Background: School systems have struggled to staff special education positions for decades (Billingsley, 1993; Cowan et al., 2016; Mason-Williams et al., 2020), but recent data suggest special education staffing challenges are now a crisis. As of October 2023, 21% of schools, and 30% of high-poverty schools, reported at least one special educator…

Background: Much has been made of whether the evidence supporting mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) is consistent or high-quality enough to merit their wide implementation, and numerous meta-analyses, reviews, and meta-analyses of meta-analyses have been conducted in pursuit of this question (e.g., Bockmann & Yu, 2023; Goldberg et al.,…

Background: Federal lawmakers passed the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant program in 2008 to incentivize enrollment in bachelor's and master's degrees in education and to reduce teacher labor supply issues in high-need fields at low-income schools. The program offers undergraduate and graduate students up…

Background/Context: African American (AA) learners, like all other learners, bring into the classroom their cultural values, the way they express themselves, and how they problem-solve. Their life experiences, even at a young age, influence their social and emotional behavior. Unfortunately, all too many AA children experience life and family…

Background: College- and career-ready standards cite the "special place of argument writing" in preparing students to be college students, professionals, and engaged citizens in an information-rich society (NGA, 2010). To support these critical skills, the National Writing Project (NWP) developed the College, Career, and Community…

Does receipt of School Improvement Grants (SIG) funding to implement a school intervention model have an impact on outcomes for low-performing schools? This study answers this question using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that exploits cutoff values on the continuous variables used to define SIG eligibility tiers, comparing outcomes in…

Within low-income communities in low- and high-resource countries, there is a profound need for more effective schools that are better able to foster child and youth development and support student learning. This paper presents a theoretical framework for understanding the role of teacher ecology in influencing teacher effectiveness and, through…

Improving the quality of teacher preparation is an important national issue, because the quality of teaching plays such a large role in students' learning. One key indicator of students' academic success is the competence and capability of their teachers. However, the availability of well-prepared and effective teachers varies widely across the…

Students' ability to succeed academically in the school setting depends heavily on factors that students face outside of the school walls. One such contributor is the presence of a safe environment for students to travel to and from school. Unfortunately, for many students in urban and economically depressed environments, the daily commute to and…

Why are some schools able to thrive and produce strong student outcomes, while others struggle? To answer this question, researchers have surveyed teachers and students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) since the 1990s, asking them about their schools' organizational climate and practices. From these data, researchers at the Consortium on Chicago…

Recent efforts to attract and retain effective educators and to improve teaching practices have focused on reforming evaluation and compensation systems for teachers and principals. In 2006, Congress established the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), which provides grants to support performance-based compensation systems for teachers and principals in…

Many school systems today are trying to attract top college graduates into teaching, but little is known about what dissuades this target group from entering the profession. This study randomly assigned applicants for a highly-selective alternative pathway into teaching in Argentina either to a survey about their motivations for applying to the…

Students' basic reading and math skills can decline significantly during the summer months. Most attribute this to the prolonged period during which young students are outside of a structured learning environment (Cooper et al 1996). While summer learning loss occurs among all income groups, the effects are more pronounced for those from…

READS (Reading Enhances Achievement During Summer) has been implemented in North Carolina schools for the past several years as part of an Investing in Innovation (i3) validation grant that began in fall 2010. This paper focuses on the Year 3 study and compares the Year 3 results to the Year 1 and Year 2 results, and the results of earlier…

This study, sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education, examines whether some early elementary school math curricula are more effective than others at improving student math achievement in disadvantaged schools. A small number of curricula, which are based on different approaches for developing…