It is a healthy exercise to debate the merits of using effect-size benchmarks to interpret research findings. However, these debates obscure a more central insight that emerges from empirical distributions of effect-size estimates in the literature: Efforts to improve education often fail to move the needle. I find that 36% of effect sizes from…

Charter schools are highly debated in policy and political discussions about delivering public education. As "laboratories of innovation" that often use lotteries to assign spots, they hold the potential to generate rigorous evidence about effective educational practices. This paper synthesizes and summarizes findings from charter…

Background: Observation Studies, Unmeasured Confounding, and Sensitivity Analysis: An important part of educational research is identifying important, potentially causal, factors that influence children's learning from observational studies. However, it is well-known that discovering such factors from observational studies can be biased due to…

State-mandated, standardized testing can have negative consequences on classroom practices in the Northeastern United States due to significant pressure placed on classroom teachers to demonstrate student achievement. The purpose of this research was to examine how elementary classroom practices, in grades three through five, were influenced based…

Background: Media play an important role in shaping public perceptions of education policies, yet few studies have explored how research evidence is included in media coverage of education reforms. Purpose: In this study, we investigate how research appears in the public discourse of student achievement in the context of the reauthorization of the…

The past three decades have seen charter schools emerge as a prominent and controversial alternative to traditional public schools. This policy brief examines "Thirty Years of Charter Schools: What Does Lottery-Based Research Tell Us?" which summarizes 40 studies that have used lottery research designs to analyze how charter schools…

The main goal of this study is to determine the extent to which academically successful students studying in secondary schools in Turkey that only accept students scoring in extremely high (94th-99th) percentile on standardized tests harbor intentions to emigrate from Turkey in the future. In addition, a secondary goal is to examine why they…

Bui, Craig, and Imberman assessed the impact of gifted and talented programs on student achievement using regression discontinuity and random assignment to gifted magnet schools. In both analyses, they found minimal impact of the gifted and talented programs on student achievement. This commentary addresses two concerns associated with the study.…

As more states move to universal computer-based assessments, an emergent issue concerns the effect that device type might have on student results. Although, several research studies have explored device effects, most of these studies focused on the differences between tablets and desktops/laptops. In the current study, we distinguish between…

The system for measuring the quality of education (SIMCE) is a standardised evaluation that provides results on the academic achievement of Chilean students, while also including indicators of personal and social development. Through a mixed analysis of variables extracted from these indicators, the purpose of this research study is to build a…

School District Effectiveness Research (SDER) works to identify unusually effective organizations for in-depth qualitative study that significantly outperform peer districts over multiple years. Yet, critiques of SDER include a focus on cross-sectional data, individual states, and percent proficient metrics. Here, we analyze the Stanford Education…

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), like No Child Left Behind before it, requires states to report information on the academic achievement of students in each of their schools, both overall and for various subgroups of students. A subgroup of particular interest to policymakers and researchers is economically disadvantaged students,…

This study encompasses the history, definition, and implementation of merit pay to identify the variables that affect student achievement and teacher retention. By reviewing 13 studies on American education relevant to the policy, this study aims to determine how merit pay influenced student achievement and teacher retention rates. In the United…

Since the 1920, colleges and universities have leveraged standardized testing as a way to determine worthiness of access to higher education. Nearly 100 years since its first appearance, the use of standardized testing has become commonplace despite the growing evidence of the socioeconomic and racial disparities among test takers. While some high…

Testing has been a contested aspect of education for decades. The way in which testing, standardized tests, and student motivations correlate is a separate issue. This action research study investigates the relationship between pre-tests and students' perception of their personal growth. Three classes of 11th grade U.S. History were utilized to…