Background/Context: Closing achievement gaps is a major concern in U.S. education. These gaps can develop in a wide range of ways over the course of a student's schooling. Yet, research on school effectiveness and accountability policies for schools often focuses on rank orderings of schools based on value-added models, which could mask those…

The Equality of Educational Opportunity Study (1966)--the Coleman Report--lodged a key takeaway in the minds of educators, researchers, and parents: Schools do not strongly shape students' achievement outcomes. This finding has been influential to the field; however, Coleman himself suggested that--had longitudinal data been available to…

Because high-stakes testing for school accountability does not begin until third grade, accountability ratings for elementary schools do not directly measure students' academic progress in grades K through 2. While it is possible that children's test scores in grades 3 and above are highly correlated with children's outcomes in the untested…

This report examines the beginning-of-year (BOY) reading performance of emergent bilingual students who attended virtual summer school in June 2020. Students' performance on the Texas Kindergarten Entry Assessment (TX-KEA) and MAP reading assessment was compared to that of similar emergent bilingual students who did not attend the summer school…

Educational stakeholders have long known that students might not be fully engaged when taking an achievement test and that such disengagement could undermine the inferences drawn from observed scores. Thanks to the growing prevalence of computer-based tests and the new forms of metadata they produce, researchers have developed and validated…

Effect sizes in the Cohen's d family are often used in education to compare estimates across studies, measures, and sample sizes. For example, effect sizes are used to compare gains in achievement students make over time, either in pre- and post-treatment studies or in the absence of intervention, such as when estimating achievement gaps. However,…

Much research has evaluated teacher- or school-level variance in students' achievement as a proxy for teacher or school effects. These effects have almost exclusively been estimated across years with state-level testing data. In this paper, interim assessment data, collected across 9 time points in the fall, winter, and spring of Grades 3 to 5…

This study examined the relationships between poverty and a school's academic performance (both student achievement and growth). Educators, advocates, and policymakers can use these data to shape how people look at the performance of schools in their communities and to inform education policy (e.g., the effect of evaluating schools based on…

This paper describes high quality teaching practices in two schools that produce exceptional growth for all kinds of students. These practices focus on making the most of instructional time and exposing students to high quality content in a variety of contexts. They prove teachers don't need to choose between differentiating to meet students'…

Over the past decade, national initiatives have shifted States' attention to the challenge of turning around low-performing schools. The lack of consistent, dramatic improvements in the lowest-performing schools reflects the severity of the school turnaround challenge, but also suggests the need to continuously evaluate and refine turnaround…