Despite the multifaceted causes of educational disparities, schools' responsibility for reducing inequality undergirds American ideals. Educators operate as street-level bureaucrats to accomplish this equalizing work. Surprisingly, we know little about how teachers think about inequality or enact strategies to combat it, even though their…

Recent studies show that texting-based interventions can produce educational benefits in children across a range of ages. We study the effects of a text-based program for kindergarten parents, distinguishing a general program from one that adds differentiation and personalization based on the child's developmental level. Children in the…

School performance pressures apply disproportionately to tested grades and subjects. Using longitudinal administrative data--including achievement data from untested grades--and teacher survey data from a large urban district, we examine schools' responses to those pressures in assigning teachers to high-stakes and low-stakes classrooms. We find…

Politics of education researchers have long recognized the role of micropolitics in school decision-making processes. We argue that investigating micropolitical dynamics is key to an important set of school decisions that are fundamental to inequities in access to high-quality teachers: assignments of teachers and students to classrooms. Focusing…

School performance pressures apply disproportionately to tested grades and subjects. Using longitudinal administrative data and teacher survey data from a large urban school district, we examine schools' responses to those pressures in assigning teachers to high-stakes and low-stakes classrooms. We find that teachers who produce greater student…

Districts nationwide are implementing teacher induction programs as a strategy to increase both beginning teacher retention and student achievement. The induction of beginning teachers has been widely acknowledged as important for teachers' feelings of success and their retention (Darling-Hammond, 1994; Huling-Austin, 1989; Smylie, 1994).…

This article explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover…

A number of studies have found that teachers are prone to leave schools serving high proportions of low-achieving, low-income, and minority students for more economically and educationally advantaged schools. In schools with very high turnover rates, this can pose a number of challenges, including lack of continuity in instruction, lack of…