YS Publications

5 Ways Coaches Can Support Technology Integration

5 Ways Coaches Can Support Technology Integration is an article by D’Andre Weaver and Kasha Hayes from The Learning Professional. Like most tools, educational technology is only successful when people know how to use it well. Yet in a survey of schools across the U.S., half reported that the steep learning curve for teachers’ use of technology is a moderate or large challenge. Providing the right support on technology integration to educators is therefore critical to make the most of technology resources, including artificial intelligence, in schools. The Verizon Innovative Learning Schools program has learned over the last decade how to best prepare teachers to embrace and integrate technology, and it all comes back to human-centered professional learning. No matter how advanced AI becomes, nothing can replace person-to-person connections, especially in teaching and learning interactions. Thus, the greatest power is in having dedicated, experienced coaches work with educators to build their capacity to use technology efficiently and effectively.

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The 2023 Educator AI Report: Perceptions, Practices, and Potential

Imagine Learning, the largest provider of digital curriculum solutions in the U.S., serving 15 million students in more than half the school districts nationwide, produced this 2023 report, showcasing a comprehensive exploration of AI’s current and future role in K-12 classrooms. With Generative AI emerging as a pivotal element in the dynamic educational landscape of 2023, Imagine Learning conducted the survey to explore the perceptions, current practices, and future aspirations of educators who have already embraced technology in the classroom. One compelling finding coming out of the report is that a resounding 90% of educators surveyed believe that AI has the potential to make education more accessible. Increasingly, teachers are recognizing that when implemented ethically and with thoughtful consideration, AI can help students with special needs, learning disabilities, and language barriers, for example, and experience more effective, personalized learning methods.

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How Youth Surveys Guide Collective Community Investment and Planning Benefits of Using Youth Data

This 2024 report was prepared by Penn State College of Health and Human Development, Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, and supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. It opens by describing why and where youth surveys add value. It draws from lessons from six communities that introduced and implemented these surveys in schools under an Evidence2Success framework. The document closes by offering practical suggestions, advice and steps for adopting this approach and leveraging a survey’s findings. The end goal is to empower community leaders, residents, educators and program providers to systematically and strategically implement a survey and utilize its results to make better, smarter decisions about youth and family programs.

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In Search of the Magic Bullet; Results from the Building Audiences for Sustainability Initiative

Arts organizations found it’s possible to engage both new and current audiences, but it takes time and might not happen on their desired terms. That’s one of several key learnings in this 2024 report by Francie Ostrower, which reports findings from the nonprofit performing arts organizations that participated in Wallace’s Building Audiences for Sustainability (BAS) initiative from 2015 to 2019. The 25 organizations tested different approaches to building new audiences while keeping their current audiences engaged. Some focused on age groups, such as millennials or Gen-X; others looked at location and how they interacted with their community. Some worked to attract a more racially or ethnically diverse audience. A few sought to build audiences for new or less familiar works.

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Promoting Mental Health and Well-Being in Schools An Action Guide for School and District Leaders

Schools are prioritizing students’ mental health, and there are many tools and resources to choose from in addressing mental health challenges. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention created this 2024 action guide as a place to start. It can help school and district leaders build on what they are already doing to promote students’ mental health and find new strategies to fill in gaps. The action guide describes six in-school strategies that are proven to promote and support mental health and well-being. For each strategy, the guide also describes approaches, or specific ways to put the strategy into action, and examples of evidence-based policies, programs, and practices.

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Changing Course in Youth Detention: Reversing Widening Gaps by Race and Place

Changing Course in Youth Detention: Reversing Widening Gaps by Race and Place is a report prepared by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and published in August 2023. A main finding is that there are large and widening gaps in youth detention by race and place, based on a three-year analysis of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on juvenile justice systems. When it comes to the odds of being detained, young people in the United States live in different worlds, depending on their race and the region and jurisdiction where they reside. The disproportionate use of detention for Black youth — already distressingly high before the pandemic — has increased. Also, over that three-year period, where youth lived mattered to a greater extent to their odds of being detained than it did before.

