The first comprehensive history of the Obama administration's evidence-based initiatives. From its earliest days, the Obama administration planned and enacted several initiatives to fund social programs based on rigorous evidence of success. Ron Haskins and Greg Margolis tell the story of six—spanning preschool and K-12 education, teen pregnancy, employment and training, health, and community-based programs. Readers will appreciate the fast-moving descriptions of the politics and policy debates that shaped these federal programs and the analysis of whether they will truly reshape federal social policy and greatly improve its impacts on the nation's social problems. Based on interviews with 134 individuals (including advocates, officials at the Office of Management and Budget and the Domestic Policy Council, Congressional staff, and officials in the federal agencies administering the initiatives) as well as Congressional and administration documents and news accounts, the authors examine each of the six initiatives in separate chapters. The story of each initiative includes a review of the social problem the initiative addresses; the genesis and enactment of the legislation that authorized the initiative; and the development of the procedures used by the administration to set the evidence standard and evaluation requirements—including the requirements for grant applications and awarding of grants.

Next Generation Evidence serves as a prequel to Show Me the Evidence: Obama's Fight for Rigor and Results in Social Policy by Ron Haskins and Greg Margolis. While Show Me the Evidence highlighted the importance of prioritizing funding for programs with evidence, Next Generation Evidence looks at how we can build the pipeline of evidence-producing programs. Evidence is remarkably powerful; it helps us understand the needs of communities, make decisions in times of change and scarcity, and build and do more of what works. However, practitioners face a number of structural and practical hurdles to building and using evidence. Traditional evaluation and research methods are often not timely, affordable, meaningful, or inclusive for helping practitioners make decisions to increase their impact for people and communities. Too often and for too long, evaluation was a thing done to practitioners and the communities they serve, relegating them to a passive role when they should be regarded as leaders of this work. Worse, their data and evidence has been used against them in disempowering thumbs-up, thumbs-down circumstances, rather than for learning and improvement that leads to impact. Next Generation Evidence features innovative thinking from leaders across policy, philanthropy, research, and practice. Together, these leaders lay out a vision for a stronger, more equitable data and evidence ecosystem that centers on the voices of people and communities most directly impacted by the problems we seek to solve. Throughout the book, case studies featuring practitioners at various stages in their evidence-building journey highlight concrete illustrations of how continuous evidence building can benefit organizations and outcomes for communities.

Radically reimagine our ways of being, learning, and doing Education can be transformed if we eradicate our fixation on big data like standardized test scores as the supreme measure of equity and learning. Instead of the focus being on "fixing" and "filling" academic gaps, we must envision and rebuild the system from the student up—with classrooms, schools and systems built around students’ brilliance, cultural wealth, and intellectual potential. Street data reminds us that what is measurable is not the same as what is valuable and that data can be humanizing, liberatory and healing. By breaking down street data fundamentals: what it is, how to gather it, and how it can complement other forms of data to guide a school or district’s equity journey, Safir and Dugan offer an actionable framework for school transformation. Written for educators and policymakers, this book · Offers fresh ideas and innovative tools to apply immediately · Provides an asset-based model to help educators look for what’s right in our students and communities instead of seeking what’s wrong · Explores a different application of data, from its capacity to help us diagnose root causes of inequity, to its potential to transform learning, and its power to reshape adult culture Now is the time to take an antiracist stance, interrogate our assumptions about knowledge, measurement, and what really matters when it comes to educating young people.

With the view that children are capable young scientists, authors encourage science teaching in ways that nurture students' curiosity about how the natural world works including research-based approaches to support all K-5 children constructing scientific explanations via talk and writing. Grounded in NSF-funded research, this book/DVD provides K-5 teachers with a framework for explanation (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) that they can use to organize everything from planning to instructional strategies and from scaffolds to assessment. Because the framework addresses not only having students learn scientific explanations but also construct them from evidence and evaluate them, it is considered to build upon the new NRC framework for K-12 science education, the national standards, and reform documents in science education, as well as national standards in literacy around argumentation and persuasion, including the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010).The chapters guide teachers step by step through presenting the framework for students, identifying opportunities to incorporate scientific explanation into lessons, providing curricular scaffolds (that fade over time) to support all students including ELLs and students with special needs, developing scientific explanation assessment tasks, and using the information from assessment tasks to inform instruction.

"This book is about the threats to education quality in the developing world that cannot be explained by lack of resources. It reviews the observed phenomenon of service delivery failures in public education: cases where programs and policies increase the inputs to education but do not produce effective services where it counts - in schools and classrooms. It documents what we know about the extent and costs of such failures across low and middle-income countries. And it further develops the conceptual model posited in the World Development Report 2004: that a root cause of low-quality and inequitable public services - not only in education - is the weak accountability of providers to both their supervisors and clients.The central focus of the book, however, is a new story. It is that developing countries are increasingly adopting innovative strategies to attack these problems. Drawing on new evidence from 22 rigorous impact evaluations across 11 developing countries, this book examines how three key strategies to strengthen accountability relationships in developing country school systems have affected school enrollment, completion and student learning. The book reviews the motivation and global context for education reforms aimed at strengthening provider accountability. It provides the rationally and synthesizes the evidence on the impacts of three key lines of reform: (1) policies that use the power of information to strengthen the ability of clients of education services (students and their parents) to hold providers accountable for results; (2) policies that promote school-based management?that is increase schools? autonomy to make key decisions and control resources, often empowering parents to play a larger role; (3) teacher incentives reforms that specifically aim at making teachers more accountable for results, either by making contract tenure dependent on performance, or offering performance-linked pay. The book summarizes the lessons learned, draws cautious conclusions about possible complementarities across different types of accountability-focused reforms if they are implemented in tandem, considers issues related to scaling up reform efforts and the political economy of reform, and suggests directions for future work."

Teaching your students to think like scientists starts here! Use this straightforward, easy-to-follow guide to give your students the scientific practice of critical thinking today's science standards require. Ready-to-implement strategies and activities help you effortlessly engage students in arguments about competing data sets, opposing scientific ideas, applying evidence to support specific claims, and more. Use these 24 activities drawn from the physical sciences, life sciences, and earth and space sciences to: Engage students in 8 NGSS science and engineering practices Establish rich, productive classroom discourse Extend and employ argumentation and modeling strategies Clarify the difference between argumentation and explanation Stanford University professor, Jonathan Osborne, co-author of The National Resource Council’s A Framework for K-12 Science Education—the basis for the Next Generation Science Standards—brings together a prominent author team that includes Brian M. Donovan (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study), J. Bryan Henderson (Arizona State University, Tempe), Anna C. MacPherson (American Museum of Natural History) and Andrew Wild (Stanford University Student) in this new, accessible book to help you teach your middle school students to think and argue like scientists!