The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA or the Recovery Act) of 2009 provided an unprecedented level of funding for K-12 education. The program created a "historic opportunity to save hundreds of thousands of jobs, support states and school districts, and advance reforms and improvements that will create long-lasting results for our…

As the United States continues to become a more diverse nation, much work remains to be done to ensure that all children, regardless of their race or ethnicity, have the opportunity to thrive. A policy report recently published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that children of color face immense barriers to success in key categories of…

The current teacher workforce is younger, less experienced, more likely to turnover, and more diverse in preparation experiences than the workforce of two decades ago. Research shows that inexperienced teachers are less effective, but we know little about the effectiveness of teachers with different types of preparation. In this study, we classify…

Background/Context: Under supplemental educational services ("supplemental services"), a parental choice provision of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), schools that have not made adequate yearly progress in increasing student achievement are required to offer low-income families free, afterschool tutoring. Existing research shows low…

Nigeria is a signatory to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) declaration but till now she has not made any significant milestones in actualizing these human development goals. In spite of the coordinated efforts towards mobilizing those in the formal education system to partially address its implementation challenges, serious gaps still exit…

Extant between 2004 and 2011, Aimhigher was the UK government's flagship national initiative for widening participation to higher education for young people from disadvantaged social groups, with costs approaching 1 billion British Pounds. Its demise was predicated on a perceived lack of progress and the absence of compelling evaluative research.…

Standardized-test scores are increasingly important indicators of school success. But how robust are school-performance ratings when they are based on measures derived from these scores? In my thesis, using data from Houston Independent School District (HISD) and New York State (NYS), I examined the robustness of school-performance ratings across…

This report uses the Civil Rights Data Collection dataset released in early 2012 to raise questions and drive debate about the subject of teacher absence. This dataset comes from the first national survey to include school-level information on teacher absence. The measure constructed from this information is the percentage of teachers who were…

The population growth, labor force participation, and educational attainment of Latinos in the U.S. influence the composition of the current and future U.S. society, economy, and workforce. In 2012, the Latino population in the United States is the youngest and fastest growing ethnic group, with the highest level of labor force participation…

Based on two studies that we conducted in the Chicago metropolitan area in 2009 and 2010, we found that teachers do, in fact, use research, although they tend to seek it out under very specific conditions and circumstances. Namely, teachers tend to look for research in response to an immediate, pressing concern, such as how to best teach fractions…

In an age in which information and data are more readily available than ever, it is critical for higher education institutions to develop tools that can communicate essential information to those who make decisions in an easy-to-understand format. One of the tools available for this purpose is a dashboard, a one- to two-page document that presents…

For increasing numbers of Americans, a crucial facet of the American Dream appears to be at risk. A solid majority consider a college degree an indispensable ticket to the middle class. At the same time, even more people believe college is financially out-of-reach for many qualified students. This is the message from new public opinion research by…

Over the past 25 years, the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects has remained more or less constant. In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more…

This paper was born of the authors' discussions about the imbalance between critique and constructive thinking within the sociology of education, and work on education policy. They were concerned that their research--and the body of work to which their research contributes--is becoming increasingly irrelevant to policy and practice. For British…

Efficient use of resources, including space, is critical in academic departments. Traditional space auditing simply assesses occupancy levels. We present a novel approach which assesses not just the extent to which space is used, but also how well it is used. We link space use quantitatively to key performance indicators in a research-intensive…