Comprehensive Resource Library for Leading PreK-12 Education Systems Change

This toolkit emphasizes the importance of listening to communities to better understand their assets and needs, reflecting on opportunities to leverage community strengths and address gaps, and taking actionable steps to create meaningful change.

This blog focuses on highlighting the need to invest in high-quality data to better understand workforce characteristics, compensation, educator training, and related policies.

This blog describes four ways researchers are using AI to support education research and offers best practices.

This report details findings from one component of the Parent Aware evaluation focused on understanding the experiences and needs of families and early educators in Minnesota.

This toolkit is designed to be a resource that school staff can reference to support their work with Afghan refugee families. While most of the information in this toolkit is relevant to school staff across the United States, a few resources are specific to Pennsylvania.

This blog presents four strategies to to achieve a level of staff wellness, informed by research on school employee wellness, health equity, and implementation science.

This brief provides the background and context for the Parent Aware evaluation and our guiding questions for the evaluation.

This guide summarizes information on 25 survey questionnaires, assessment tools, and other data collection tools that out-of-school time (OST) practitioners and researchers can use to assess outcomes for program participants

This practice guide focuses on the transformative potential of partnerships between community organizations and schools.

This blog draws on lessons from a recent Child Trends study on the capabilities of AI systems to propose stronger guidance and regulations to ensure rigorous assessment of potential harm by AI systems in contexts involving children and families.

This practice guide focuses on practical measurement of school practices and programs and how it can be used to transform school systems.

This blog focues focuses on building relationships with key K-12 education stakeholders, including students, teachers, families, and school staff.

This toolkit provides providers and administrators will the knowledge to support the design and delivery of high-quality family planning care and programming to youth in school-based settings.

This Child Trends brief details a study to explore how shifting Medicaid policies have influenced access to school-based health services.

This toolkit is intended to benefit educators, administrators, and community members interested in creating safer, more supportive, and more equitable learning environments at their schools.

This instrument helps recipients of Title IV, Part A funds conduct a comprehensive needs assessment to prioritize programming and activity selection.

This infographic provides information about high school stressors and the ways supportive adults can alleviate them.

This tool is designed to assist organizations serving middle school– and high school–aged youth in reflecting on their current integration of traumainformed practices and youth-adult partnerships into organizational and programmatic decision-making.

This brief summarizes the research evidence on how high-quality ECE benefits all young children, as well as key subgroups, such as children who are dual language learners and children with disabilities.

This interactive tool allows users to browse 10 years of research—published from 2012 to 2022—on the effects of protective community resources (PCRs) on children and youth from birth to age 24

This toolkit organizes research-based information and practical tools in a user-friendly format that school systems can use to develop and implement a plan to advance the wellness of all school employees.

This video features co-researchers discussing how equity and shared decision-making impacted families’ lives, thereby helping families and communities recognize their own power to overcome challenges related to trust and language barriers.

This brief provides guidance on how to compile needs assessment data, distribute funds, or deliver training and technical assistance to maximize impact on schools and support equitable student outcomes. This resource is designed specifically with Title IV, Part A in mind, however, much of the content and best practices are applicable to any state education leaders working to facilitate meaningful, positive impacts on schools and student outcomes.

This resource shares guidance with state coordinators on application of the the Title IV, Part A statute that discuss science, technology, engineering and math. Specifically, the resource offers indicators, examples, and considerations for effective STEM with an emphasis on equity.

This brief focuses on how Title IV, Part A state coordinators or other leaders can think critically about the content and value of state-sponsored professional development (PD). The brief includes guidance on comprehensive planning for PD as well as PD opportunities related to recruitment and certification of qualified teachers.

This information sheet is intended to help school leaders read and interpret education research. Its content includes how to access and read education research, essential questions to answer when reading research, and tips for sharing helpful research.

This guide discusses the benefits of engaging stakeholders to support school programming, provides examples of methods of engagement, and suggests various indicators of successful stakeholder relationships.

This resource describes some of the benefits of self-assessment and contains a tool that state education agencies can use to assess their own performance while working to meet Title IV, Part A requirements.

This resource guide helps state education agencies and local education agencies select evidence-based programs, providing a starting point for identifying and selecting interventions, curricula, and other resources with a credible research base. While developed initially to meet the requirements outlined as part of the Title IV, Part A statute, this resource may be useful to a broader audience.

This information sheet explores ways to use Title IV, Part A funds to support new and innovative programming and services in schools. State and local education agencies can engage in the cycle of innovation and sustainability to generate, implement, and sustain effective programs and activities, both generally and as supported by statute.

This information sheet describes the process of, and best practices for, identifying, selecting, and implementing evidence-based practices and programs in schools. Title IV, Part A State coordinators can use the tools and resources included in this information sheet to guide and work alongside local education agencies that want to use EBPs in their work.