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Creating Equitable Ecosystems of Belonging and Opportunity for Youth: An Action Guide for Cross-System and Sector Leaders and Practitioners

Creating Equitable Ecosystems of Belonging and Opportunity for Youth: An Action Guide for Cross-System and Sector Leaders and Practitioners is a 2023 guide created by The Forum for Youth Investment. It is designed to help public- and private-sector leaders build ecosystems that are better suited to help young people thrive. It is specifically intended to support coordinated initiatives where multiple youth-serving organizations or agencies are already working together. To generate this guide, The Forum convened a wide range of national thought leaders, practitioners and youth. The group fulfilled a two-part charge: 1) explore research-based concepts for supporting learning and development; and 2) create tools to help youth and adults put these concepts to use within their own environments. Once this work was complete, the Forum engaged more than 50 youth to both create a Youth Journey Map for Belonging and Opportunity and build an action guide for systems leaders on fostering youth well-being and belonging.

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The Youth Program Quality Improvement (YPQI) Approach: Implications for Policy and Practice Research

The Youth Program Quality Improvement (YPQI) Approach: Implications for Policy and Practice Research demonstrates that programs for young people have positive benefits including academic achievement, career exploration and development, and social, emotional and civic skills. However, many programs do not realize this potential – often due to the lack of coordination and support about how to assess and improve staff practices that create the conditions for young people to have high-quality experiences across settings. Evidence suggests that the predominant form of professional development—staff training without follow-up—rarely produces sustained change in practice. The Youth Program Quality Improvement (YPQI) approach offers a continuous improvement method that shifts the norms of traditional professional development – starting with assessment of staff practices aligned to a standard of quality, and then engaging in a multi-month cycle of planning and improvement. The Youth Program Quality Intervention Study was the first experimental investigation of a data-driven, continuous improvement approach in the afterschool field. The study explored whether the YPQI approach could improve the quality of youth experiences in afterschool programs. This brief focuses on the implications of the findings of that study – and the lessons learned from continued implementation of that approach over the last 15 years in communities across the country – for policy and practice.

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Voices Unveiled: A Qualitative Exploration of the Postsecondary Journey of Foster Youth in LA County

The co-conveners of the Los Angeles Opportunity Youth Collaborative (OYC), JBAY, Alliance for Children’s Rights and UNITE-LA, partnered with the Los Angeles Community College District to explore the LA College Promise (LACP). While LACP had demonstrated success among the general first-time college population, its success among foster youth was untested. The OYC utilized a human-centered design process to convene partners and gather extensive youth and stakeholder feedback to determine if the LACP was an effective approach for foster youth and to better understand the experience of foster youth transitioning into postsecondary education and the systems that serve them. This report highlights the finding from this qualitative research study and opportunities for policy and practice changes that could improve the postsecondary educational outcomes of youth in foster care.

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Centering Wellbeing: Advancing Social Emotional Learning for All

Centering Wellbeing: Advancing Social Emotional Learning for All is a report from Digital Promise by Christina A. Russell of Policy Studies Associates, Inc. It summarizes activities of the Working Group on Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and Learning Differences, launched in 2021 as an initiative of the Global Cities Education Network (GCEN). Fourteen school districts each worked to implement a unique action plan designed to strengthen SEL supports in their district, including for students with learning differences. Districts drew on expertise and resources shared in the working group and adapted the strategies to meet their needs. The learning centered on deep dives into two international school systems: a virtual site visit to Surrey Schools (British Columbia, Canada) and an in-person convening in Melbourne (Victoria, Australia). This report features four case studies and shares lessons learned and strategies implemented by the districts.

