The unprecedented challenges of teaching during COVID-19 prompted fears of a mass exodus from the profession. We examine the extent to which these fears were realized using administrative records of Massachusetts teachers between 2015-2016 and 2021-2022. Relative to prepandemic levels, average turnover rates were similar going into the fall of…

The out-of-school time (OST) field in the United States has a complex history. The push to offer programming reflects a legacy rooted in moral panics about racially minoritized youth. However, this field is populated by community spaces that act as multipurpose sites of culturally sustaining educational practices supporting positive youth…

Despite the growing availability of classroom measures, such measures rarely attended to the embodied nature of learning. This article describes the collaborative development of a practical measure to capture embodied participation in mathematics classrooms with four elementary school teachers--working with students at the intersections of…

We compiled the first longitudinal data set with detailed state funding information to examine whether different funding strategies for public higher education correlate with college access and completion, with a focus on outcomes among racially minoritized students. We found no relationships between funding mechanisms and student outcomes at…

This brief uses national data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to investigate deficit beliefs, or beliefs that students' academic underperformance is primarily attributable to deficiencies in their home environments, among high school math teachers. Descriptive results reveal that students in low-level math courses have teachers…

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a seismic and ongoing disruption to K-12 schooling. Using test scores from 5.4 million U.S. students in Grades 3-8, we tracked changes in math and reading achievement across the first 2 years of the pandemic. Average math test scores in the fall of 2021 in Grades 3-8 were 0.20-0.27 standard deviation (SD) lower…

The realities of a global pandemic coupled with economic, climate, and racial crises have exacerbated existing racial injustices in schools and society. Although many have argued for a principled refusal to return to an inequitable "normal" (Roy, 2020), dominant models of educational improvement prioritize technical-rational approaches…

We examine effects of the pandemic on student attendance, course grades, and grade retention in North Carolina in 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 using descriptive and regression analyses. We find each outcome worsened on average in 2020-2021, with larger changes at the high end of the absence distribution, the low end of the grade distribution, and among…

Pathological thinking surrounding disenfranchised and marginalized communities remains a problem in education policy, popular discourse, and research on marginalized communities. Scholars employ a host of frameworks to challenge such pathological thinking, often through the language of deficits. We argue that in an effort to refute pathological…

Calls for justice-centered education approaches have gained traction over the years. Yet given the entrenched inequities that disproportionately harm multiply-marginalized students of color, it is evident that they remain incomplete. Using a specific incident as our launching point, we explore current conceptualizations of justice through a…

Most U.S. school districts draw "attendance boundaries" to define catchment areas that assign students to schools near their homes, often recapitulating neighborhood demographic segregation in schools. Focusing on elementary schools, we ask: How much might we reduce school segregation by redrawing attendance boundaries? Combining parent…

Concern about harsh and inequitable discipline over the past two decades has galvanized a host of discipline reforms. These reforms have gained renewed attention in recent months as both the COVID-19 pandemic and mass uprisings against anti-Black violence have both bolstered calls to reimagine schools as caring spaces. This moment raises urgent…

Existing scholarship suggests that schools do the work of social stratification by functioning as "sorting machines," or institutions that determine which populations of students are provided educational resources needed to help them get ahead. We build on this theory of social reproduction by extending it to better understand how…

Little is known about the professional experiences of trans school workers. This brief describes the demographic characteristics of a non-random sample of 296 trans PK-12 school workers (i.e., teachers, administrators, staff) in the United States and Canada and reports their workplace experiences and the structural and social supports for trans…

A growing body of research and popular reporting shows racial differences in school modality choices during the COVID-19 crisis, with White students more likely to attend school in person in the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021. This in-person learning gap raises serious equity concerns. We use unique panel survey data to explore possible…