Bui, Craig, and Imberman assessed the impact of gifted and talented programs on student achievement using regression discontinuity and random assignment to gifted magnet schools. In both analyses, they found minimal impact of the gifted and talented programs on student achievement. This commentary addresses two concerns associated with the study.…

In randomized controlled trials (RCTs) where the outcome is a student-level, study-collected test score, a particularly valuable piece of information is a study-collected baseline score from the same or similar test (a pre-test). Pre-test scores can be used to increase the precision of impact estimates, conduct subgroup analysis, and reduce bias…

The Board of Governors of California's Community College System, in executing California's Partnership for Excellence (PFE) Program, has recognized that the colleges operate within remarkably disparate social and economic environments, and that these differences include variation in factors that are likely to affect the performance of colleges on…