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School options have increased in Ohio and across the nation in recent decades. One prominent option is publicly funded scholarships (or "vouchers") that families can use to send their children to participating private schools. Today, over 75,000 Ohio students participate in one of the state's five voucher programs, the largest of which are known as EdChoice. Despite their growing popularity, critics have argued that expanding voucher programs harms traditional school districts. But are they right? Authored by Ohio State University professor Dr. Stéphane Lavertu, this report explores the impacts of Ohio's EdChoice program on school district enrollments, finances, and educational outcomes. The study includes detailed analyses of the state's "performance-based" EdChoice program that, as of 2021-22 provides vouchers to approximately 35,000 students as well as its "income-based" EdChoice program which serves approximately 20,000 low-income students.

In 2019, MDRC launched the Scaling Up College Completion Efforts for Student Success (SUCCESS) project to improve college completion rates for traditionally underserved students, such as students from low-income backgrounds and students of color, at community and broad-access colleges (those that have open or minimally selective admissions policies). The SUCCESS program integrates multiple evidence-based components proven in previous studies to help students stay enrolled and graduate. Relatively little is known about how to best serve adult learners and improve their graduation rates. This brief highlights the experiences of adult students 25 years or older in the SUCCESS program at four institutions and explores how SUCCESS supports adult learners and how it, and other programs, can do more. Namely, this research reveals that: (1) students found the SUCCESS coaching component particularly valuable in terms of keeping them accountable and providing resources; (2) the full-time enrollment requirement posed a challenge for balancing academic and personal responsibilities; (3) although students appreciated the financial incentive many still had unmet financial needs; and (4) beyond the SUCCESS components, students expressed they could benefit from additional flexibility, community-building opportunities, and support with technology. [The following additionally financially supported the SUCCESS demonstration: the Minnesota State System Office and the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services.]

Politically charged education issues roiled the 2022 races for seats on state boards of education, yet none of the boards flipped partisan control. However, majority parties expanded their representation on boards in Colorado, Kansas, and Utah so far. Of the 63 seats on the ballot for 12 state boards, 35 incumbent candidates were reelected. This policy update discusses elected state boards, the impact of governors' elections, elected state chiefs, ballot measures, and what is next.

Early Childhood Education (ECE) programs are an important investment in Ohio's youngest learners. Ohio has worked to increase the availability of high-quality early learning programs for preschool children by providing the Early Childhood Education grants. Funded programs deliver high-quality, comprehensive learning environments focused on healthy development and intellectual, social and emotional success. Research is clear: children who participate in high-quality early learning programs begin school better prepared for educational success. In Fiscal Year 2022 (July 1, 2021-June 30, 2022), 350 Early Childhood Education Grant-funded programs served 16,732 children because of the $72,608,000 investment in state funding. These grantees included public school districts, educational service centers, joint vocational schools, community schools, chartered nonpublic schools and community-based child care providers who earned 3-, 4- or 5-star ratings in Ohio's quality rating system, Step Up To Quality. [For the 2021 report, see ED619733.]

Among programs designed to reduce teen pregnancy, few evidence-based interventions specifically aim to reduce repeat pregnancies. Repeat pregnancies among adolescent mothers, however, are both prevalent and consequential. About one-sixth of births to adolescent mothers are repeat births. Compared to adolescent mothers with only one child, those with more than one face increased health risks and greater long-term difficulties related to educational and economic outcomes. Teen Options to Prevent Pregnancy (TOPP) is an 18-month multicomponent program to delay repeat teen pregnancy among adolescent mothers. Developed by staff from the OhioHealth hospital system and Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, TOPP features personalized contraceptive counseling by nurses trained in motivational interviewing (MI), along with access to a contraceptive clinic and transportation and social worker assistance. Beginning in 2011, Mathematica collaborated with staff from OhioHealth and the Nationwide Children's Hospital to conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of TOPP with 598 adolescent mothers with low incomes. Based on follow-up surveys conducted 6 and 18 months after study enrollment, as well as state birth records collected for up to 30 months after enrollment, this initial RCT found that TOPP significantly reduced the chances of study participants having a repeat pregnancy or subsequent birth, and increased their chances of using long-acting reversible contraception. This present study builds on these results by examining the longer-term impacts of TOPP on participants' educational outcomes. As mentioned above, repeat births among adolescent mothers are linked to greater difficulties in attending or completing school, which might hinder their ability to achieve economic self-sufficiency later in life. This study examines whether TOPP impacted mothers' enrollment and persistence in postsecondary education over a period of up to eight years after starting the program, using college enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse.

