During and in the immediate years after the global COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government has given school districts across the United States millions of dollars through a series of three final grants called the Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ESSER) Grant to help improve education, decrease student learning losses suffered…

Across the country, charter schools now serve a diverse student body of 3.7 million students in nearly 8,000 charter schools and family demand for charter schools continues to grow. The Charter Schools Program (CSP) is the only source of federal funding that supports the growth of charter schools to meet this community need, but the CSP has been…

In 2019, approximately 91,000 child care and early education (CCEE) providers cared for one or more young children in a home-based child care (HBCC) setting and were "listed" by state or local CCEE agencies (National Survey of Early Care and Education [NSECE] Project Team 2021). Listed HBCC providers experience three predominant CCEE…

An important pre-condition to diversifying the workforce of land-grant extension services is access to qualified ethnic minority individuals with an awareness and interest in pursuing extension careers. This paper highlights an example of collaboration between the K-State Research and Extension office and an educational research program at Kansas…

This report examines state-funded loan forgiveness and conditional grant programs, designed to alleviate student loan debt and address workforce shortages in high-need fields. These service-contingent programs incentivize graduates to work in targeted occupations or underserved areas in exchange for debt relief.

Tuition-free college programs are gaining momentum as policymakers address rising college costs and workforce readiness. Despite their growing adoption, limited research examines how workforce-focused eligibility criteria impact student outcomes beyond enrollment. This pre-registered study employs two within-study quasi-experimental…

This paper investigates how early career academics interpret and respond to institutional demands structured by projectification. Developing a 'frame analytic' approach, it explores projectification as a process constituted at the level of meaning-making. Building on 35 in-depth interviews with fixed-term scholars in political science and history,…

Peer observation of teaching (PoT) is a recognized evaluation tool. However, faculty concerns persist regarding bias, beneficial feedback, and lack of peer observer training. While faculty desire to provide quality and equitable reviews, many higher education faculty peers have little expertise in conducting observations and evaluations. This…

Teacher staffing challenges were pervasive throughout the pandemic, but the downturn in student enrollment combined with the end of ESSER funds leaves considerable uncertainty about the postpandemic teacher labor market. We use data on new teacher endorsements and job postings scraped from district hiring websites in Washington to measure supply…

The state of Maryland has recognized the potential for registered apprenticeships both to provide a path to better-paying careers that do not require college degrees and to help employers meet their needs for employees with specialized skills. This report explores opportunities for and challenges to expanding apprenticeship in Maryland and…

This pilot study explores how agricultural sciences faculty utilize Digital Learning Objects (DLOs) in their courses and collaborate with librarians to improve students' information literacy skills. The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 14 agricultural sciences faculty members at two land-grant institutions in the United States. The…

This forum piece reports on a brief survey of current quantitative research ethics training materials in Applied Linguistics (AL). This survey was conducted as a step towards an increased understanding of the ways in which we, as a field, train students and researchers to conduct quantitative research ethically. The survey was carried out in the…

To address student concerns about full tuition rates while taking online courses during COVID-19, we conducted choice experiments at a representative U.S. land-grant university to elicit students' willingness-to-pay for alternative course delivery modes. Results show that students demanded 30% and 7% tuition discounts for fully online and hybrid…

We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children--through duration expansions to the kindergarten day--to better understand how an implicit childcare subsidy affects mothers and families. Exploiting full-day kindergarten variation across place and time from 1992 through 2022 and novel data on state-level…

This report explores motives, experiences, and outcomes of the Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth (P3)--a federal program to improve services for "opportunity youth" by increasing flexibility for sites focused on systems change--and makes recommendations for federal leaders to improve its appeal and impact. Building on…