Global Higher Education Rankings 2010: Affordability and Accessibility in Comparative Perspective by Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto-based consulting firm. This report provides a comparison of affordability and accessibility in higher education. Covering seventeen countries in all, the report presents data on a six different indicators of affordability (taking into account in various combinations of costs and subsidies) and four different indictors of accessibility (looking at participation, attainment and equality of access).
A Policymaker’s Guide to Early College Designs: Expanding a Strategy for Achieving College Readiness for All from the Jobs for the Future, Early College High School Initiative. This report outlines what it would take to systematize and scale up early college course taking, extending the benefits to all high school students, secondary schools, and colleges across the country.
The State of the South 2010, Talent and Skill: Antidotes to Uncertainty from MDC. This report that most Southern states lag not just the U.S. but many developed nations in college completion rates and faces a "job gap" totaling 3.1 million jobs--the number of positions it would take to get back to 2007 employment levels.