Planning Tool for Family Engagement (Student Engagement and Attendance Center)

This tool is designed by Westat Insight (formerly Insight Policy Research) and American Institutes for Research to help state education agencies (SEAs), local education agencies (LEAs), and other educators work as a team to move toward practices with high authenticity for family engagement—practices that leverage relationships with families and seek to engage meaningfully with them. By using a continuous improvement process, teams at local, district, and state levels will collaboratively assess current family engagement practices, identify gaps, determine improvement practices that align with the components of authentic engagement, and prioritize practices to implement. Teams will then create an actionable…

Off to a Strong Start: The GRAD Partnership Year 1 Results

Year one of the GRAD Partnership’s implementation of student success systems, the next generation of early warning/on-track systems, occurred in the year following what many teachers and school leaders called the most challenging year of their career. Data from the first cohort of the GRAD Partnership schools indicates that student success systems were up to the challenge: Schools working with the GRAD Partnership to implement student success systems saw fewer course failures and reductions in chronic absenteeism. Read the research brief to learn more about the real, tangible, and meaningful ways student success system implementation benefitted students across the…

In School, Engaged, On-track? The Effect of the Pandemic on Student Attendance, Course Grades, and Grade Retention in North Carolina 

This study provides new evidence of the pandemic’s negative impact on student outcomes, highlighting its variable and disproportionate effects for historically marginalized groups, including Black and Hispanic students, EDS students, and ELL students. Results underscore the need for implementing tiered, targeted interventions to provide appropriate supports for students with different needs, as well as the imperative that administrators, policymakers, and researchers pay attention to the full distribution of student outcomes to ensure recovery reaches all students. 

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