In most markets, consumers of goods and services have vastly more options available to them than they will consider closely. At the point of making a decision, consumers are choosing between only a small subset (i.e., a consideration set) of all possible alternatives. The preceding process that forms these consideration sets is the focus of this…

The United States educational system has historically struggled to improve the student outcomes for African American and economically disadvantaged students (Meatto, 2019). This doctoral study analyzed the underlying factors that affected schools' performances in a central Louisiana school system over a five year period. Specifically, this study…

Teacher retention has been a growing nationwide concern for years that has exponentially worsened as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Schools serving students from low socioeconomic backgrounds tend to be most negatively affected by high rates of teacher turnover. This study examined the impact of implementing effective onboarding on…

Most public K-12 schools in the United States enact a school improvement plan each year based upon the state testing results from the previous year. Despite the many frameworks, research, and recommendations, few scholars tackled what the plans contain and the results. Using a sequential explanatory mixed methods model, two stages examined school…

Improving school effectiveness is a priority for many countries. The Swedish instrument "Pedagogical and Social Climate in School" (PESOC) has been widely used for measurement of school improvement. Since pedagogical leadership is an important component of school effectiveness, this study aimed to describe the psychometric properties of…

Purpose: Recent attempts to measure schools' influence on students' social-emotional learning (SEL) show differences across schools, but whether these estimated differences measure the true effects of schools remain unclear. To better understand these measures, we examine the stability of estimated school-by-grade effects across 2 years using…

Full-service community schools (FSCSs) are designed to provide historically underserved students with more equitable educational experiences. Yet, the literature has given scant attention to how teachers help to fulfill the promise of these schools. Integrating two critical constructs in education--professional capital and culturally relevant and…

This essay proposes that efforts at assessing the contribution of faith-based schools to faith formation be grounded in an account of student vocation framed by Christian practices. We identify gaps in research on assessment of school effectiveness and suggest that a focus on the present vocation of students may fruitfully connect faith and…

Following a sample of students who participated in admissions lotteries at eight Early College High Schools (ECs) partnering with 2-year colleges, this study examined the college enrollment and degree completion of students who won admissions lotteries and enrolled in ECs in Grade 9 (i.e., EC students), and assessed the EC impact--in terms of…

Since the early 2000s, educational evaluation research has primarily centered on teachers', rather than schools', contributions to students' academic outcomes due to concerns that estimates of the latter were smaller, less stable, and more prone to measurement error. We argue that this disparity should be reduced. Using administrative data from…

School improvement in chronically under-performing schools remains a formidable challenge for school leaders. Recent policies in the U.S. have created incentives for school leaders to attempt new strategies to improve outcomes, and increasingly, school leaders of charter management organizations and other multi-school organizations (MSOs) are…

There is an increasing interest of policies and projects to adapt boarding schools as a means to provide quality education for educationally disadvantaged students. However, little evidence is available for the effectiveness of boarding schools. The current study examined the boarding effect on primary and middle school student mathematics…

Poverty has been identified as an obstacle to educational success. In 2003, Washington state researchers, Shannon and Bylsma (2007), conducted a study to uncover the commonalities found in schools outperforming their socioeconomic indicators. Their work identified nine characteristics of high-performing schools and determined all successful…

Cities such as New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Silicon Valley and other metropolitan areas, also known as "Superstar Cities," are very effective at attracting highly educated workers. In a virtuous cycle, these workers migrate to where the interesting, highly paid jobs are, where other smart young people live, and where the cultural…

School inspections are a key component of the accountability system in many education systems, including England. The judgments and reports produced through these inspections are widely used by parents when they are choosing a school for their children. But should they be? This paper presents new evidence on this issue. We illustrate how parents…