This brief provides findings from the full report, "California School Districts and the Emergency Connectivity Fund," which examines the Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF) program's history to determine which school districts applied for funding, what kinds of needs their students and constituent communities were facing at the time, and…

Funding public higher education has long been a shared responsibility between state, local, and federal governments and students and their families (Laderman et al., 2023). While state and local governments fund public institutions directly, the federal government primarily funds higher education through portable student aid, including federal…

Oregon Revised Statute (ORS) 327.016 directs the Oregon Department of Education (ODE) to prepare and publish by June 30 of each year an annual report related to the State School Fund moneys received for English language learner programs and student outcomes. The Annual Reports for English Learners (ELs) in Oregon for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school…

There are more than 43,500 juvenile offenders in residential placement across the country. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's (OJJDP's) reentry programs help ensure that youth have the tools to become productive, law-abiding members of society upon their return. OJJDP's Second Chance Act programs provide specialized…

This paper examines the financial resources allocated to Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) schools under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in the United States. Our analyses demonstrate that CSI schools do receive additional funding and spend more than comparable non-CSI schools. However, we question whether the magnitude of this…

The flexibility federal block grants provide recipients poses challenges for evaluation. These challenges include aggregating data on wide-ranging activities grant recipients implement and the outcomes they achieve. In 2014, we began designing an evaluation to address the challenges of assessing outcomes and to improve outcome accountability for…

Decades of research has suggested that completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) can be a complex, difficult process for postsecondary students and their support networks. However, no extant research has informed federal student aid practitioners and researchers as to what federal student aid jargon terms institutions of…

Achieving prosperity for all Americans could not be more urgent. Although the United States remains the most prosperous nation on earth, millions of citizens are losing faith in the American dream of upward mobility, and in American-style capitalism itself. This crisis of confidence has widened the divide afflicting American politics and cries out…

The American Rescue Plan provides nearly $1.9 trillion in stimulus funds to states with an astounding $123 billion allocated to the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund for safe school re-openings and recovering learning loss. State and local education agencies have enormous responsibility to ensure this money makes a…

The purpose of this flash report is to share with the U.S. Department of Education (Department) observations made by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) concerning grantees and subgrantees inconsistently reporting audit data on Department subprograms, or unique components of a program, to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse (FAC), the designated…

The debate over the federal government's role in education has taken center stage in recent months, with many arguing that it is time to "hand education back to the states." While state control may sound appealing to some, this perspective overlooks the crucial role the federal government has played in establishing and protecting a…

We estimate the effects of Race to the Top (RTTT) on teacher qualifications, work environments, and job attitudes. Drawing on the Schools and Staffing Survey and the National Teacher and Principal Survey, we create a nationally representative data set of public school teachers from 1988 to 2018. We adopt an event study difference-in-differences…

Title IX of the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) provides the Department of Education with funds to award grants to enable states and districts to deliver services to families living in unstable housing situations. The Project UP-START Program (Project UP-START) is a District program designed to identify students living in unstable housing and to…

The recent passage of H.R. 1 by a partisan Congress chooses billionaires over babies, and puts children in unprecedented peril. This Issue Brief describes some of the many ways that H.R. 1 will hurt children in the U.S. and even around the world in the very near term and in the years to come, including that it: (1) Cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid…

The House has passed a budget reconciliation bill that supporters are referring to as a "one big, beautiful bill." However, the authors of this Issue Brief believe that this budget bill threatens the health and nutrition of millions of children and pushes millions of children into poverty in order to provide tax credits for corporations,…