Northwest Regional Comprehensive Center

The Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship is accepting applications for the 2007-2008 school year. Einstein Fellows spend the school year in Washington, D.C., sharing their expertise with policymakers. Fellowships are served with Congress or one of several government agencies such as the Department of Energy, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The goal of the program is to provide an opportunity for teachers to inform national policy and improve communication between the K-12 STEM education community and national leaders. The application deadline is January 8, 2007.

The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) released its first report on the 10 state actions to ensure the effective use of longitudinal data, including details on how states are changing policies and practices to promote linkages across systems, ensuring appropriate access to new data and analysis, and strengthening stakeholder capacity to use this information.

The Center on Education Policy has a released a report synthesizing findings from their research on how the No Child Left Behind Act's school restructuring requirements are being implemented in Michigan, California, Maryland, Ohio, and Georgia. Document reviews and interviews with state officials were conducted in the five states, and case study research was carried out in 19 districts and 42 schools. Among the report's findings are that more schools have entered restructuring and many remain in that status for multiple years; the "any other" restructuring option is the most popular option in the states studied; and the five states varied greatly in the supports they offered restructuring schools.

Edvantia Report

This guide by The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) and the National Association of State Title I Directors (NASTID) provides definitions of key technology components and relevant examples, where appropriate as a glossary for educators. The guide also presents essential implementation and infrastructure considerations that decision makers should think about when implementing technology in schools. Technology enhances administrative, teacher and student capabilities and performance, especially for those students who lack access to technology outside of school.

The Center on Instruction's Reading, Special Education and ELL Strands have recently developed a document that makes recommendations for improving literacy-related instruction in the content areas or across the entire school day, interventions for students reading below grade level, and recommendations for supporting literacy development in adolescent English language learners.

REL Northwest recently published a report focusing on student proficiency in reading and math from 2003–2004 to 2006–2007. The report compares gaps in performance on state achievement tests between grade 8 American Indian and Alaska Native students and all other grade 8 students in 26 states serving large populations of American Indian and Alaska Native students.

The Center on Instruction released the second edition of its annotated bibliography on adolescent literacy. Updated from a 2007 edition, the bibliography is intended as a resource for technical assistance providers as they work with states on adolescent literacy. This revision includes current research and documents of practical use in guiding improvements in grades 4–12 reading instruction in the content areas and in interventions for struggling readers. It is organized into four categories aligned with information provided in adolescent literacy guidance documents previously developed by the Center on Instruction: Policy and Leadership, Assessment for Instruction, Academic Literacy in the Content Areas, and Interventions for Struggling Readers.

As this paper from the Center on Reinventing Public Education illustrates, urban districts are often large, hierarchical bureaucracies in which allocation processes are spread among different layers and executed by different players in the system. When district leaders fail to recognize the various micro-level allocation practices used to deploy millions (or in some cases billions) of dollars in their organization, they may not be aligning their resources with their intended strategies for reform. As this paper shows, resource allocation practices take on many different forms, each with different implications for various district strategies (abstract from CRPE).