As required by 20 U.S.C. 1407 and 34 C.F.R. § 300.199, the Ohio Department of Education is identifying in writing to local educational agencies and the United States Department of Education the state-imposed special education rules, regulations, and policies adopted by the State Board of Education that are not required by Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA) or by Part B federal regulations. The updated rules include the state requirements and the federal Part B IDEA requirements that apply to the provision of special education and related services to children with disabilities by school districts, county boards of mental retardation and developmental disabilities, and other educational agencies. "Other educational agency" means a joint vocational school district; department; division; bureau; office; institution; board; commission; committee; authority; or other state or local agency, other than a school district or an agency administered by the Department of Developmental Disabilities, that provides or seeks to provide special education or related services to children with disabilities. This document summarizes the state-imposed rule requirements but does not identify the rule requirements that are based on the federal IDEA Part B requirements.

The COVID-19 pandemic drew new attention to the role of school boards in the U.S. In this paper, we examine school districts' choices of learning modality -- whether and when to offer in-person, virtual, or hybrid instruction -- over the course of the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The analysis takes advantage of granular weekly data on learning mode and COVID-19 cases for Ohio school districts. We show that districts respond on the margin to health risks: all else equal, a marginal increase in new cases reduces the probability that a district offers in-person instruction the next week. Moreover, this negative response is magnified when the district was in-person the prior week and attenuates in magnitude over the school year. These findings are consistent with districts learning from experience about the effect of in-person learning on disease transmission in schools. We also find evidence that districts are influenced by the decisions of their peers.

This case study outlines how the Montgomery County Education Service Center (MCESC), in partnership with JFF's Pathways to Prosperity Network team, has worked to address the mismatch between education and labor market from 2018-2022. It outlines the importance of leadership through the regional Business Advisory Council, highlights the process of documenting skills and competencies for key industries in the region, and describes the development of pathway models that outline key aspects of pathways including labor market information, postsecondary options, college and career preparation opportunities, and coursework. It demonstrates how the region has successfully moved from discrete one-off education and training programs to well-developed regional infrastructure that supports college and career pathways that benefit students, employers, and the regional economy.

Since districts are often competing with each other and other higher-paying professions for new hires, it is imperative to consider ways to better engage and appeal to candidates. For human resource (HR) professionals and administrators to improve their efforts, they need to know how to cultivate effective relationships with potential new hires. Relationship-based recruitment provides for more connection with a candidate than the typical application and interview process of recruiting and hiring. Through this "high-touch" recruitment process, districts build relationships with candidates before a job is posted so candidates can learn more about a district or particular school prior to applying. By establishing a relationship with potential applicants early in the recruitment process, district administrators and teachers also learn about the possible fit of the candidate. This brief was developed in collaboration with the Indiana Department of Education to outline best practices for cultivating relationships with potential new hires. It goes over relationship-based recruitment and what it looks like to have an ongoing relationship-based recruitment with potential new hires for districts.

At Zane State, guided pathways has served as a framework for bringing multiple changes together to support student success. The college has placed particular emphasis on helping students enter and stay on a program path by connecting them to faculty and advisors called success coaches from the start. A focus on early engagement and onboarding is central to several of the college's major reform efforts, including the adoption of case management advising and the redesign of the college's first-year experience (FYE) course and new student orientation. This case study examines that since implementing guided pathways reforms, Zane State has seen improvements in several key measures of student success. [For the full report, "Funding Guided Pathways Reforms at Small Colleges: Three Ohio Community Colleges Show How to Do It. Report," see ED623432.]

North Central State College provides a case study of how a small college can increase revenue by strategically realigning its existing staff resources for improving student retention and success, even in a period of stagnant enrollment. The college implemented a series of major reforms with the aim of improving student retention and completion on a substantial scale. The president and his leadership team recognized that to improve student outcomes without substantial new revenue, the college would have to better align its existing resources, especially its human resources, with a central focus on improving student retention and completion rates. The college expanded the roles of the success coaches, who help new students, and cross-trained them with staff in admissions, financial aid, and other front-end offices to better answer incoming students' questions. The college also redefined a student services position that had been vacated to add a success coach who works with dual enrollment students taking college courses in local high schools. [For the full report, "Funding Guided Pathways Reforms at Small Colleges: Three Ohio Community Colleges Show How to Do It. Report," see ED623432.]

When Vicky Wood came to Washington State Community College as president in 2017, the college was investing limited resources in efforts to improve student success. Dr. Wood brought on a new leadership team, which has engaged faculty and staff throughout the college in making substantial changes to organizational practice and culture with the goal of improving student recruitment, retention, learning, and success in employment and further education. These changes, which reflect guided pathways design principles and goals were implemented in three phases: (1) college leaders sought to strengthen advising and support for enrolled students; (2) the college sought to improve recruitment and onboarding of new students; and (3) the college is converting nearly all of its programs to be scheduled in eight-week terms to allow students to focus on a smaller number of courses at a time and give students with work and family obligations more flexibility to adapt their schedules. This case study examines the three phases and how it effects on student performance. [For the full report, "Funding Guided Pathways Reforms at Small Colleges: Three Ohio Community Colleges Show How to Do It. Report," see ED623432.]