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Investigating the Causal Effects of Arts Education

Investigating the Causal Effects of Arts Education is an article by Daniel H. Bowen and Brian Kisida from the November 2022 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. It reports research that was focused on the causal relationship between arts learning and educational outcomes. Investigating these relationships has become imperative as policymakers increasingly prioritize empirical evidence of educational impacts, which often leads to curriculum narrowing that favors traditionally-tested subjects. Employing a randomized controlled trial with 42 elementary and middle schools in Houston, Texas, finding that randomly assigning arts educational opportunities reduces disciplinary infractions, improves writing achievement, and increases students’ emotional empathy.

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Partnering to Promote Equity and Digital Learning

This report describes a 15-month collaboration between three Every Learner Everywhere partner organizations (Achieving the Dream, the American Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and Digital Promise) and five colleges, all engaged in a research-practice partnership around enhancing equity and digital learning in gateway courses. The report describes the key features of research-practice partnerships, the design choices made for this one, partnership activities both within and across institutions, and data on student perceptions and academic performance in the target courses before and after these activities. The report was published in February 2023 and written by Korah Neisler, Julie Wilie and Barbara Means.

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Study of State Policies to Prohibit Aiding and Abetting Sexual Misconduct in Schools

This 2022 study for the US Department of Education was conducted by Policy Studies Associates, Magnolia Consulting and SRI International. It examined states’ development and implementation of laws and policies to prohibit aiding and abetting educator sexual misconduct in schools. The study also sought to describe the challenges states have encountered in implementing the requirements of Section 8546 and how they have addressed these challenges. The study addressed four main questions: 1. To what extent do states have laws, regulations, codes of ethics, and/or policies that prohibit assisting or aiding and abetting the employment of school staff, contractors, or agents who have engaged, or where there is probable cause to believe they have engaged, in sexual misconduct with a student or minor? 2. How did states develop laws, regulations, codes of ethics, and/or policies to address Section 8546? 3. How are SEAs implementing laws, regulations, codes of ethics, and/or policies that prohibit aiding and abetting? 4. What challenges have SEAs faced in implementing state laws or policies required under Section 8546?

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Developing Effective Principals: What Kind of Learning Matters?

Developing Effective Principals: What Kind of Learning Matters? synthesizes empirical research from 2000 to 2021 on principal preparation and development. It underscores the importance of improving the availability and quality of principal learning programs. Among other things, the authors find that high-quality pre-service preparation programs have common elements, including rigorous recruitment of program candidates, close partnerships with school districts, and a course of study in which candidates apply what they learn, guided by experienced mentors or coaches. Mentoring and coaching are also influential and valuable for current principals, along with collegial learning networks and applied learning, according to the report. Moreover, a specific focus on equity-oriented leadership has the potential to improve principals’ ability to meet the needs of diverse learners. The publication was published by Wallace Foundation, released in May 2022 and was written by Linda Darling-Hammond, Marjorie E. Wechsler, Stephanie Levin, Melanie Leung-Gagné and Steve Tozer.

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Study of State Policies to Prohibit Aiding and Abetting Sexual Misconduct in Schools

Study of State Policies to Prohibit Aiding and Abetting Sexual Misconduct in Schools by Anderson. L.M et al., published by Policy Studies Associates 2022. This study examined states’ development and implementation of laws and policies to prohibit aiding and abetting educator sexual misconduct in schools. The study also sought to describe the challenges states have encountered in implementing the requirements of Section 8546 and how they have addressed these challenges. It sought to understand how states are addressing implementation of the provisions in Section 8546, and addressed four main questions: (1) To what extent do states have laws, regulations, codes of ethics, and/or policies that prohibit assisting or aiding and abetting the employment of school staff, contractors, or agents who have engaged, or where there is probable cause to believe they have engaged, in sexual misconduct with a student or minor? (2) How did states develop laws, regulations, codes of ethics, and/or policies to address Section 8546 (3) How are SEAs implementing laws, regulations, codes of ethics, and/or policies that prohibit aiding and abetting? (4) What challenges have SEAs faced in implementing state laws or policies required under Section 8546.

