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Partners to Lead (PtL) is a school leadership professional development (PD) project funded by a 5-year Education Innovation and Research grant and implemented by the DuPage, Illinois, Regional Office of Education (ROE) in 37 public elementary, middle, and high schools in four Illinois ROEs. The American Institutes for Research® (AIR®), the independent evaluator of PtL, has completed an implementation and impact study of the program. This final report summarizes the PtL program and AIR's evaluation methods; the extent to which PtL was implemented as designed; and findings on PtL's impact on student achievement, changes to principal effectiveness as measured by the Illinois 5Essentials Survey, and principal retention. All 37 schools recruited to participate in PtL remained in the program across all 3 years of the intervention, and principals generally expressed satisfaction with the components of PtL. However, analyses indicate that PtL did not have a statistically significant positive impact on principal leadership effectiveness, student achievement, or principal retention. From March 2020 through the end of the intervention, some PtL principals may have become somewhat disengaged from the full PtL PD and coaching due to competing professional and personal priorities resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have attenuated the impact of PtL. Nonetheless, students in intervention schools scored 0.104 standard deviation higher in math in spring of the final year of the intervention, and the p value for the estimated positive impact on student math achievement was 0.06.

We combine nanosecond laser shock compression with \emph{in-situ} picosecond X-ray diffraction to provide structural data on iron up to 275 GPa. We constrain the extent of hcp-liquid coexistence, the onset of total melt, and the structure within the liquid phase. Our results indicate that iron, under shock compression, melts completely by 258(8) GPa. A coordination number analysis indicates that iron is a simple liquid at these pressure-temperature conditions. We also perform texture analysis between the ambient body-centered-cubic (bcc) $\alpha$, and the hexagonal-closed-packed (hcp) high-pressure $\epsilon-$phase. We rule out the Rong-Dunlop orientation relationship (OR) between the $\alpha$ and $\epsilon-$phases. However, we cannot distinguish between three other closely related ORs: Burger's, Mao-Bassett-Takahashi, and Potter's OR. The solid-liquid coexistence region is constrained from a melt onset pressure of 225(3) GPa from previously published sound speed measurements and full melt (246.5(1.8)-258(8) GPa) from X-ray diffraction measurements, with an associated maximum latent heat of melting of 623 J/g. This value is lower than recently reported theoretical estimates and suggests that the contribution to the earth's geodynamo energy budget from heat release due to freezing of the inner core is smaller than previously thought. Melt pressures for these nanosecond shock experiments are consistent with gas gun shock experiments that last for microseconds, indicating that the melt transition occurs rapidly.

With the need to meet a set of higher accountability standards such as Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards and the AYP benchmarks of the NCLB Act, for example, school principals are faced with the knowledge that they play a vital role in school effectiveness as well as teacher retention, parent participation, and student behavior. As a result, it is important for principals to find ways to continually stay abreast of the best strategies for tackling day-to-day and long-term school issues such as acquiring and allocating resources, maintaining a clearly articulated vision that is focused on student learning, establishing trust and open lines of communication among faculty and staff, and, perhaps most importantly, providing instructional leadership. Two valuable strategies that can be used to identify areas of improvement for individual administrators are through the use of formative and summative assessments. Formative and summative assessments for administrators serve a multitude of purposes. These assessments should be used by school districts to evaluate and assess potential areas for improvement for individual school principals in order to target professional developmental needs, and they should be adaptable enough to take into account a principal's workplace contexts (e.g., urbanicity or poverty level). This paper presents a list of important points that both the district and the building-level principals should remember before embarking on the use of formative and summative assessment to improve leadership practices.

This descriptive study provides a snapshot of teacher evaluation policies across a demographically diverse sample of districts in the Midwest Region. It aims to lay the groundwork for further research and inform conversations about current policies at the local, district, and state levels. Specifically, this study examines district evaluation policy documents for evidence of 13 common teacher evaluation practices. In general, district policy documents were more apt to specify the processes involved in teacher evaluation (who conducts the evaluation, when, and how often) than they were to provide guidance for the content of the evaluation, the standards by which the evaluation would be conducted, or the use of the evaluation results. District policies also varied in how specific they were, though the tendency was to be less, rather than more, specific for the 13 evaluation practices examined. Two-thirds of the district teacher evaluation policy documents provided guidance for fewer than half of the 13 practices. No policies specified more than 10 evaluation practices, and nearly 16 percent reflected none of these practices. The most commonly referenced practice was how often evaluations are to be conducted (67 percent), followed by what evaluation tools are to be used (59 percent) and what methods are to be used (49 percent). The study also finds that Midwest Region districts evaluate teachers primarily to help decide whether to retain or release new teachers. School principals and administrators do most of the evaluations and, at the district's direction, focus on beginning teachers. Beginning teachers are typically evaluated two or more times a year, and experienced teachers just once every two or three years. Several other patterns emerge from the findings: (1) Many district policies distinguish between beginning and experienced teachers unsatisfactory evaluations; (2) Few policies spell out consequences for unsatisfactory evaluations; (3) Few districts reference using resources or guidance to support evaluations; (4) Most evaluations are summative reports used to support decisions about retaining teachers and granting tenure, rather than for professional development; (5) Few district policies require evaluators to be trained; (6) Vague terminology leaves evaluation policies open to interpretation; and (7) The specificity of policy and procedures varies across districts. The following are appended: (1) Methodology; (2) Study findings by research question; (3) Description of teacher evaluation study stratified random sample; (4) Summative teacher evaluation form; and (5) Formative teacher evaluation form. (Contains 10 tables, 2 boxes, and 1 note.) [This report was prepared for the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) by Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest administered by Learning Point Associates.]