Across the country, charter schools now serve a diverse student body of 3.7 million students in nearly 8,000 charter schools and family demand for charter schools continues to grow. The Charter Schools Program (CSP) is the only source of federal funding that supports the growth of charter schools to meet this community need, but the CSP has been…

As our education systems continue to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic we urge the next administration to prioritize investing wisely in the future of our nation through federal programs and policies that support the nation's 50 million K-12 public school students. A comprehensive and significant investment in the education of our public school…

Using data from Rhode Island, and deploying a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design, this study capitalizes on a natural experiment in which schools, in accordance with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers, were sorted into performance categories based on a continuous performance measure. The lowest performing schools were then mandated to…

Using longitudinal data from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era, I applied regression techniques and found a positive association between school failure to reach "adequate yearly progress" in mathematics and subsequent changes in the quality of middle grades mathematics instruction in districts where district leaders adopted robust…

This report details the Network for Public Education's two month examination of the U.S. Department of Education's Charter Schools Program (CSP). Our investigation found a troubling pattern of insufficient applicant review, contradictions between information provided by applicants and available public data, the gifting of funds to schools with…

Twenty-first century education reform shifted the pursuit of public education from democratic principles to the pursuit of private interests for individual benefit. Reasoning from an applied behavior economic theoretical framework assumes consumers seeking economic benefits from their public schools will seek public schools with more resources.…

A growing body of research has been documenting the pivotal role that philanthropic funding plays in advancing state and local charter school reform. However, there is little understanding of the geographic flow of these funding patterns and the market, policy, and organizational conditions that have concentrated funding in some clusters of states…

The federal Race to the Top initiative signified a shift in American education policy whereby accountability efforts moved from the school to the teacher level. Using administrative data from Tennessee, we explore whether evaluation reforms differentially influenced mobility patterns for teachers of varying effectiveness. We find that the rollout…

This article examines school-level responses to subgroup accountability pressure through an ethnographic case study of a school cited for failing to make adequate yearly progress for student subgroups. Concerns about the calculations and measures used to derive the citation and reservations about acting on accountability data delegitimized the…

In recent years, the federal government has invested billions of dollars to reform chronically low-performing schools. To fulfill their federal Race to the Top grant agreement, Tennessee implemented three turnaround strategies that adhered to the federal restart and transformation models: (a) placed schools under the auspices of the Achievement…

This mixed-method multiple case study investigated nine elementary schools. Six "odds-beating schools," which serve relatively high numbers of economically disadvantaged children, achieved higher than predicted performance on state assessments when compared with three typically performing schools. The overarching research question…

For this study, we examined the constructs of time, student groupings, and professional staffing in schools and determined their significance in whether or not schools made Adequate Yearly Progress or were required mandatory improvement. We conducted a logistical regression analysis using a national data set, the School and Staffing Survey…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2002 emphasized holding schools accountable for student achievement and academic growth. Accountability was a continued focus as President Obama offered states Race to the Top funding if they included, among other changes, a focus on accountability and identifying low achieving schools. One Midwestern state…

In 2011, the USAID Education Strategy set forth an ambitious agenda to help solve one of the most pressing challenges facing developing countries: the lack of access to quality education for children and youth. Through this strategy, with a focus on measurable outcomes and ambitious targets, USAID transformed the conversation in the sector from…

This document is from a featured presentation at the 2018 annual conference of the Science Teachers Association of Texas (STAT). The public schools are a fundamental element of our democratic society, and they have been the pathway to opportunity and a better life for generations of Americans. But at present, the American public school system is…