Education is often depicted as one of the best ways out of poverty. At the same time, research over many decades finds that most educational outcomes are strongly correlated to poverty. It is not likely that these two themes are true at the same time. Either schools are windows of opportunity and help overcome or mitigate poverty and other…

Money matters in education, especially for students from families that are struggling financially. Increasing school funding not only leads to improved school completion rates and higher achievement in low-income school districts, but over the long-term it can increase educational attainment, wages, and family incomes for children from low-income…

This chapter offers an integrated review and discussion of the major advances in theory and practice in the area of literacy, with particular focus on the work since 2014 onward. For the purposes of this review, it approaches Literacy as the ability to read and write. For reading, the chapter highlights theoretical advances that expand the view of…

We know that opportunities exist in the United States, but if we hope to share these more equitably, we need to better understand the ways opportunities currently vary among individuals, families, states, and regions of the country. Using key measures of well-being (including poverty, income, employment, safety, and health) for each state, along…

We use data from the Stanford Education Data Archive to describe district-level trends in average academic achievement between 2009 and 2019. Although on average school districts' test scores improved very modestly (by about 0.001 standard deviations per year), there is significant variation among districts. Moreover, we find that average test…

In this article, the first of a two-part presentation, the author advocates for healthy communities, families, and schools, as well as for changes in housing patterns. Part Two will appear in the October 2019 issue of the Record.

Well over six decades after the Supreme Court declared "separate but equal" schools to be unconstitutional in "Brown v. Board of Education," schools remain heavily segregated by race and ethnicity. The lack of progress in integrating schools: (1) depresses education outcomes for black students; (2) widens performance gaps…

We develop a new framework for identifying at-risk students in public schools. Our framework has two fundamental advantages over "status quo" systems: (1) it is based on a clear definition of what it means for a student to be at risk and (2) it leverages states' rich administrative data systems to produce more informative risk measures.…

As the 2020-21 school year opens amid the COVID-19 pandemic's disruption, this third and final installment of Quality Counts 2020 delivers a data-driven portrait of the nation's school system along with A-F grades and rankings for each state on a wide range of academic, school finance, and socioeconomic indicators. This report also includes an…

This article explores the associations between the achievement of economically disadvantaged students and the presence of state policies that include student achievement in teacher evaluations. We looked at student achievement across all 50 states from 2007 through 2013. A simple comparison of states with and without the policy suggested that…

The purpose of this APA BEA Racial Disparities Task Force report is to examine the role of racism and bias on educational opportunity and achievement disparities experienced by children. Specifically, we seek to link racism explicitly to opportunity gaps by examining how racism operates on multiple levels. Using critical race theory,…

For the past three academic years, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted learning and the relationships between teachers, students, families, and communities that are at the heart of education. Even as school buildings reopened to in-person instruction, periodic quarantines, social distancing, and canceled events had a profound impact on students'…

In its 2019 report, "Beyond the Border: Family Separation in the Trump Era," UnidosUS demonstrates how the current trajectory of the nation's immigration policies is threatening the future of an entire generation of American children. This issue brief on Illinois is part of a series that builds on this analysis by exploring the stakes at…

The 35th edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's "KIDS COUNT"® Data Book examines the unprecedented declines in student math and reading proficiency brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on education. The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveals that between 2019 and 2022, fourth-grade reading…

In 2018, the United States continues to see wide and worrying achievement gaps among student groups, despite decades of programs and policies meant to narrow them. Many factors inside and outside the education system contribute to these gaps, but researchers have consistently shown that black, Hispanic, and low-income students tend to enter school…