This information sheet highlights the value of focusing on mental health in schools, with an emphasis on leveraging technology. It highlights practical recommendations Title IV-A State coordinators can share with local education agencies to support their efforts to promote mental health strategies and skills, including links to resources LEAs and school staff may find useful for planning and implementation.

This resource provides state education agencies with information about delivering education through distance learning for all students by creating and expanding access to educational opportunities. Specifically, this resource discusses considerations for ensuring that a diverse curriculum is made available to students and how it may be adapted for a distance learning environment.

This resource is an operational guide for state coordinators as they explore strategies and approaches to providing training and technical assistance for local education agencies in their states. The recommendations and resources here can be applied broadly to T/TA across Title IV, Part A topic areas

This information sheet supports Title IV, Part A State coordinators in helping a local education agency address school mental health support and services.

The Framework for Coherent AI Use in K–12 Education is a practical tool designed to help education leaders align AI tools with their district’s technology standards, curriculum, pedagogy, and implementation conditions to ensure AI strengthens teaching and learning.

This practice guide outlines how school leaders can use need sensing—a relationship-centered, improvement science strategy—to gather stakeholder insights, identify system challenges, and drive sustainable school transformation.

This practice guide provides school leaders, practitioners, and researchers with practical steps and tools for using evaluations to improve programs, practices, and outcomes in K-12 school systems.

This instrument is designed to help education leaders and teams go through the process of creating a survey using existing survey items and measures that address their needs and hoped learnings.

This toolkit is designed to help school districts and their leaders develop, implement, and maintain a comprehensive data inventory.

This instrument supports effective continuous improvement practices in schools and districts by helping school teams determine the degree to which they are guided by shared beliefs, mission, vision, and values.

This toolkit helps educators use qualitative data to transform schools to better serve students, families, and communities.

In this blog, Child Trends’ education team has identified three critical reasons why districts must develop and refine policies to successfully integrate AI into STEM education.

This brief examines how healthy schools may help address racial inequities across five key areas: health systems, public education, juvenile justice, environmental conditions, and family income.

This brief highlights six areas of education inequity linked to health and well-being that healthy schools are well-positioned to dismantle: chronic absenteeism, school violence, school discipline, special education, school infrastructure, and school staffing. For each inequity, we provide specific recommendations for education leaders and their health partners that align with the goal of creating healthy schools.

This resource guide describes the benefits and key components of youth-adult partnerships in adolescent pregnancy prevention programming. The resource guide also shares examples of successful youth-adult partnerships and provides tips and best practices for coordinating a youth-adult partnership.

This resource guide encourages educators to shift the focus of adolescent pregnancy prevention programs from individual behavior to a broader understanding of the many factors that influence health outcomes, taking both an individual- and a population-level approach. Using the social-ecological model can help achieve better health outcomes for youth, including marginalized or vulnerable populations.

This resource focuses on sharing some considerations for using peer mentorship within adolescent pregnancy prevention programming. It provides examples of peer mentoring and what makes a successful mentoring relationship.

This webinar focuses on trauma-informed approaches and explores how youth-adult partnerships can be used as a strategy to strengthen sexual risk avoidance education programming to address the effects of community violence and other trauma on youth. The webinar reviewed effective practices for integrating trauma-informed approaches and youth-adult partnerships, shared practical examples, introduced a tool for organizations to self-assess the integration of trauma-informed approaches and youth–adult partnerships in their programming, and gave attendees an opportunity to work with the tool, discuss it, and ask questions.

This webinar provides tools and information on using an empowerment framework to engage and educate youth in sexual risk avoidance education programming. They provided an overview of what an empowerment framework is, highlighting its connection to agency, autonomy, and positive youth development.

This podcast conversation focuses on mental health challenges youth face, the landscape of mental health care services, and strengths-based approaches to support youth resilience by creating spaces where youth can thrive.

This podcast conversation focuses on current trends around availability and access to substances and opportunities to address these concerns within programming. During adolescence, risk-taking is a normative part of development.

This podcast conversation focuses on creating trauma-informed spaces that are safe and supportive for all young people. It is especially important for practitioners to think about how their organization and program implementation can be trauma-informed.

This instrument is a step by step process for how to create a visual map of the problem you are trying to tackle. This process will help your team generate a shared understanding of the causes and sub-causes of the problem focus area, thereby creating a smaller, more targeted focus as you begin to think about the best places to seed improvement work.

This instrument is walks teams through empathy mapping, which is a two step process. These steps include: First, members of the improvement team each choosing one of the approaches listed below to collect more data about the problem focus area that the team is investigating. After collecting data using one of the approaches, members meet together to combine their findings in an empathy map.

This instrument is a set of cards that are intended to support the day-to-day work of systemic change to advance equity. They represent mindsets that are crucial to equitable change but are often missing from generic improvement models.

The Student Voice Toolkit is a comprehensive, research-based resource that defines student voice, illustrates what it looks like in classrooms and schools, offers practical tools and self‑assessment rubrics for readiness and implementation, and provides measures to evaluate its impact on student engagement and outcomes.