Anna Foster

Youth Policy Lab is working with the Skillman Foundation to identify a set of leading indicators to assess progress toward systems-level change in Detroit's educational ecosystem. Many of the long-term outcomes the Skillman Foundation seeks to influence—including postsecondary success, student well-being, and broader educational attainment—may take many years or decades to shift. As a result, the foundation seeks to understand which intermediate indicators (i.e., those that may change within approximately 5 years) are meaningfully connected to longer-term educational outcomes and therefore, ar...

When early high-quality math instruction is aligned across grades, it can have a positive effect on children’s math skills, attitudes toward math, and working memory. However, evidence-based pre-K learning trajectories and instructional practices are not typically integrated into the curriculum for the early elementary grades. This lack of integration can have negative results: Children may encounter the same content more than once from pre-K to kindergarten through third grade. Conversely, the math instruction they receive may not cover the areas or progression of learning that research says ...