Study Background: This study delves into the intricacies of policy implementation within diverse institutional contexts, focusing on a federal initiative aimed at increasing low-income students' participation in dual enrollment programs through Pell Grants. Despite the policy's equity-oriented intentions, the actual impact varied significantly…

In 2008, Maine implemented the Educational Opportunity Tax Credit (EOTC), a tax credit that repays up to $4,400 of student loan debt to filers who live in Maine, work in Maine, are paying towards their student debt, and who have an eligible degree. In 2019, Maine Revenue Services (MRS) provided 14,341 EOTC tax credits to 19,798 people, with annual…

Background/Context: The landscape of college remediation programs experienced significant shifts from prerequisite models to corequisite models in the past few years across the nation. The traditional prerequisite models required students placed below college level to pass a sequence of remedial courses before they could enroll in college-level…

Background: Promise scholarship programs are a quickly spreading policy tool in the free college movement. Despite their rapid spread, promise programs remain generally untested and there is even less information about how they are implemented. Focus of study: We study the implementation and effects of the nation's first randomized control trial…

Background/Context: Well-documented achievement gaps persist between members of disadvantaged social groups and their more advantaged peers (Domina et al., 2018; Harackiewicz et al., 2014; Musu-Gillette et al., 2017; Stoet & Geary, 2013). Certainly, systemic and structural factors explain most of these gaps; yet, there is another contributor…

Background: Retention of early-career teachers is a persistent problem in the United States, with 44% of teachers leaving the profession within five years nationally (Ingersoll et al., 2018). Similar trends are seen in Georgia as a whole (Henson et al., 2015), and among Atlanta Public Schools (2019). Retention of Black educators presents an even…

The City University of New York's (CUNY's) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) combines many of the ideas from a range of programs into a comprehensive model that requires students to attend school full-time, and provides supports and incentives for three years. ASAP's financial aid reforms, enhanced student services, and scheduling…

To address concerns about low graduation rates and a lack of workforce readiness, states and districts have been experimenting with different models of high school reform. One of the most popular models has been the Early College High School (ECHS) model, small schools that blur the line between high school and college. Since 2002, over 200 ECHSs…

Improving teacher effectiveness is a key strategy to ensure student readiness for college and careers and to address achievement gaps and persistent low performance. In response to the new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS-ELA) the National Writing Project (NWP) created a professional development (PD) program to support…

This study focuses on how the treatment effects of a teacher professional development initiative in science differed by school capacity. In other words, the authors are primarily concerned with treatment effect heterogeneity. As such, this paper complements ongoing evaluation of the average treatment effects of the initiative over time. The…

This study was designed to establish the efficacy of Teaching SMART (Teaching Science, Mathematics and Relevant Technologies); a science professional development program for teachers with students in grades 3 through 5. Teaching SMART promotes scientific inquiry and emphasizes the importance of equity, empowerment, exploration, and fun in the…