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Deepening Science Engagement with Challenge Based Learning: Research Report

This 2020 report from Digital Promise by Emi Iwatani, Barbara Means, Maria R. Romero, and Mai Chou Vang reports on a project conducted during the 2018-19 school year. A total of 18 middle school teachers and five administrators from three U.S. school districts partnered with instructional coaches and learning sciences researchers from Digital Promise to address an ambitious educational challenge: How to deepen engagement and learning of middle school science in our schools and beyond. The overarching goals of the Challenge Based Science Learning Project, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, included producing high-quality open educational resources (OER) for middle school science, and understanding whether and how activities built around these resources can promote deeper learning in science classrooms. Digital Promise organized this collaborative effort and also provided formative evaluation and research support.

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Prevalence of Coaching and Approaches to Supporting The Valuable Role of Edtech Coaches during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A National Survey

This 2020 report by Mahsa Bakhshaei, John Seylar, Pati Ruiz, and Mai Chou Vang presents findings from a survey administered to instructional technology coaches in the United States. Survey results show that administratorsand, to a higher degree, teachers, valued the role of instructional technology coaches more during the pandemic than they did prior to school closures. By using their expertise in meaningful use of technology in teaching and learning, instructional technology coaches significantly facilitated the transition of their school and/or district community to online instruction. They supported administrators in designing useful learning continuity plans, teachers in minimizing teaching disruption, and families in fostering a home home environment that supports remote learning.

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Strong Principals, Strong Pipelines: A Guide for Leveraging Federal Sources to Fund Principal Pipelines

Strong Principals, Strong Pipelines: A Guide for Leveraging Federal Sources to Fund Principal Pipelines is designed to help districts identify federal funding for principal pipelines. It focuses on financing for “comprehensive, aligned principal pipelines,” that is, a set of coordinated (“aligned”) procedures and policies designed to cultivate and support effective school leaders across the range (“comprehensive”) of talent management activities under a district’s purview. Such pipelines have been shown by research to have benefits for student achievement. Written by Brenda Turnbull, Sean Worley and Scott Palmer, the December 2021 guide was published by Policy Studies Associates in association with Education Counsel.

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Stability and Change in Afterschool Systems, 2013-2020: A Follow-Up Study of Afterschool Coordination in Large Cities

This report from the National Institute for Work and Learning was published in March 2021, and was written by Linda Simkin, Ivan Charner, Caitlin Rose Dailey, Safal Khatri and, Sanskriti Thapa. It provides a follow-up to a 2012-2013 study, which found that 77 of 100 large U.S. cities were coordinating the work of out-of-school-time providers, government agencies, private funders, and others to provide high-quality afterschool programs to the children who stand to benefit most. The report provides a look at the state of afterschool coordination just prior to the unexpected and devastating closure of schools and afterschool programs in the spring of 2020 owing to the global pandemic. It focuses on three key components described in the research on afterschool coordination—a designated coordinating entity, a common data system, and a framework or set of standards for program quality.

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Early Lessons from Schools and Out-of-School Time Programs Implementing Social and Emotional Learning

Early Lessons from Schools and Out-of-School Time Programs Implementing Social and Emotional Learning suggests that districts and out-of-school-time programs implementing SEL consider: focusing on developing a set of social-emotional skills of both students and adults; defining those skills and planning the needed supports from school districts and OST intermediary organizations; developing a common language for SEL that can build shared understanding of the terminology among school and OST staffers; setting aside staff time for clear and frequent communication; and documenting and formalizing SEL routines and practices, such as protected time for SEL in the school/OST schedule, so they can survive staff turnover. The report covers how, in the first two years of the initiative, six communities (Boston, Dallas, Denver, Palm Beach County in Florida, Tacoma and Tulsa) have gone about incorporating social and emotional learning programs and practices into the school and OST parts of the day.

