This paper presents evidence of the effects of dual language immersion (DLI) programs on the academic outcomes of students in elementary grades. Leveraging enrollment lotteries from four cohorts of DLI applicants across 10 oversubscribed programs, analyses estimate the intent-to-treat effect of access to bilingual education on reading and math…

Kentucky's Targeted Interventions (TI) program is a statewide intervention intended to prepare non-college-ready high school students for college-level coursework. Using a difference-in-regression discontinuity design, we find that TI reduces the likelihood that students enroll in remedial courses by 8 to 10 percentage points in math. These…

Growing concerns about inequitable access have made public investment in gifted programs controversial in many school districts, yet advocates maintain that gifted services provide necessary enrichment for exceptional students to succeed at school. We provide evidence on whether the typical gifted program indeed benefits elementary students'…

The federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program allocated US$7 billion over nearly a decade in an effort to produce rapid and lasting improvements in schools identified as low performing. In this article, we use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of Ohio's SIG turnaround efforts on student achievement and school…

We evaluate the impact of Success for All literacy instruction in grades 3 through 5 using data from the same cluster randomized trial used to evaluate effects in the earlier grades (K-2). In contrast to the early benefits, there is no effect on reading achievement in the later grades, either overall or for students and schools with high or low…

Interim assessments are increasingly common in U.S. schools. We use high-quality data from a large-scale school-level cluster randomized experiment to examine the impact of two well-known commercial interim assessment programs on mathematics and reading achievement in Indiana. Results indicate that the treatment effects are positive but not…

Analyzing mathematics and reading achievement outcomes from a district-level random assignment study fielded in over 500 schools within 59 school districts and seven states, the authors estimate the 1-year impacts of a data-driven reform initiative implemented by the Johns Hopkins Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education (CDDRE). CDDRE…

This article contributes to the empirical literature on remediation in community colleges by using policy variation across North Carolina's community colleges to examine how remediation affects various outcomes for traditional-age college students. We find that being required to take a remedial course (as we define it in this article) either in…

The authors describe an independent evaluation of the READ 180 Enterprise intervention designed by Scholastic, Inc. Despite widespread use of the program with upper elementary through high school students, there is limited empirical evidence to support its effectiveness. In this randomized controlled trial involving 312 students enrolled in an…

Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, schools, districts, states, and the federal government devoted enormous resources to the implementation of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) models. With more than 1.6 billion federal dollars distributed through the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) project and its successor, the CSR project,…

Many policymakers suggest that school-based reading coaches can improve teachers' practice, which consequently will improve students' literacy skills. Although reading coaches are increasingly prevalent in schools nationwide, empirical evidence for their effects on student achievement is scarce. This article helps to address this gap by conducting…

Schools that have not made adequate yearly progress in increasing student academic achievement are required, under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), to offer children in low-income families the opportunity to receive supplemental educational services (SES). In research conducted in Milwaukee Public Schools, the authors explore whether parents and…

We conducted a meta-analysis of 36 studies of Reading Recovery (RR), an intensive tutorial intervention designed to develop the literacy skills of low-performing first-grade students. Few individual studies of the program have yielded conclusive evidence regarding the program's effectiveness due to various methodological limitations. We relied on…

The effects of a voluntary summer reading intervention were assessed in a randomized field trial involving 552 students in 10 schools. In this study, fourth-grade children received eight books to read during their summer vacation and were encouraged by their teachers to practice oral reading at home with a family member and to use comprehension…

It is widely accepted that teachers differ in their effectiveness, yet the empirical evidence regarding teacher effectiveness is weak. The existing evidence is mainly drawn from econometric studies that use covariates to attempt to control for selection effects that might bias results. We use data from a four-year experiment in which teachers and…