Catherine H. Augustine

In 2000, the MacArthur Foundation began the Window of Opportunity, a 20-year, $187 million philanthropic initiative intended to help preserve privately owned affordable rental housing. The authors of this report assess whether the initiative achieved its goals and identify lessons learned about effective preservation practices, as well as about the implementation of large-scale philanthropic initiatives generally.

Presents an overview of Phase I (2001-2004) of Qatar's bold K-12 education reform initiative, Education for a New Era, based on RAND's experiences in this ambitious, multi-participant effort. RAND examined Qatar's existing education system, recommended options for building a world-class system, and supported implementation of the chosen option, which is based on internationally benchmarked curriculum standards and parental choice of schools.

Young teens undergo multiple physical, social-emotional, and intellectual changes, which have been viewed as setting them apart from both younger and older students. The basic concept of a separate middle school was to better focus on and serve the special needs of children in their early teens. The question is whether middle schools, as currently designed and operated, are performing that function well. Or, as some have alleged, do they unintentionally encourage poor behavior, alienation, disengagement, and low achievement? This monograph is a comprehensive assessment of the American middle school. It presents observations on a variety of very real issues troubling social climates and associated behavioral problems, teachers who lack subject-matter expertise, and parents who seem uninvolved, among others. The authors offer ways of tackling these issues: reassessing the organization of grades K-12; specifically assisting the students most in need; finding ways to prevent disciplinary problems; working with proven professional-development models; helping parents understand the school's goals and methods and how they can help their children learn at home; and exploring how other countries promote the well-being of and provide positive school climates for students of comparable age to support academic achievement. Published by the RAND Corporation. Distributed to the trade by National Book Network."

Undertaken for the Department of Defense1s Office of the Chancellor for Education and Professional Development, this report addresses the need of organizations to exert influence in situations where they lack the hierarchical authority that would make such influence straightforward. It does so by presenting a three-stage framework that will help such organizations recognize and capitalize on the power-and-influence options available to them.

Program providers and funders who decide how best to invest limited resources to meet goals for children and youth in the summer are increasingly encouraged by policymakers to base their decisions on research evidence. This report, which provides a systematic review of the evidence supporting summer programs and descriptions of evidence-based programs, is intended to provide guidance regarding the effectiveness of summer interventions.

In 2011, The Wallace Foundation launched a project to expand summer program opportunities for students from low-income families in urban school districts. RAND researchers assessed program effectiveness. In this sixth report in a series, the authors consider how policy environments affect districts' attempts to scale and sustain quality summer programs, with the goal of helping program leaders navigate local, state, and federal policy contexts.

During the school year leading up to summer 2015, summer leaders in three cities made concerted efforts to integrate their summer learning programs into the core priorities and operations of the larger school district as a strategy to increase sustainability. This report examines these efforts and their impacts. The recommendations we provide should be useful to leaders of district-led summer programs and others who support sustaining them.

The Wallace Foundation s National Summer Learning Study, conducted by RAND and launched in 2011, offers the first assessment of district-run voluntary summer programs over the short and long run. This report, the second of five that will result from the study, looks at how summer programs affected student performance on math, reading, and social and emotional assessments in fall 2013."

RAND is conducting a longitudinal study that evaluates the effectiveness of voluntary summer learning programs in reducing summer learning loss, which contributes substantially to the achievement gap between low- and higher-income students. Based on evaluations of programs in six school districts, this second report in a series provides research-based advice for school district leaders as they create and strengthen summer programs.

This study documents actions of Wallace Foundation grantees to create more-cohesive policies and initiatives to improve instructional leadership in schools; describes how states and districts have worked together to forge such policies and initiatives; and examines the hypothesis that cohesive systems improve school leadership. Such efforts appear to be a promising approach to developing school principals engaged in improving instruction.

Initiatives to coordinate schools, cultural institutions, community-based organizations, foundations, and/or government agencies to promote access to arts education in and outside of schools have recently developed. This study looks at the collaboration efforts of six urban communities: how they started and evolved, the kinds of organizations involved, conditions that helped and that hindered coordination, and strategies used.It examines the efforts of six communities to improve arts education through coordination across multiple organizations, describing how the efforts unfolded and documenting the common and unique benefits and challenges of collaborative approaches.

Since the 1970s, Qatar has complemented in-country post-secondary education with scholarship programs and study-abroad opportunities, but the system may benefit from organization and other changes. This report summarizes the results of an evaluation of Qatar's scholarship system and describes proposed reforms drawn from comparative assessments of countries with similar characteristics and interviews with a wide-ranging group of stakeholders.

Looks at how Department of Defense (DoD) education, training, and development institutions are affected by the consolidation of DoD facilities and changes in governance structure. The Department of Defense (DoD) often improves its efficiency by consolidating facilities (mainly through base realignment and closure, or BRAC) and changing its governance structure. These shifts significantly affect the education, training, and development (ET&D) institutions that support DoD personnel, with such impact as relocation. With an eye toward the 2005 BRAC, RAND researchers look at four case studies of the 1990s and from them make recommendations for ET&D institutions that may be affected by future shifts in defense infrastructure. (PW)