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Every Summer Counts: A Longitudinal Analysis of Outcomes from the National Summer Learning Project

Every Summer Counts: A Longitudinal Analysis of Outcomes from the National Summer Learning Project offers a full account of outcomes from the largest- and longest study of its kind on summer learning programs – following nearly 6,000 students in five urban school districts from the end of 3rd grade through the spring of 7th grade. The districts (Boston; Dallas; Duval County, Fla.; Pittsburgh; and Rochester, N.Y.) joined with local out-of-school time intermediaries and community partners to participate in Wallace’s National Summer Learning Project (NSLP), which launched in 2011 to understand the implementation and effectiveness of voluntary summer learning programs.

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Job Training for Youth With Justice Involvement: A Toolkit by the National Youth Employment Coalition

Job Training for Youth With Justice Involvement: A Toolkit by the National Youth Employment Coalition, was published in December 2020 with support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The publication is intended to foster meaningful collaboration between professionals in the federal workforce development system and the juvenile justice system.
It offers readers: 1) evidence-based practices in youth workforce development; 2) an overview of the workforce system funded under the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act; 3) advice on improving WIOA-funded services for youth with justice involvement at the local level; and 4) guidance on forming effective interagency partnerships.

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Changing the Principal Supervisor Role to Better Support Principals: Evidence from the Principal Supervisor Initiative

Changing the Principal Supervisor Role to Better Support Principals: Evidence from the Principal Supervisor Initiative, by researchers from Mathematica and Vanderbilt, explores the implementation and impact of the Principal Supervisor Initiative, a four-year, Wallace-supported venture launched in 2014 by six large districts to reshape the principal supervisor role. The report finds that by the initiative’s end the districts had succeeded in changing the job so that it centered on developing and evaluating principals in ways meant to help them promote high-quality teaching and learning in their schools. Principals reported increased frequency of supervisor practices to develop school leadership—such as providing them with useful feedback and working with them to assess teacher effectiveness. Principals also gave a more positive assessment than they had earlier of overall supervisor effectiveness. Changes in supervision did not have an impact on teachers’ perceptions of their principal’s performance. And although central offices made headway in adapting their operations to the new supervisor role—as indicated by improved principal and supervisor views of central office support—there was room for more progress on this front.

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Keeping Youth Out of the Deep End of the Juvenile Justice System

Keeping Youth Out of the Deep End of the Juvenile Justice System is a Developmental Evaluation Overview of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Deep-End Reform By Urban Institute. From 2013 to 2018, the Annie E. Casey Foundation funded a developmental evaluation of a deep-end reform initiative involving 12 juvenile justice jurisdictions across the United States. This initiative, which the Casey Foundation supported through funding and technical assistance, aimed to safely and significantly reduce out-of-home placements for youth, especially youth of color. The report presents three pillars of Casey’s approach to deep-end reform, five characteristics of jurisdictions that have successfully implemented deep-end reforms, activities that sites can pursue to reduce out-of-home placements and improve racial equity, the benefits and challenges involved for jurisdictions participating in deep-end work and advice on how to implement and sustain these reforms.

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Leading the Change: A Comparison of the Principal Supervisor Role in Principal Supervisor Initiative Districts and Other Urban Districts

Leading the Change: A Comparison of the Principal Supervisor Role in Principal Supervisor Initiative Districts and Other Urban Districts, by researchers from Vanderbilt University, the University of Utah, and Mathematica, is based on a survey conducted in concert with the Council of the Great City Schools. The study compares the supervisor role in 2018 in the six districts in the Wallace initiative with the role in 48 other large urban U.S. districts (all Council members) that were not part of the Wallace effort. The report notes that districts nationwide have been rethinking the supervisor role in light of such developments as the publication of national supervisor standards, which emphasize support of principals as instructional leaders. The researchers found that the initiative districts had a greater prevalence than non-initiative districts of a number of structures to support supervisors in their newly defined jobs, including role-specific training, mentoring for neophytes and a lower supervisor-to-principal ratio. Supervisors in initiative districts were also far more likely than their counterparts in other districts to report they were involved in deploying instructional support staff members to their schools, and they voiced more positive attitudes about their district’s approaches to evaluating both supervisors and principals. At the same time, the job practices of the two groups were similar in many ways, with supervisors in both initiative and non-initiative districts spending about the same amount of their working time (65 percent) interacting with principals.

