How and to what extent students learn history content is a complicated process, drawing from the instructional opportunities they experience; the policy prioritization of history/social studies instruction in schools; and their own cultural perspectives toward the past. In an attempt to better understand the complex inter-play among these…

Math and reading teachers who also coach athletics in the public school system are challenged to balance the responsibilities that come with fulfilling dual occupational roles. While many studies have examined teacher-coaches' stress levels and job perception in the context of role strain, there is no evidence of how student achievement in tested…

For-profit charter schools represent a controversial new market-based education reform (Garcia, Barber, & Molnar, 2009; Conn, 2002). This essay explores how schools operated by for-profit corporations differ from those operated by non-profit organizations. Specifically, do for-profit charter schools locate in demographically distinct areas and…

In an effort to better understand aggregate patterns in the way elementary school students are assigned to classes, we conduct a careful analysis of observed classroom assignment outcomes in the 5th grade in North Carolina elementary schools. First, we model the probability that a pair of students are classmates as a function of the…

Differential grading occurs when students in courses with the same content and curriculum receive inconsistent grades across teachers, schools, or districts. It may be due to many factors, including differences in teacher grading standards, district grading policies, student behavior, teacher stereotypes, teacher quality, and curriculum adherence.…

Research has demonstrated that high rates of student mobility are associated with a range of negative academic outcomes, both for students who leave their schools and those who remain behind. The current study focused on mobility among those enrolled in charter schools in the state of Indiana. A multilevel Cox Proportional Hazards survival…

Most studies of school achievement use free-lunch eligibility or other basic indicators to adjust for differences in students' socioeconomic backgrounds. This study determines whether these variables are enough to separate the confounding effects of students' backgrounds from the main variables of interest in education studies. The Early Childhood…

This article examines the role of student demographic characteristics in standardized achievement test scores at both the individual level and aggregated at the state, district, school levels. For several data sets, the majority of the variance among states, districts, and schools was related to demographic characteristics. Where these background…

Opportunity to Learn (OTL) stems from the basic premise that there is an important relationship between the quality and intensity of classroom instruction and students' levels of academic success. For many students with disabilities, an emphasis on OTL has become national priority, yet measuring its impact is a complex challenge. The first purpose…