LPI Blog

In addition to providing students and families with much-needed services and supports, well-implemented community schools can be a successful strategy for whole-school transformation. That's the finding of a recently released brief, Community Schools: An Evidence-Based Strategy for Equitable School Improvement, published jointly by the Learning Policy Institute and the National Education Policy Center. This LPI Blog post features a Q&A with the study authors, who detail their approach and findings, describe the four interdependent features of community schools, and discuss how well-implemented community schools can be used as a targeted and comprehensive intervention for school improvement under ESSA.

Around the country, school districts are struggling to attract and retain high-quality teachers. This blog, the latest in our series on Solving Teacher Shortages, discusses the effectiveness of service scholarships and forgivable loans at recruiting excellent educators. These programs can attract more diverse teacher candidates and—because they tend to recruit a more stable workforce—can reduce recruitment and training costs associated with turnover.

CTE helps prepare young people for success in both postsecondary education and a range of high-wage, high-skill careers and is a critical engine for our economy. Right now, however, our nation is facing a serious shortage of CTE teachers that undermines quality and limits course access. This blog details how reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act creates a vehicle to address shortages and strengthen CTE offerings.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia reported having shortages of special education teachers in the 2016–17 school year. As a result, school districts have filled those vacancies with underprepared teachers. Strategic investments in evidence-based programs can alleviate this perennial shortage. This blog highlights programs and state-level strategies to attract, prepare, and retain enough special education teachers to meet school and district needs.

The Union Public Schools district in Tulsa, Oklahoma shows what can be achieved when a public school system takes the time to invest in a culture of high expectations, recruit top-flight professionals, and develop ties between schools and the community. From kindergarten through high school students get a state-of-the-art science education in a district where more than one third of the students are Latino, many of them English language learners, and 70% receive free or reduced-price lunch.

As school districts around the country struggle to find enough qualified teachers to staff their classrooms, state policymakers are considering a range of budget and policy proposals to address immediate teacher shortages and build a sustainable, high-quality, and more diverse teacher workforce. This blog explores how states are tackling teacher shortages with targeted investments and evidence-based strategies.

Amidst news reports of teacher shortages throughout California, a small number of districts issued so-called March 15 notices to teachers, signaling a potential layoff in the next school year. How can we have layoffs in times of shortages? This blog, by LPI Executive Director Patrick Shields and Senior Writer Roberta Furger, puts the layoff news in perspective.

President Trump’s “skinny budget” proposal, calls for wide-ranging cuts in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), including the complete elimination of funding for Title II, Part A, the Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants program. Eliminating this section of the law, which supports educator learning and development, undermines the ability of states and districts to achieve ESSA’s ambitious goals for our schools and students.

California’s State Board of Education has an opportunity to leave behind one of the most unfair and problematic features of No Child Left Behind (NCLB): the way it calculates English learners’ progress for purposes of accountability. In doing so, however, the state will still need to address how it will focus on, understand, and support the nearly 1.4 million public students classified as English learners.

Since our November 8th election, educators across the country have been stunned by the increase in racial slurs, bullying, and graffiti featuring swastikas and hate speech on campuses, emulating what children saw and heard in the presidential campaign. While deeply disturbing, the explicitness and widespread public eruption of hate speech of all kinds gives us a direct opportunity to create a curriculum of civility and caring, and to unseat the tacit bigotry that is often under the surface in schools.