Deficit narratives about Blackness are embedded in research, discourse, and policies as policymakers and researchers theorize about differences in schooling outcomes between Black students and their peers. We offer a counterstory to prevailing conceptualizations of student absenteeism by arguing that they center racialized and deficit narratives…

In the wake of racial justice protests in the United States, many states adopted policies to constrain the discussion of racism, particularly contemporary and systemic racism, in K-12 classrooms. Discursively framed as "critical race theory bans," these policies enumerate lists of "prohibited concepts" to be eliminated from…

We use 35 years of data on public school teachers in Washington to calculate several different measures of teacher attrition and mobility. We explore how these rates vary over time and their relationship with the state unemployment rate. Annual rates of teacher attrition from the workforce have been between 5% and 8% for each of the past 35 years,…

Existing research on the implementation of special education (SE) has consistently documented racial inequities in the law's implementation. We present a new theoretical framework to guide future research. SE law requires parents to act as initiators, developers, and enforcers in the implementation of SE policy. Drawing from law and society…

Educational change efforts that prioritize equity for multilingual learners (MLs) require attention to several interconnected components of the education system. We build on prior literature and our collective research to clarify the concept of "shared responsibility" for ML students and to operationalize the concept at the school,…

With a goal of contextualizing teacher job dissatisfaction during the first full school year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we contrast teachers' experiences with the decade and a half leading up to the pandemic. We draw on nationally representative data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and National Teacher and Principal Survey from the 2003-04 to…

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…

Motivated by potential financial savings, 4-day school weeks have proliferated across the United States in recent years, reaching public schools in 24 states as of 2019. The consequences of the 4-day school week for students, schools, and communities are largely unknown. This article uses district-level panel data from Oklahoma and a…

Despite the outsized influence the Catholic school sector in the United States has on policymaking, research into the organization of Catholic schools has not kept pace with contemporary educational research trends. In this brief paper, we diagnose how conceptual and empirical decisions made within the field of Catholic education resulted in the…

The growing fiscal cost of K-12 teacher pension plans and pension-induced labor market distortions have led to calls for teacher pension reforms. Dynamic structural econometric models are a useful way to analyze the fiscal and staffing consequences of current and alternative retirement plans. This article lays out the benefits of the structural…

Given that a national superintendent dataset has never existed, claims about superintendent turnover and gender gaps have traditionally been based on conjecture or data from a single year and small sample of superintendents. Utilizing a new dataset of all K-12 public school district superintendents in the United States across four school years,…

There is growing interest in how to better prepare K-12 students to work with data. In this article, we assert that these discussions of teaching and learning must attend to the human dimensions of data work. Specifically, we draw from several established lines of research to argue that practices involving the creation and manipulation of data are…

School practices and policies are often influenced by various research, nonprofit, for-profit, and philanthropic organizations. To help understand their influence, this article provides a framework accounting for the variety of school improvement organizations (SIOs) and summarizes debates regarding their benefits and risks. I cluster SIOs as…

The field of multilingual learner education has become increasingly complex, with longstanding efforts focused on promoting "access" to multilingual learners being criticized for failing to "transform" systems responsible for these students' marginalization. This essay brings clarity to the complex terrain of equity for…

Assistant principals (APs) are important education personnel, but empirical evidence about their career outcomes remains scarce. Using administrative data from Tennessee and Missouri, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of AP mobility. While prior work focuses on promotions into principal positions, we also examine APs exiting school…