Background: Districts with federal nutrition programs must have an updated local school wellness policy (LSWP) to promote nutrition, physical activity, and student wellness. This study evaluates factors associated with LSWP quality among low-income districts. Methods: In 2018, we collected LSWPs from websites of 200 randomly selected,…

Growth-to-standard models evaluate student growth against the growth needed to reach a future standard or target of interest, such as proficiency. A common growth-to-standard model involves comparing the popular Student Growth Percentile (SGP) to Adequate Growth Percentiles (AGPs). AGPs follow from an involved process based on fitting a series of…

Multi-site randomized controlled trials (RCTs) provide unbiased estimates of the average impact in the study sample. However, their ability to accurately predict the impact for individual sites outside the study sample, to inform local policy decisions, is largely unknown. To extend prior research on this question, we analyzed six multi-site RCTs…

Many educational policies hinge on the valid measurement of student economic disadvantage at the school level. Measures based on free and reduced-price lunch enrollment are used widely. However, recent research raises questions about their reliability, particularly following the introduction of universal free lunch in certain schools and…

This study explores the effects of the two-generation program Career"Advance"--which combines education and training for parents in healthcare with Head Start for children--on children's academic, language, mathematics, and inhibitory control followed for 3 years. The sample (collected in Tulsa, Oklahoma from 2011 to 2018) includes 147…

Research has shown that male teachers in early childhood settings play a crucial role in providing male role models, offering diverse perspectives, and helping children develop positive gender-role stereotypes. Therefore, it is crucial for Early Head Start programs to increase the representation of male teachers to ensure that all children can…

This article combines archival research and critical discourse analysis to examine 33 evaluation and report documents that evaluate the effectiveness of the Fulbright Program from 1958-2023. Specifically, the study employs argumentation analysis to understand the underlying ideological strategies used to discursively construct the Fulbright…

In 2016, the federal government proposed and adopted the Every Student Succeeds Act, which retracted the federal government's prior control over states' teacher evaluation systems, permitting more local control. Kevin Close, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, and Clarin Collins collected information from states to determine the degree to which states were…

Background: South Africa's long-standing reading crisis is well recognised. At various stages since 2000, national government has presented the inculcation of a culture of reading as a solution to this crisis. Objectives: This article critically interrogated the term 'culture of reading' as used in national government discourse with reference to…

Bilingual children demonstrate varying levels of proficiency in each of the two languages to which they are exposed. Even though it is widely acknowledged that bilingual children are not a homogenous group, existing studies on dual-language profiles in bilingual children have focused on expressive language profiles. In this study, we used the…

Little is known about how the expansion of state pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs affects low-income children with disabilities in Head Start. Using almost 30 years of administrative data of all Head Start programs and a differences-in-differences design, this study tests the possibility that, as state pre-k differentially draws relatively more…

The federal Race to the Top competition provided significant impetus for states to adopt value-added models as a part of their teacher evaluation systems. Such models typically link students to their teachers in the spring semester when statewide tests are administered and estimate a teacher's performance based on his or her students' learning…

Preschool teachers' consistency of warm, sensitive, and responsive interactions with children may be more important than average levels and may moderate the association between children's cognitive and emotion regulation and their preschool adjustment. A sample of 312 boys and girls aged 32-68 months in 44 classrooms at 16 privately-funded centers…

Background: Numerous studies have observed a significant and unique relationship between children's use of nonmainstream dialect and reading outcomes. We aimed to examine the relationship between nonmainstream dialect and reading at its roots by completing a preliminary evaluation of the relationship between African American English (AAE) dialect…

Coaching is becoming widely recognized as a tool to help early childhood educators enhance teaching and build professional skills. Although effective, the use of an external coach can be cost and time prohibitive. This study examined the effectiveness of internal peer coaches as compared to external coaches in implementation fidelity of an…