This study examines implementation of college-and-career-ready (CCR) education standards across five school districts in Ohio, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Drawing on the policy attributes theory, we found that the specificity of districts' approaches to two long-recognized policy levers, curriculum and professional…

Empirical research investigating the association between teacher pay incentives and student test scores has grown rapidly over the past decade. To integrate the findings from these studies and help inform the debate over teacher merit pay, this meta-analysis synthesizes effect sizes across 37 primary studies, 26 of which were conducted in the…

Many states and communities have invested in public early childhood education programs to improve children's readiness to enter school and narrow achievement gaps in later grades. This study asked whether and how Wisconsin's universal state-funded prekindergarten program, Wisconsin 4K, has improved student achievement and helped to reduce the…

Asking practitioners to make larger changes to their practice is often thought to lead to lower fidelity of implementation. However, salient differences between ambitious new reforms and teachers' existing practices may also facilitate processes of conceptual change and correspondingly increase fidelity of implementation. I use survey data on the…

A core motivation for the widespread teacher evaluation reforms of the past decade was the belief that these new systems would promote teacher development through high-quality feedback. We examine this theory by studying teachers' perceptions of evaluation feedback in Boston Public Schools and evaluating the district's efforts to improve feedback…

We present findings from a randomized controlled trial of "Descubriendo la Lectura" (DLL), an intervention designed to improve the literacy skills of Spanish-speaking first graders, who are struggling with reading. DLL offers one-on-one native language literacy instruction for 12 to 20 weeks to each school's lowest performing…

This article investigates the interaction between the Common Core State Standards and curricular tracking by examining instructional decision making across tracks in a large metropolitan district. This study draws on institutional logics as a framework to analyze 106 instructional decisions from 24 participants involved in middle school literacy…

K-12 intervention studies often include fidelity of implementation (FOI) as a mediating variable, though most do not report the validity of fidelity measures. This article discusses the critical need for validated FOI scales. To illustrate our point, we describe the development and validation of the Implementation Validity Checklist (IVC-R), an…

Spurred by the federal Race to the Top competition, the state of Tennessee implemented a comprehensive statewide educator evaluation system in 2011. The new system is designed to increase the rigor of evaluations and better differentiate teachers based on performance. The use of more differentiated ratings represents a significant shift in…

In a common approach for scaling up effective educational practice, schools adopt evidence-based programs to be implemented with fidelity. An alternative approach assumes that programs should be adapted to local contexts. In this randomized trial of a reading intervention, we study a scaffolded sequence of implementation in which schools first…

This article presents findings from an intervention across sixth and seventh grades to teach academic words to middle school students. The goals included investigating a progression of outcomes from word knowledge to comprehension and investigating the processes students use in establishing word meaning. Participants in Year 1 were two sixth-grade…

This article seeks to deepen our understanding of the nature and quality of democratic participation in educational reform by examining the first-year implementation of California's Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) mandating civic engagement in district decision-making. Drawing on democratic theory, empirical literature, and data from 10…

Reading Recovery (RR) is a short-term, one-to-one intervention designed to help the lowest achieving readers in first grade. This article presents first-year results from the multisite randomized controlled trial (RCT) and implementation study under the $55 million Investing in Innovation (i3) Scale-Up Project. For the 2011-2012 school year, the…

We conducted a randomized field trial to test an academic vocabulary intervention designed to bolster the language and literacy skills of linguistically diverse sixth-grade students (N = 2,082; n = 1,469 from a home where English is not the primary language), many demonstrating low achievement, enrolled in 14 urban middle schools. The 20-week…

Using a cluster randomized trial design, we evaluated the persistence of effects of a research-based model for scaling up educational interventions. The model was implemented in 42 schools in two city districts serving low-resource communities, randomly assigned to three conditions. In pre-kindergarten, the two experimental interventions were…