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Trends in Principal Supervisor Leadership and Support: Results from Two Surveys of Principal Supervisors in America’s Great City Schools

Trends in Principal Supervisor Leadership and Support: Results from Two Surveys of Principal Supervisors in America’s Great City Schools, by the Council of the Great City Schools, offers indications that the supervisor role may have evolved in larger U.S. school districts as a whole in recent years to center more on helping principals support effective teaching. The authors compare responses to a survey that the Council fielded through its member districts in 2012 with the responses from supervisors in member districts in the 2018 Leading the Change survey. While supervisors in the 2012 group reported, on average, overseeing 24 principals, the 2018 group reported overseeing 16—a smaller “span of control” that is one of the hallmarks of changing the job from its traditional concentration on administration to a focus on work with principals to support effective instruction. Supervisors in the 2018 sample were also more likely than those in the 2012 sample to report carrying out such instructionally-focused activities with principals as visiting classrooms and discussing student performance data. At the same time, the 2018 survey found evidence that surveyed districts could do more to train supervisors and provide them with support from the central office. Less than half of the 2018 respondents reported, for example, that they had received professional development on key aspects of their jobs, such as identifying instructional quality in classroom observations.

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Building Impact: A Closer Look at Local Cross-Sector Collaborations for Education

Building Impact: A Closer Look at Local Cross-Sector Collaborations for Education is a report from a study by Teachers College, Columbia University and supported by the Wallace Foundation. It examines eight contemporary education collaborations across the country, from Providence, R.I. to Portland, Ore. Despite facing a number of challenges, the “current collaborations show promise for creating a new kind of venue to bring local partners together who often have not cooperated in the past and have even been in conflict,” the study’s authors say. “Importantly, most of the collaborations we studied seem to have helped calm often-contentious urban education politics and establish enough stability for partners to move forward.” For a copy, go to:

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Reentry to Foster Care: Identifying Candidates Under The Family First Act

Reentry to Foster Care: Identifying Candidates Under The Family First Act is a report by the Center for State Child Welfare. It examines the risks of children returning to foster care after discharge and seeks to help child welfare agencies identify kids who might benefit from evidence-based interventions available through the Family First Prevention Services Act. The report’s findings are based on a sample of more than 600,000 children in 20 states and covers a seven-year time frame —from 2003 to 2010. It includes all children who exited their first stay in care before age 18 and were either reunited or placed with guardians. To assess the risk of reentering foster care, researchers looked at three clusters of variables: child characteristics (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender and age); placement history (e.g., type and duration); and social context (e.g., socioeconomic disadvantage).

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Lessons from LEAP: Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential

This webinar was hosted by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, sharing data and lessons from the first phase of Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP)™, an effort to boost employment and educational opportunities for young people ages 15 to 25 who’ve experienced homelessness or been involved with public systems. On the webinar, Louisa Treskon, of nonprofit research firm MDRC, explored findings from an evaluation of LEAP’s 10 local partnerships, which have used two proven models — Jobs for America’s Graduates (JAG) and JFF’s Back on Track — to help participating youth succeed in school and at work. The session also featured Robin Graham, program director of South Bay Community Services, who shared lessons from her organization’s experiences implementing the Back on Track model in San Diego County, Calif., and a youth participant who discussed the elements of LEAP most important to him.

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Shaping Summertime Experiences

Shaping Summertime Experiences is a report from the National Academy of Sciences examining the state of the evidence on summer learning in America. The goal of the consensus study is to provide a path forward that is actionable for policy makers, funders, sectors, and agents involved in the environments and experiences of children and youth in summertime to improve the quality, effectiveness, and equity of their efforts. The Wallace and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations provided funding to create a Committee on Summertime Experiences and Child and Adolescent Education, Health and Safety, with experts in a number of fields. The committee reviewed the existing literature on summertime learning and gathered information and testimony from experts and stakeholders, summarized in the report.

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