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A governor's State of the State address is an opportunity to outline policy priorities, highlight past accomplishments and reflect on the condition of the state and country. In 2018, 17 governors are serving their last year in office, having reached the end of their term or deciding not to seek re-election. Many of them used their State of the State addresses to emphasize the importance of collegiality among policymakers. When governing bodies function well, the state and its citizens reap the benefits--a principal benefit being an education that prepares citizens for well-paying jobs. Each year, Education Commission of the States tracks, analyzes and identifies trends in education policy proposals featured in governors' State of the State addresses. To date, 44 governors have delivered their 2018 addresses. The top six education priorities across states are discussed in this report: (1) School Finance; (2) Workforce Development; (3) Postsecondary Affordability; (4) Career and Technical Education; (5) Teacher Quality; and (6) Early Learning.

Many educators choose to believe that learning to read and write is as natural as learning to listen and speak, even though scientifically based research does not support their belief. However, most educators (as well as the public) believe that most students must be taught mathematics to learn it. Moreover, there is a body of research evidence that attests to the positive relationship between students' mathematics achievement and their teachers' mathematics knowledge. Teachers who know more mathematics than their peers have students who learn more mathematics than their peers. Thus, state and federal officials, as well as the general public, are rightly concerned about the academic qualifications of those who teach mathematics (and science) in the public schools, especially since there has been a steady decline for decades in the number of mathematics and science majors or minors choosing secondary school teaching careers. There has also been a steady decline in the number of high-achieving women seeking to become elementary teachers or teachers of other subjects. About two decades ago, in an effort to ensure that their teachers had an adequate grasp of the field of their license before they began teaching, states began to require the passing of a subject matter licensure test for entry into the profession. Licensure tests--typically tests assessing the basic substantive knowledge needed for professional practice--are the major objective measure of quality control used by most professions for entry into the profession. By default, licensure tests have determined what new teachers in elementary, middle, and high school need to know in mathematics in order to teach the subject. They have also influenced how new teachers taught mathematics if they or other required tests contained pedagogical items. However, people lack a critical summary of the research on the content, value, and uses of teacher licensure tests. A small but growing number of studies have examined the content or value of teacher licensure tests and their relationship to student achievement. The purpose of this paper is to indicate what can be learned from these studies, especially those that examine the content or use of teacher tests assessing mathematics knowledge, and to highlight a number of questions that warrant research if these tests are to serve the same function that licensure tests serve other professions. Three appendices are included: (1) Topics for the Elementary, Middle, and High School Mathematics Licensure Tests in Massachusetts; (2) Pass Scores by Test Administration from May 2005-May 2006 on Three Mathematics Tests for Teacher Licensure in Massachusetts; and (3) License-Specific Evaluation Questions for Prospective Mathematics Teachers in Massachusetts. (Contains 1 footnote.)

The Tufts University Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) strives to improve STEM education through engineering and believes every student should have the chance to engineer. Situated in Massachusetts, the first state to adopt engineering education at all levels in public schools (Massachusetts DOE, 2001), the CEEO supports the belief that engineering education starts in kindergarten and continues to develop throughout their K-12 schooling. The authors also believe that at the core of K-12 engineering is the Engineering Design Process (EDP). The purpose of introducing students to the EDP is to teach students that engineering is about organizing thoughts to improve decision making for the purpose of developing high quality solutions and/or products to problems. Three key concepts in successful implementation of the EDP are: (1) students are engineers; (2) teachers need to listen to their students; and (3) classroom environments need to change to properly enable learning through the EDP. Recently, the authors worked with the Massachusetts State Department of Education to produce a revised engineering design document that describes a learning progression for the EDP from kindergarten through high school. This white paper describes the high school portion of that document geared toward the activities or skills they associate with the EDP as defined by the current Massachusetts curriculum frameworks. This depiction of the EDP implies a cyclical, stepwise process that is rarely the case in solving real-world engineering problems. Oftentimes the task requires some jumping around from step to step. By adopting this slightly adjusted paradigm, students will recognize that the EDP does not rely upon rigid thinking, but provokes creative and outside-the-box thinking. (Contains 1 figure.)

The Hancock school finance case put the adequacy doctrine to its strictest test yet, to see if even a national educational leader such as Massachusetts could be found in constitutional violation. The doctrine failed this test, as the court found in favor of the defendants due to the vigorous reform program since 1993. The court credited the state's steady educational progress, closing of funding gaps between rich and poor districts, and its strong program of accountability and standards. None of this is relevant under the adequacy doctrine, which posits a constitutional funding requirement tied to specified educational outcomes. The lessons of Hancock are that courts need not accept the adequacy doctrine as the constitutional standard, but the best strategy to head off judicial intervention is to adopt Massachusetts-type reforms. (Contains 10 figures and 66 footnotes.)

This report describes the use of Lead Turnaround Partners (LTPs) in the current School Improvement Grant (SIG) program and provides the results of document review, surveys, and interviews with eight State Education Agencies and seven Lead Turnaround Partner organizations. The study focuses on the implementation of the transformation and turnaround models under the SIG program during the 2010-2011 school year. The current marketplace of Lead Turnaround Partner (LTP) providers and the organizational structures of existing LTPs are explored. In addition, the communication strategies and the roles of various players involved in aspects of SIG implementation, including State Education Agencies (SEAs), Local Education Agencies (LEAs) and LTPs are discussed. Lessons learned and recommendations for improvement for each entity are summarized. Document review, surveys, and interviews were gathered/conducted from/with: Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, Tennessee, and Virginia. Document review, surveys, and interviews were gathered/conducted from/with the following LTPs: Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL), America's Choice, Cambridge Education, EdisonLearning, Learning Point Associates/AIR, Pearson School Achievement Services, and WestED. Based on the findings, this report offers recommendations for states; districts; the field; states, districts, and LTPs; and the U.S. Department of Education (USED) and states. An appendix provides LTP profiles.

