Despite compelling evidence that master's degrees don't systematically make teachers more effective for their students, most US school districts provide a pay premium for them. They should stop, the sooner the better, and states should take the lead in pushing them to do so. Education dollars--whether COVID-19 relief funds or predictable annual…

This research is situated at the nexus of race, racism, and care in education law, policy, and practice. State takeovers of schools and school districts in the United States have been rising for over thirty years, significantly increasing in the past decade. These takeovers raise questions of equity, accountability, integrity, and capability in…

School leaders need research-based strategies to focus school improvement efforts. Collective teacher efficacy (CTE), the shared belief that a faculty has the power to affect student achievement, is a construct based on locus of control theory and social cognitive theory. Empirical research showed that CTE strongly and positively correlated with…

School leaders need research-based strategies to focus school improvement efforts. Collective teacher efficacy (CTE), the shared belief that a faculty has the power to affect student achievement, is a construct based on locus of control theory and social cognitive theory. Empirical research showed that CTE strongly and positively correlated with…

Summer programming is one of the main ways school districts have sought to help students recover academically from COVID-19 pandemic-related setbacks. Authors use a survey administered to a nationally representative sample of kindergarten through grade 12 public school districts to investigate the prevalence and structure of districts' programming…

In 2002 the Council of the Great City Schools and its members set out to develop performance measures that could be used to improve business operations in urban public school districts. The Council launched the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project to achieve these objectives. The purposes of the project were to: (1) Establish a common…

The State Indicators Database (SID), which is the School Finance Indicators Database's (SFID) primary product, includes approximately 125 variables, but this report focuses on three key school finance measures: fiscal effort, adequacy, and progressivity. This report discusses how states' systems tend to mediate the impact of economic downturns and…

Civic education is once again at the center of education policy debates. Over the past five years, policy reform has been enacted in 46 states and, with some exceptions, has consisted of states embracing two initiatives: the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies (C3) and the Civic Education Initiative (CEI). Both initiatives…

Local districts can benefit from a collaborative process for refreshing their master schedules to increase teacher planning time. Alongside national models for organizing the school day, local districts must account for regional factors such as resources, historical practices, community expectations, changing state requirements, negotiated…

We describe the contours of one leadership preparation partnership between a university and urban high school district, to demonstrate the affordances that have allowed the partnership to process and weather challenges. Critically, we describe the actual work of collaboration, presenting one extended example of learning-in-action. As such, the…

The School Spending & Outcomes Snapshot allows users to view and print data visualizations to explore spending and outcomes data in order to foster thoughtful conversations to improve equity and outcomes in their schools communities.

Collective teacher efficacy (CTE) is a social construct that describes teachers' perceptions of the collective capability of their colleagues to make an educational difference in the lives of their students that transcends the impact of students' homes and communities (Bandura, 1993, 1997; Goddard et al., 2000). The purpose of this study was to…

Promoting equity and improvement science have seen increased attention over the last several years as educators seek to expand the experiences, opportunities, and outcomes for marginalized students. This book shows school and district leaders how to create the conditions needed to use improvement science--with its robust collection of tools,…

Although charter schools are frequently afforded flexibility from many state laws that govern traditional public schools, a growing number of charter school teachers have now unionized and introduced collective bargaining to the charter sector. Using data from a detailed content analysis of teacher CBAs from California, we compare the…

Calls for evidence-based practice are pervasive. In response, extensive scholarship has employed four categories of research use--instrumental, symbolic, conceptual, and imposed--to examine how research is used in schools and districts. We draw on sociocultural learning theory and empirical data from one school district to newly theorize latent…