Two years ago, Community College Research Center (CCRC) published a guide to help college leaders understand the costs involved in implementing guided pathways reforms. The guide was based on research at six community colleges, but only one of these was a smaller college. Small colleges lack economies of scale that can generate revenue to support investments in technology, staff training, and release time for staff to participate in reforms. And implementing guided pathways at small colleges means that many faculty and staff need to take on new roles to plan and manage the process. This report describes how small colleges can fund and sustain guided pathways reforms. It is based on activities at three small Ohio community colleges that have made large-scale changes in practice based on the guided pathways model over the past several years. These colleges--North Central State College, Washington State Community College, and Zane State College--have successfully implemented these reforms despite challenges, including declining enrollments, decreased tuition revenue, and a reliance on performance funding. All three colleges have made changes in practice that have enriched the experience in and out of the classroom for all students, not just targeted groups. College leaders credit these changes for improvements in rates of student progression and completion they have achieved. This report summarizes what changes in practice the colleges implemented at scale and how they are funding and sustaining these reforms. It is accompanied by case studies of each of the featured colleges, which provide more detail about their reforms, the effects of the reforms on student performance, and the strategies they used to fund their efforts: (1) North Central State College: Stabilizing Enrollment Through Strategic Realignment of Resources Struggling with declining enrollments after the Great Recession, North Central State implemented a series of major reforms with the aim of improving retention and completion on a substantial scale. These included embedding certificates in degree programs, redesigning advisor positions as success coaches who help entering students choose a program of study, creating new division liaison positions tasked with advising students in each of the college's three main academic areas, and recasting existing instructional design staff positions to focus on helping faculty teach online and evening classes (ED623434); (2) Washington State Community College: Improving Student Retention and Success Through Organizational Efficiencies and Alignment Since 2017, a new president and leadership team has engaged faculty and staff throughout Washington State in making substantial changes to organizational practice and culture with the goal of improving student recruitment, retention, learning, and success. These changes have been implemented in three phases: first, the college focused on strengthened advising and support for enrolled students; then it improved recruitment and onboarding of new students; in the current phase, the college is converting nearly all of its programs from 16-week terms to 8-week terms to allow students to focus on a smaller number of courses at a time and give students with work and family obligations more flexibility to adapt their schedules (ED623436); and (3) Zane State College: Weaving Projects and Budgets Together to Support Student Success Zane State has used grants and general operating funds for reassigning staff roles to implement a number of large-scale reforms without significant infusions of new money. The college has placed particular emphasis on helping students enter and stay on a program path by connecting them to success coaches from the start; redesigning the first-year experience course to promote student engagement; taking a holistic approach in the provision of academic, career, and financial advising to students; and removing structural barriers in program pathways (ED623438). [For the guide, "Funding Guided Pathways: A Guide for Community College Leaders. Report," see ED609234.]

Salaries are one of the most powerful policy levers states and school districts can use to attract qualified, effective, and diverse teachers. What role do states play in supporting strategic use of salaries? This report examines the state teacher compensation policies that influence districts' potential strategic use of teacher pay. It analyzes three types of state policies that aim to attain three purposes: (1) Differentiated pay: To attract teachers to traditionally hard-to-staff subjects or schools; (2) Performance pay: To reward high-performing teachers; and (3) Pay for prior work: To compensate teacher candidates for prior experience relevant to teaching. With the influx of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, some states have designed new or expanded already existing initiatives aimed to attract or retain teachers to hard-to-staff positions. The analysis in this report includes these state strategies, while acknowledging that they might only remain in place temporarily while ESSER funds remain available. [For the the second report in this three-part series, "State of the States 2021: Teacher Preparation Policy," see ED611532.]

The American Community Survey (ACS), a nationwide study collected continuously every year in every county in the United States, is designed to provide communities with reliable and timely demographic, social, economic, and housing data each year. These ACS estimates are not averages of monthly or annual values, but rather an aggregation of data collected over the five-year period. The data contained in this Chartbook describe how residents in the Appalachian Region were faring before and during the initial 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in March 2020. As such, these numbers do not measure the social and economic impact of the outbreak beyond 2020. As data from the pandemic and post-pandemic period are released in the coming years, these figures can serve as a point of comparison that ultimately can enable data users to better measure the pandemic's effect on Appalachia's social and economic dynamics. [For the 2015-2019 Chartbook, see ED613609.]

