Dr. Cory Meals, Assistant Professor of Music Education at the University of Houston, was the 2025 featured presenter for the Graduate Research Forum at the Ohio Music Education Association (OMEA) Professional Development Conference. Dr. Meals presented two studies highlighting composer diversity in secondary ensemble lists. Analyses revealed an…

2024 marked another year of considerable legislative progress by charter school supporters across the country. Advocates notched significant policy wins from coast to coast, including in red, blue, and purple states. This report provides highlights from this year's state legislative activity across the country, organized into the following…

In 1906, the Carnegie unit, or credit hour, was introduced to standardize U.S. public education. It defined the precise number of minutes students needed to learn a particular subject and the number of credit hours required to earn a high school or college degree. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Carnegie unit served the important purpose of…

Student attendance declined during the COVID-19 pandemic and has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. There is little evidence explaining the decline. This study examines the role of remote learning. In Michigan, compared to students never provided with remote-only learning in 2020-21, students provided with remote-only learning for 1-2 months…

This narrative inquiry highlights the first year of a 5-year Jacob K. Javits grant. In it, the authors detail their experiences writing and receiving the grant and beginning the equity-focused work of helping develop and expand gifted education in Michigan. Michigan currently has no gifted education legislation or funding, so this Javits team…

This study investigates how individual states raise revenue to pay for elementary-secondary education spending after a school finance reform (SFR). We consider 24 states that implemented SFRs between 1989 and 2005. Using a synthetic control approach, we identify six case-study states (Arkansas, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, and…

The Region 8 Comprehensive Center collaborated with the Indiana Department of Education to evaluate the obstacles many districts face in the teacher hiring process. The brief further discusses the importance of hiring timelines, benefits and barriers of early hiring, and recommendations and strategies for revising hiring timelines.

School transportation may increase student outcomes by providing a reliable and safe means of getting to and from school. Little evidence of the effects of such policies exists. In this paper, I provide some of the first causal evidence of transportation impacts on student attendance and achievement using a rich panel of student-level enrollment…

School choice policy shifts the responsibility of accessing high-quality schools from the state to parents, yet there is little research on how parents subjectively experience the burdens of choosing schools. In this case study, we conducted interviews and focus groups with 36 parents attending traditional public, charter, and private schools…

We survey undergraduate students at a large public university to understand the pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors driving their college major and career decisions with a focus on K-12 teaching. While the average student reports there is a 6% chance they will pursue teaching, almost 27% report a nonzero chance of working as a teacher in the…

We use administrative panel data from seven states covering nearly 3 million students to document and explore variation in "academic mobility," a term we use to describe the extent to which students' ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their public schooling careers. On average, we show that student ranks are…

Parental perception of the importance of science education and parental perceptions and use of active learning and inquiry-based practices in the context of homeschool science education represent a clear gap in the existing literature. This quantitative survey research study was designed to discover, analyze, and quantify parents' perceptions of…

From 2005 to 2015, the number of Black teachers in Michigan dropped by 48%, substantially exceeding declines in the corresponding K-12 Black student population. These teacher losses are an acute phenomenon within a broader national context of deurbanization of K-12 student populations away from those districts with the largest and most established…

Building stronger relationships between families and schools is increasingly identified as a way to address many vexing issues--teacher shortages, chronic absenteeism, lingering academic and social-emotional effects of COVID-19, and perceived divisions between parents and educators. Because policies and practices around family engagement vary…

Over the past decade, Children's Savings Account (CSA) programs have proliferated across the United States. CSA programs pair long-term savings and investment accounts with other supports to help families pay for post-secondary education. The goal of most CSA programs is to increase participants'--especially those from low-income…