The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) was the largest onetime federal investment in K-12 schools in history, funneling almost $200 billion to states and school districts. We use novel data from Washington State to investigate the extent to which ESSER funding causally influenced spending on school personnel. We argue…

State law (Revised Code of Washington [RCW] 28A.320.130) requires the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to annually report to the Legislature the number of incidents in violation of RCW 9.41.280, which involves the possession of weapons on school premises, transportation systems, or in areas of facilities while being used…

This article is a multiple case study of policy in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon. Both cities have developed programs that utilize government funding to increase access to public school K-5 arts education. While each city used a different path for advocacy and policy change, there were common threads that could be used as a framework…

Despite well-designed curriculum materials, teachers often face challenges in their implementation due to diverse classroom needs. This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can support middle-school math teachers by helping create high-quality curriculum scaffolds, which we define as the adaptations and supplements teachers…

This study explored relationships between school nurses' diabetes-related attitudes, self-efficacy in diabetes management and education, and care practices. One-hundred fourteen school nurses who have taken care of students with type 1 diabetes in public schools comprised this descriptive study sample. Participants completed online surveys. School…

This study involving 233 participants from ten states sought to identify the types of educational journals practicing superintendents read. The findings indicate that the majority of superintendents are reading publications provided by professional and trade organizations rather than peer-reviewed journals. Across all subgroups, "Educational…

Despite the attempts by lawmakers to legislate a closing of the achievement gap, persistent gaps in performance for students based on ethnicity, race, economic level, disability, and first language persist throughout public schools in the United States. Occasionally, a principal will receive attention for raising the performance of minoritized…

We use administrative panel data from seven states covering nearly 3 million students to document and explore variation in "academic mobility," a term we use to describe the extent to which students' ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their public schooling careers. On average, we show that student ranks are…

Washington is one of nine states that requires teaching about Indigenous peoples in public schools. The framework of cultural humility was used to investigate preservice teachers' knowledge and views about Indigenous culture. Eleven elementary preservice teachers were interviewed during their last year in a teacher preparation program. Interviews…

The United States Supreme Court in Kennedy v. Bremerton Sch. Dist. held that a local school district violated the First Amendment freedom of religious expression rights when it directed an assistant football coach to stop praying on the fifty-yard line of a high school football field after each game. In finding for the high-school football coach,…

Building on prior research documenting associations between youth purpose and academic, psychological and physical well-being, this study examined the contributions of workplace learning (WPL) to youth purpose and internal motivation among 281 youth of diverse racial and ethnic identities and economic status enrolled in two high school networks…

Paraeducators are critically important members of school communities, but there is little statewide research on the characteristics of paraeducators. We therefore use over 25 years of longitudinal data from Washington state to provide a descriptive portrait of the paraeducator workforce. Paraeducators are more racially and ethnically diverse than…

Senate Bill 6362 (2018) directed the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to "define the duties and responsibilities that entail a 'school day' under the state's statutory program of basic education under RCW [Revised Code of Washington] 28A.150.220 and 28A.150.260." In August 2018, Superintendent of Public…

Prior work on teacher candidates in Washington State has shown that about two thirds of individuals who trained to become teachers between 2005 and 2015 and received a teaching credential did not enter the state's public teaching workforce immediately after graduation, while about one third never entered a public teaching job in the state at all.…

Do Washington state's targeted, public preschool programs help socially vulnerable students succeed in elementary school? In this study, we explore this question by examining the state's Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP) and the Early Support for Infants and Toddlers (ESIT) program. Using statewide censuses of…