Seizing Opportunity at the Top: How the U.S. Can Reach Every Student With an Excellent Teacher

Explains how to provide excellent teachers for every child every year by better identifying excellent teachers, removing policy barriers so they can teach more students for more pay, and catalyzing schools' and districts' will to put them in charge

School Finance Toolkit: How to Create a Community Guide to Your School District's Budget

If your community-based organization would like to launch a school finance initiative in your community, you can use this toolkit as a starting point. The toolkit walks through the major steps organizations have gone through in their own initiatives, offering advice and examples of tools you can adapt for your own use. The toolkit explores the major challenges organizations have faced in this work, and how they have addressed those challenges. And the toolkit points you toward other resources that can help you find and analyze information about school finance. This toolkit is not itself a primer on school finance. Except in passing, it does not explain how school funding works in school districts. You will have to obtain this kind of background information from other resources (some listed in this toolkit) and as you go along.The toolkit contains five major sections:Get Started. This section helps you set a mission for your school finance initiative, organize your people to get the job done, and find the resources to get the job done.Engage the Public. This section discusses strategies for engaging the public up-front, finding out what citizens want to know about school finance -- and why.Crunch the Numbers. This section addresses the nitty-gritty work of creating a community guide to the school budget, offering helpful tips on finding, analyzing, and presenting information effectively.Put the Numbers to Work. This section talks about ways you can use the information you have gathered as a catalyst for community-wide discussions of school finance and its impact on school quality.Resources. This section contains a variety of tools used by community-based organizations in their school finance initiatives, everything from town meeting agendas to focus group questions to budget analysis spreadsheets. This section also contains references to many sources of data about school finance, many of them just a mouse-click or toll-free call away

Encouraging Social Innovation Through Capital: Using Technology to Address Barriers

Outlines how technology can help foster a robust capital market for public education innovation by improving content, linking technology with face-to-face networks, and streamlining transactions. Suggests steps for government, foundations, and developers

3X for All: Extending the Reach of Education's Best

Proposes ways to extend the reach of the best teachers, who produce three times the learning gains that the least effective ones do, including focusing on instruction, managing multiple classrooms, and using technology. Looks at implementation challenges

Opportunity at the Top: How America's Best Teachers Could Close the Gaps, Raise the Bar, and Keep Our Nation Great

Analyzes the effect the best teachers have on low-performing students' learning gains, the potential for closing achievement gaps by expanding their impact, and strategies to identify and retain effective teachers by building an opportunity culture

How Should States Define Teacher Effectiveness?

Adapts slides from a presentation on defining a teacher's effectiveness based on student outcomes and teacher behaviors linked to outcomes, with rigorous and dynamic measurements that include deeper competencies, and extending the best teachers' reach

Florida Charter Schools: Hot and Humid with Passing Storms

This report examines the history of Florida's charter school initiative, results to date, and areas where the state can improve

Connecting Youth Through Multiple Pathways

Presents findings from a field scan of efforts to help vulnerable youth graduate from high school, what is working, what should be done, and what opportunities exist for Casey's involvement. Explores risk factors and alternative programs. Lists resources

Youth at High Risk of Disconnection

Updates the 2003 report "Connected by 25: Improving the Life Chances of the Country's Most Vulnerable 14-24 Year Olds" with demographic changes in disconnected and at-risk youth -- teens who are dropouts, mothers, in foster care, and/or incarcerated

A Road to Results: Results-Based Accountability in the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Education Program

Reviews a four-year pilot K-12 education project focused on results-based assessments of preparedness for children, families, and communities. Details how project results shaped the foundation's education program and grantmaking