This study examined a school's improvement efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism in a rural, high-poverty elementary school. Through improvement science, it analyzed the effects of attendance interventions on attendance improvement. It is well known that students who do not regularly attend school will also struggle with adequate progress and…

This improvement project was designed to ensure students enrolled in elementary schools with a high poverty index received literacy instructional strategies that promoted literacy achievement. When analyzing Graham County School data, I noticed third-grade students attending high poverty elementary schools were not achieving literacy success at…

"Pashe Achhi" is a telecommunication model that emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh to provide support to 0- to 5-year-old children and their caregivers through mobile-to-mobile phone calls. It is a caregiver-child facing and/or only caregiver focused, low-resource, low-tech model that constitutes a 20-minute phone call.…

Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge by using information produced by its evaluation and compensation reforms as the basis for effectiveness-adjusted payments that provided large compensating differentials to attract and retain effective…

National interest is growing in Integrated Student Support (ISS) interventions, which offer schools systematic ways to reduce barriers to learning. The present study exploits the random component embedded within the school assignment system of a large urban school district to estimate the effect of schools providing ISS on student academic…

Intergenerational poverty and scarce financial resources can create and sustain detrimental behaviors and outcomes among adolescents. Efforts to increase financial literacy and job-related skills, however, can offer youth from low-income households knowledge, skills, and opportunities otherwise unavailable to them. Targeted interventions that…

Most children in the United States will spend at least part of their childhood living apart from one of their parents; the child support system is designed to ensure that they nonetheless receive financial support. While the system is largely effective when noncustodial parents have substantial regular earnings, many noncustodial parents,…

Given growing awareness of the high prevalence of food insecurity among college students, higher education leaders are implementing various food interventions on their campuses. However, there is little research on the efficacy and impact of these initiatives. Using data from a field randomized control trial, we find that a relatively modest…

This study examined the feasibility and promise of using virtual Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Training (DBT-ST) with educators. DBT-ST was offered to 39 educators (89% female, mean age 46.45) in one high-poverty school district during the COVID-19 pandemic using a pre-post design. Educators attended five of eight groups (Mode = 8) and there…

Growing up in poverty presents numerous nonacademic barriers that impede academic progress for economically disadvantaged students (Duncan and Murnane, 2016). Because schools alone have limited capacity to address the systemic nature of economic inequalities that directly affects student outcomes, policymakers and researchers in recent years have…

In the United States, beginning teacher retention rates are extraordinarily low; only 50% of teachers remain in the classroom after five years. In particular, the state of Arizona has been recruiting significant numbers of teachers from out of state and attempting to retain them with minimal success. This persistent problem has led the neediest of…

This study examines the long-term relation between an Integrated Student Support (ISS) intervention and postsecondary enrollment and completion for predominantly low-income students of color. We use propensity score weighting to estimate the relation between receiving ISS during elementary school and postsecondary outcomes for 2009-2017 high…

Transfer payment is of great significance for poverty alleviation and balanced regional development. Based on the first-hand survey data from 18 key counties of 6 provinces in China's national poverty alleviation and development program, this paper uses propensity score matching to calculate the effects of transfer payment funds on the results of…

Analyses were conducted with second graders, drawn from an ongoing multi-cohort randomized controlled trial (RCT), who had been identified for RCT entry based on comorbid reading comprehension and word-problem solving difficulty. To estimate pandemic learning loss, we contrasted fall performance for 3 cohorts: fall of 2019 (pre-pandemic; n = 47),…

For more than a year, the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) conducted research in New Mexico, including interviews, site visits, document review, and new analyses of data provided by the New Mexico Public Education Department (NMPED). The purpose of the study was to provide New Mexico leaders a research perspective on the challenges facing education…