Professional development (PD) for teachers is a ubiquitous feature of the American educational landscape. Yet we know little about how districts navigate the variation in teacher learning needs when designing and implementing district-wide PD programs. In this paper, we describe how the District of Columbia Public Schools implemented an ambitious…

Although research alliances (RAs) have long been seen as mutualistic and reciprocal, RAs face numerous obstacles navigating stakeholders' differing goals, incentives, and information. This longitudinal, comparative case study of two RAs uses principal-agent theory to analyze these interdependent challenges and their relationship to RA strategy and…

Over the past 15 years, we have seen an increase in the use of cluster randomized trials (CRTs) to test the efficacy of educational interventions. These studies are often designed with the goal of determining whether a program works, or answering the what works question. Recently, the goals of these studies expanded to include for whom and under…

Programs that improve teaching effectiveness represent a core strategy to improve student educational outcomes and close student achievement gaps. This article compiles empirical values of intraclass correlations for designing effective and efficient experimental studies evaluating the effects of these programs. The Early Childhood Longitudinal…

The growth of the public discourse on college completion and student debt has pushed policymakers and institutional leaders to implement a variety of policies aimed at incentivizing student completion. This article examines state-adopted excess credit hour (ECH) policies on student completion and median debt outcomes. Using a quasi-experimental…

Although multiple-measure teacher evaluation systems have gained popularity in the United States, few studies have examined their implementation or how they are shaped by organizational context. New Orleans provides a strategic case to examine the enactment of a state teacher evaluation policy in a highly decentralized setting with variation in…

In practice, teacher turnover appears to have negative effects on school quality as measured by student performance. However, some simulations suggest that turnover can instead have large positive effects under a policy regime in which low-performing teachers can be accurately identified and replaced with more effective teachers. This study…

One way in which financial aid is thought to promote college success is by minimizing the time students spend working. Yet, little research has examined if this intended first-order effect occurs, and results are mixed. We leverage a randomized experiment and find that students from low-income families in Wisconsin offered additional grant aid…

School reconstitution, a turnaround strategy that prescribes massive staffing turnover, is expected to result in more committed and capable school staff and innovative practices. However, little evidence supports this assumption. We use quasi-experimental designs to assess the impact of reconstitution on student achievement and teacher mobility,…

Despite federal and state laws and regulations that require states and local districts to provide English language learners (ELLs) with support services, prior research has indicated that ELLs are, in general, lagging behind non-ELLs in academic achievement. An unanswered question is whether the initial designation of students as ELL influences…

Much of the currently available evidence on the causal effects of public prekindergarten programs on school readiness outcomes comes from studies that use a regression-discontinuity design (RDD) with the age cutoff to enter a program in a given year as the basis for assignment to treatment and control conditions. Because the RDD has high internal…

Most of the students who set out to earn degrees in community colleges never do. Interventions that simplify the complex organizational structures of these schools are promising solutions to this problem. This article is the first to provide rigorous evidence of the effects of structured transfer programs, one such intervention. Leveraging the…

We report findings from a quasi-experimental evaluation of the recently implemented US$5,000 retention bonus program for effective teachers in Tennessee's Priority Schools. We estimate the impact of the program on teacher retention using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design by exploiting a discontinuity in the probability of treatment…

Changing placement policy may help to improve developmental education student outcomes in community colleges, but there is little understanding of the impacts of these reforms. We take advantage of heterogeneous placement policy in a large urban community college district in California to compare the effects of math remediation under different…

We study GO Centers, a college information program that is run by student peers and provides information about all aspects of the college-going process to academically prepared students on the margin of attending college. We use the semi-random rollout of the program along with detailed panel data on the universe of Texas public school students to…