After a tumultuous reception, the Biden administration's regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) were finalized in July. Although the Administration backpedaled partway on issues related to community demand and racial integration, its final rules cracked down on so-called "for-profit charters," in line with the president's campaign promises. Soon, we'll learn whether any charters that contract with for-profit management companies received CSP start-up grants, and/or whether states that allow for-profit charters were penalized as a result. Technically, "for-profit charter schools" are non-profit organizations that contract out some or all of their operations or services to a for-profit organization--meaning the schools themselves are not for-profit. It's also very common for all public schools--both traditional and charter--to use for-profit vendors for a variety of services, from transportation and building maintenance to food service and student tutoring. This study uses administrative data from Ohio to explore whether a charter school's use of for-profit organizations impacts school quality. Specifically, it asks: (1) What makes a charter school "for-profit" vs. "nonprofit"? (2) How do for-profit and nonprofit charter schools spend resources differently? (3) How does the effectiveness of "for-profit" charters compare to the effectiveness of traditional public schools and "nonprofit" charters, in terms of academic and nonacademic outcomes? [Foreword written by Amber M. Northern and Michael J. Petrilli.]

Despite the growing popularity of WBL, the community college and workforce development fields need greater transparency and clarity on the design of these programs to broaden workforce pathways, ensure the transferability of exemplary program models, and support the advancement of equitable outcomes for all students, especially learners from historically underserved and underprivileged backgrounds. In this report, we highlight case studies of emerging program models across the United States to understand the motivation, goals, and design of paid WBL opportunities available at two-year colleges. This report outlines four recommendations for community college leaders and state policymakers. Findings from this study have important implications for state policymakers and college stakeholders in career services, academic advising, and workforce development.

Ohio policymakers have consistently voiced support for rigorous education standards and ensuring that all students have the knowledge and skills needed to succeed after high school. State leaders have a duty to step in when schools are falling far short of performance standards. Students receiving a substandard education are more likely to struggle in the job market, disengage from civic life, and suffer social isolation. But rather than trying to turn around entire districts--bureaucratic systems resistant to change--what if Ohio's policymakers focused instead on fixing individual "schools?" As a moral obligation and federal requirement, Ohio should continue working toward better outcomes in its lowest-performing schools. To increase the likelihood of success, policymakers need a well-structured improvement program. This report aims to provide an introduction. To be sure, it doesn't contain every answer about how the program functions in practice, nor is it a formal evaluation of effectiveness. Rather, it aims to offer useful baseline information, flag areas that merit further attention, and suggest ideas that could strengthen Ohio's program.

Approximately 450 community colleges nationally are part of formal statewide or national initiatives to implement guided pathways reforms to improve student success, and many other colleges are implementing guided pathways practices on their own. Because guided pathways is a whole-college reform--and because it takes several years to fully implement--it is challenging to evaluate. This paper presents a methodology for assessing the scale of adoption and estimating the causal effects of guided pathways within states and across colleges that have adopted the approach. To measure the scale of adoption of guided pathways practices, we will conduct institutional surveys and phone interviews with college leaders and examine the websites of every community college in Ohio, Tennessee, and Washington (70 institutions total). We plan to use these data to estimate each college's scale of adoption using a rubric with indicators for scale and timing. Drawing on strategies used in K-12 whole-school reform evaluations, we propose to examine pre-reform adoption trends and apply a single interrupted time series design to project what students' early outcomes would have been in the absence of guided pathways. We then propose to use a comparative interrupted time series design (which closely resembles a difference-in-differences approach) to exploit variation in the intensity of guided pathways practices and the timing of their adoption across colleges by comparing early student outcomes in colleges that have adopted guided pathways practices at scale and those that have not or those with a low scale of adoption. [This report was written with Hana Lahr.]

Background: The attraction and retention of female and minorities to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) related academic careers have been a concern for many years. Today, it is still unclear what are the needs of this STEM minority population to encourage them to pursue and be retained in academic career paths. Design/Method: In this study, senior undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral students and junior assistant professors were surveyed about topics that many studies have been reporting as essential for their success in academic careers. In this investigation, 123 attendees participated in surveys after a 1.5 day workshops held in three different institutions. The topics discussed and surveyed with the participants involved: Future Faculty Forum: What is Assistant Professorship?; Time management; Mastering the Science of College STEM Teaching; Culturally Responsive Teaching in STEM; Mentoring/career coaching; Graduate school 101; and Transitions: Being Proactive. Networking activities with the participants were also deployed, for example, round table and networking lunches (where all faculty and students in the college were invited to attend). Results: The results of the surveys showed that females and males participants had different opinions on which topic was the most beneficial for their careers. Overall, female and minority participants were more concerned about time management and mentoring; while male participants were more interested on the topic "What is Assistant Professorship?". Conclusions: This study indicates that different approaches are needed to attract and retain different genre and ethnicities in engineering and other STEM disciplines.