Teach For America is an organization that aims to address educational inequity in part through a program of training and placing teachers in U.S. K-12 public schools that have the highest proportions of high-poverty students. In this report, the authors quantify the impacts of Teach For America Indianapolis (TFA Indy) on student and school outcomes in the Indianapolis area. They evaluate the effectiveness, retention, and career trajectories of TFA Indy teachers who work within the Indianapolis area, with comparisons made to other teachers hired during the same period. In additional subgroup analyses, the authors identify differential patterns of TFA Indy teacher retention, promotion, and career progression as a function of whether teachers are White versus non-White.

Standards-based reform is a key feature of U.S. education policy. Several decades ago, scholars posited that if states set ambitious standards and then aligned curriculum, assessments, and professional development (PD) to those standards, teaching and learning would improve. However, the focus on establishing standards has often overshadowed the important idea that standards are effective only if the other inputs in an instructional system (e.g., curriculum, assessments, PD) are in alignment with those standards and coherent with each other. Without that alignment and coherence, teachers may perceive different messages about what to teach and how to teach it. At worst, those messages can conflict, leading to both fragmented instruction and reduced learning opportunities. In this report, researchers aim to contribute to evidence on the extent to which an instructional system is coherent and provides consistent and clear messages to teachers about instruction, including messages about how to address the learning needs of traditionally underserved students. The research team uses survey responses from a nationally representative sample of public school kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) English language arts and mathematics teachers to present a portrait of instructional system coherence in schools across the country during the 2021-2022 school year.

The Department of the Air Force (DAF) has placed a strategic focus on improving talent management, including how to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce. To support the DAF's efforts, in fiscal year 2021, the RAND Corporation's Project AIR FORCE was asked to (1) provide targeted benchmarks and a planning tool that will allow DAF to evaluate the demographic composition of the active-duty workforce overall and functional areas within this workforce and (2) identify practices and opportunities that the DAF can use to support diversity in critical career fields. This report is one of a series of reports meant to address these tasks. In it, the authors describe the construction of career field benchmarks using near-equivalent groups of civilian workers, provide examples using several functional areas, and discuss considerations for interpreting these results. Accompanying this narrative are the Air Force Occupational Diversity Benchmarking Workbooks, a pair of Excel workbooks (one for enlisted personnel and one for officers) containing benchmarks for the demographic distribution of DAF functional areas. The benchmarks are created using civilians working in near-equivalent occupations to DAF occupations, adjusted to account for differences in age and education level between DAF and the civilian workforce. The workbooks contain a menu of benchmark options using both narrow and broad definitions of near equivalent. Each DAF occupation can also be compared to the entire civilian workforce. The authors describe considerations for choosing the most-appropriate civilian comparison group for each occupation and for interpreting comparisons.

The U.S. Department of the Air Force has historically used a simple approach to allocate goals to recruiting groups, proportionally assigning goals to each based on its five-year production average. However, many factors influence whether the U.S. Department of the Air Force can successfully produce contracts; therefore, the same factors that influence contract production should be considered during the goal-setting process. This Perspective compares and contrasts the current process with a more comprehensive model-based goaling process that accounts for factors influencing contract production.

The job of the school principal has become much more complex and demanding over the past several decades. Many university-based principal preparation programs-which prepare the majority of school principals-have struggled with how to make the fundamental changes needed to prepare principals for today's schools. To test a path forward, The Wallace Foundation provided grants to seven universities and their partners to redesign their principal preparation programs in line with research-supported practices. This report shares findings from the RAND Corporation's five-year study of The Wallace Foundation's University Principal Preparation Initiative (UPPI). Under UPPI, each team developed a clear and ambitious vision for its program. Overall, the changes the teams enacted ensured that the programs were more rigorous, coherent, and authentically connected to the work of on-the-ground school leaders. Throughout the initiative, the teams balanced common objectives and structure with flexibility for their specific context and changing conditions. This report illustrates that it is feasible for universities-in partnership with high-need districts, state agencies, and with the support of mentor programs that have engaged in successful redesign-to improve principal preparation programs to reflect the best available evidence.

This report documents the Integrated Recruiting Resource Model (iRRM), which predicts contract and accession production for both the Regular Army and U.S. Army Reserve and provides optimal resource allocation recommendations for both components. The goal of the iRRM is to help the Army determine the most productive allocation of resources and use of policy levers under the Army's control in response to changes outside the Army's control.

Support from teachers is vital to the success of all students, but especially for students with unique learning profiles (ULPs). Therefore, the need to understand teacher support systems is particularly acute for teachers who work in schools with high rates of ULP students. Prior research has suggested that support from colleagues and experts, strong instructional leadership from principals, and positive school culture, as well as professional development and peer feedback, are key to these teachers' performance, job satisfaction, and career longevity. However, the nationwide prevalence of supports related to planning time and materials specifically geared to the needs of ULP students is much less clear, as is understanding of disparities in support access between teachers in schools with high versus low levels of student poverty. This Data Note uses data from the RAND Corporation's web-based American Educator Panel surveys to provide general insights into teachers' perceptions of the supports available for helping ULP students.

Teachers' use of student data to inform instruction is commonly accepted as sound educational practice, and this data use is only likely to grow as more data, as well as more-complex data, become increasingly available to educators. However, numerous studies reveal inconsistent data use among teachers and an overall lack of the preparation and skills needed to interpret and use student data to inform instructional practice. To effectively use a variety of student data, including - but not limited to - assessment data, teachers must possess both assessment literacy (the ability to design, select, interpret,and use assessment results appropriate for educational decisions) and data literacy (the ability to understand and use data to inform decisions). Research shows that teachers' sense of self-efficacy in interpreting and using data is linked to their actual use of data; professional development supports can help build this self-efficacy and increase data use. Results from the RAND Corporation's web-based American Educator Panels (AEP) survey provide insight into teachers' access to data and the supports they receive to use those data.

The Department of the Air Force (DAF) has prioritized growing and maintaining a diverse workforce across all pay grades. Because most positions are filled by promoting from within, having a diverse pool of candidates at the point of accession is critical to accomplishing the DAF's goal. However, a large segment of the U.S. population is not eligible to enlist as an airman or to be commissioned as an officer, and eligibility criteria affect women and racial and ethnic minority candidates differently than they affect White men. Understanding the population that meets the eligibility requirements to enlist in the military or to be admitted to the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) or the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) or Officer Training School (OTS) is crucial to determining the potential demographic makeup of DAF accessions and, ultimately, all DAF personnel. In this report, the authors create benchmarks for comparison with the DAF's accession cohorts by estimating the fraction of the eligible (and propensed) population, using ten mutually exclusive categories of gender and race and ethnicity. The benchmarks provide a measure of progress on diversity and inclusion in the force and a comparison to clearly identify whether a demographic's overrepresentation or underrepresentation can be attributed to specific eligibility standards or propensity to serve, or both.