Finding and keeping good teachers is vital to all schools. In Milwaukee, where the racial achievement gap is so wide, it is especially critical as well as in rural areas where lower income students have few environmental resources outside of schools to bolster learning.  This report investigates the factors involved in retaining urban and rural teachers as well as maximizing their effectiveness in the classroom. Interviews with teachers and school officials indicate that modest changes in educational systems could improve teacher retention and performance. Most significant reforms included systematic mentoring for new teachers and more realistic workloads. While these would require more school funding, the amount is not extravagant and the outcome could make the difference between success and failure in many schools.

This report describes a new school finance system—one designed to link the needs of students to the state's academic standards to ensure that all children, regardless of their special needs or the location of their schools, have the opportunity to succeed. It serves as the basis to Funding Our Future: The Wisconsin Adequacy Plan (above). The full report includes a cost-out of the Adequacy model for each of Wisconsin's 426 school districts. (111 pp.)

This policy brief from the New York City Working Group on School Transformation criticizes NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's education reform strategy of closing low-performing schools. Evidence from the NYC Department of Education reveals that its school-assignment policies concentrate the highest-needs students in struggling schools, exacerbating the low performance that leads to the subsequent closing of these schools. The brief calls for the DOE to build the instructional capacity across NYC public schools to support the lowest-performing schools rather than simply closing them. 

In 2010, the President set a goal for the U.S. to become the global leader in postsecondary degree attainment by the year 2020. Yet, more than 7,000 students, many of whom are not proficient in reading and math, are leaving or being pushed out of U.S. schools each day. This study shows that the U.S. cannot achieve the President’s 2020 goal if our schools continue to hemorrhage large segments of our nation’s youth. Accordingly, this document is designed to serve as a blueprint for implementing a comprehensive package of policy reforms that seek to increase the quantity of students who succeed at every stage of the educational pipeline and the quality of the education they receive. Different from most calls for reform, it considers the educational pipeline in its entirety—from early childhood through postsecondary attainment—and offers evidence‐informed strategies to boost access, quantity and quality at every stage.