In Focus on the Wonder Years: Challenges Facing the American Middle School five authors, experts in education reform, 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.

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.

Research has shown that students skills and knowledge often deteriorate during the summer months, with low-income students facing the largest losses. School districts and summer programming providers can benefit from the lessons learned by other programs in terms of developing strategies to maximize program effectiveness and quality, student participation, and strategic partnerships and funding.

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.