The Center for Law and Education (CLE), a national advocacy organization with offices in Boston and Washington, D.C., strives to assist low-income students, parents, and advocates improve their public schools and work with their communities to fulfill every student's right to a high-quality education. In Massachusetts, CLE provides legal support and technical assistance to public interest and private "pro bono" counsel representing indigent students in education law related matters. Based upon its expertise in critical education issues and its lengthy history providing legal support on behalf of low-income students, CLE offers the comments in response to a number of issues included in the legislative charge of the Graduation and Dropout Prevention and Recovery Commission. These comments reflect CLE's core philosophy, underlying all its work, that the most effective way to address the dropout problem is to ensure that students receive the high-quality education to which they are entitled under law and that students not be deprived of an education as an administrative response to problematic behavior. (Contains 37 footnotes.)

A report of preliminary findings and analysis from student discussion groups held on 7 U.S. campuses in Fall 2008, as part of Project Information Literacy. Qualitative data from discussions with higher education students across the country suggest that conducting research is particularly challenging. Students' greatest challenges are related to their perceived inability to find desired materials. Students seek "contexts" as part of the research process. A preliminary typology of the research contexts is developed and introduced. Finding contexts for "backgrounding" topics and for figuring out how to traverse complex information landscapes may be the most difficult part of the research process. Our findings also suggest that students create effective methods for conducting research by using traditional methods, such as libraries, and self-taught, creative workarounds, such as "presearch" and Wikipedia, in different ways. Appended are: (1) Research Methods and Sampling; and (2) Purpose of Discussion Groups, Use of Data. (Contains 4 figures and 8 footnotes.)

In their 2004 State of the State speeches, the nation's governors cited many issues competing for their attention and their states' resources, including health care, education, crime, and security (Nodine 2004). Among the most compelling challenges were those related to economic development and the ability of a state's workforce to meet the needs of growing, high-wage industries. In response to these needs, states have been exploring a variety of strategies to increase economic vitality by building the educational and technical skills of the workforce. To support and fund these strategies, they have created a variety of policies, which have met with varying degrees of success. State officials might well look to their peers for new ideas about how to seek advantage and opportunity in an era of increased need and tight budgets. In this report, "Building Skills, Increasing Economic Vitality," the authors highlight some of the most promising and exciting developments in state workforce and skill development policy, particularly in four areas of policy innovation: (1) Redesigning financing for workforce development; (2) Strengthening Workforce Development/Economic Development Linkages; (3) Building the Capacity of New Labor Market Institutions; and (4) Expanding Community College Capacity. The states highlighted in this report (California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington) have enacted workforce development policies that are not only innovative but also have the potential to be replicated elsewhere. In this handbook for policymakers and practitioners, Jobs for the Future showcases the range of policies and approaches that states have taken and their successes in meeting ambitious goals. These approaches are not necessarily easy to implement; in fact, most states have faced significant challenges to moving ideas to adoption and implementation. What has pushed the policies along have been powerful drivers for change as well as creative solutions to making change possible. Case studies are appended.

Research examining the impact of arts education on workforce preparation has confirmed that programs incorporating the arts can be educational, developmentally rich, and cost-effective ways of providing students with the skills needed for productive participation in today's economy. Arts education has been shown to help students develop basic, higher-order thinking, and affective skills needed for workplace success. Studies have shown that young people who study the arts show heightened academic standing, a strong capacity for self-assessment, and a secure sense of their own ability to plan and work for a positive future. Studies of arts-based education programs for general, at-risk, and incarcerated youth populations in 10 states have documented their effectiveness and illustrated how schools can make strategic use of states' cultural resources. Governors seeking to take advantage of the arts as a workforce development strategy can take the following policy actions: (1) include arts education as an element of comprehensive education reform legislation; (2) encourage artists to participate in community development programs; (3) leverage the private sector's willingness to contribute to the arts by providing seed funding and starter grants to innovative arts-based education programs; and (4) facilitate collaboration between arts educators and juvenile detention centers to promote programs for detained youth. (Contains 27 endnotes.) (MN)

This paper offers a fresh perspective on fundamental issues in using official incorporation records to corroborate the identity of corporate entities by comparing two publicly-available sets of information, namely, business registry incorporation records and reference data from the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) system, with some focus on the monitoring function performed by LEI issuers as agents for LEI data users. Three modes of analysis are used to consider these issues, high-level analysis of LEI system data about U.S. entities with LEIs, interviews conducted with U.S. business registries, and entity-level comparisons of business registry and LEI records for entities with LEIs incorporated in the states of Ohio and Massachusetts. The fresh perspective provided here includes attention to key comparison issues such as truncation of Legal Names in official records; significant state-level variation in requirements to provide business address information in incorporation records or periodic reports; recognition that some key business register data may not be readily available or available only at a cost; whether in this context enhancements can be made to the expectations for, and disclosures by, LEI issuers in their monitoring role; and to what extent the high incidence of non-renewal of LEIs might play a role in the quality of LEI reference data. The paper develops measures of scope and degree for many key issues that can arise in using business registry information within an identity-corroboration context. The exceptional transparency of the LEI system allows for detailed comparisons that connect its data quality and value proposition with its sources and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]