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K-12 Education
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School Improvement Grants (SIG) represent one type of governments’ capacity-building investment to spur sustainable changes in America’s persistently under-performing public schools. This study examines both short- and long-run effects of the first two cohorts of SIG schools from two states and two urban districts across the country. Using dynamic event analyses, we observe that SIG showed larger effects in the second and third years of the intervention than the first year on 3-8th grade student test scores—a pattern of gradually increase over the course the intervention. These positive effects are largely sustained three or four years after the funding ended. In high schools, the SIG effects on 4-year graduation rates were steadily increasing throughout the period of six or seven years after the initial start of the intervention. These patterns of SIG effects mostly apply to each of the four locations, but the magnitude of effects varies across locations, suggesting differential implementations. Moreover, SIG effects on students of color or low-socioeconomic students are similar to, and sometimes a bit larger than, the overall SIG effects. We also conduct a variety of sensitivity and robustness checks. Lastly, we discuss the policy implications of our findings on states’ continuing efforts of transforming public organizations and building their long-term capacity for better performance.
The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA) grants states unprecedented discretion in implementing many of the federal law’s requirements concerning the needs of the nation’s educationally disadvantaged students. This theoretical paper addresses a void in the policy implementation literature on why ESEA reform efforts have not been more effectively sustained. It synthesizes previous research on ESEA by proposing the use of multiple political science frames to guide new empirical research on ESSA’s impacts. These alternative models—ESSA’s Legal Framework, Institutional Actors, and Stakeholder Bargaining—can inform the law’s national impacts on equity for disadvantaged students and the key conditions affecting differences in state responses to the equity challenge ESSA presents.
Political parties in the U.S. are composed of networks of interest groups, according to the extended party network theory. Scholars have focused on national extended party networks. We use the case of education interest groups to explore how policy environments shape party networks on the state level. Using 145,000 campaign contributions from 2000 to 2017, we show that the alignment of education interest groups has changed over time. In 2000, teachers unions were the dominant group and aligned with Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans lacked support from any education group. This pattern was relatively consistent across states. Over time, coalitions diverged, with some state networks polarizing, meaning unions increasingly aligned with Democrats and reform groups with Republicans, while others did not experience such polarization. We find that labor law restrictions and private school choice programs were related to these trends, suggesting that state-level policies shape the contours of state party networks.
Newly emerging teacher residency programs offer an innovative approach to recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers for hard-to-staff schools. This report summarizes the features of these programs and research about their practices and outcomes. These programs create a vehicle to recruit teachers for high-needs fields and locations; offer recruits strong content and clinical preparation specifically for the kinds of schools in which they will teach; connect new teachers to early career mentoring that will keep them in the profession; and provide financial incentives that will keep teachers in the districts that have invested in them.
Recent research demonstrates that, when more money is spent on education for students from low-income families, achievement and graduation rates improve. So, too, do life outcomes such as employment, wages, and reduced poverty rates. Investments in instruction, especially high-quality teachers, appear to leverage the largest marginal gains in performance. School funding reforms in several states have created the conditions for stronger educational outcomes. These reforms funded schools more equitably and provided access to well-prepared and well-supported teachers; standards, curriculum, and assessments focused on 21st-century learning goals; schools organized productively for student and teacher learning; and supportive early learning environments. This report examines these efforts in four states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and North Carolina. Their experiences demonstrate that, in the U.S., equity-focused changes can yield results for students but also require steady work.
Most racial and ethnic segregation—and most financial inequities—in American public schools occur between, not within, school districts. Solving these problems often requires interdistrict solutions based on cooperation within regions. This report uses three examples (Boston, MA; Hartford, CT; and Omaha, NE) to explore how interdistrict desegregation plans with innovative funding strategies have been designed, financed, and implemented. The report describes programs’ academic and social outcomes and identifies four lessons for policymakers: Secure a metropolitan-wide agreement; establish a clear vision for educational equity; sustain efforts with equitable resources; and create a strong data and evaluation plan.
Much is known about how to attract, develop, and retain a strong and stable teacher workforce, and states across the country are taking action to address their teacher shortages in ways that strengthen their overall teacher workforce. This report highlights research on six evidence-based policies that have been used to address teacher shortages and boost teacher recruitment and retention: service scholarships and loan forgiveness, high-retention pathways into teaching, mentoring and induction for new teachers, developing high-quality school principals, competitive compensation, and recruitment policies to expand the pool of qualified educators.
Recent media reports of teacher shortages across the country are confirmed by the analysis of several national data sets reported in this paper. Shortages are particularly severe in special education, mathematics, science, and bilingual/English learner education, and in locations with lower wages and poorer working conditions. Shortages are projected to grow based on declines in teacher education enrollments, coupled with student enrollment growth, efforts to reduce pupil-teacher ratios, and ongoing high attrition rates. If attrition were reduced by half to rates comparable to those in high-achieving nations, shortages would largely disappear. We describe evidence-based policies that could create competitive, equitable compensation packages for teachers; enhance the supply of qualified teachers for high-need fields and locations; improve retention, especially in hard-to-staff schools; and develop a national teacher supply market.
Teacher professional learning is of increasing interest as one way to support the increasingly complex skills students need to succeed in the 21st century. However, many teacher professional development initiatives appear ineffective in supporting changes in teacher practices and student learning. To identify the features of effective professional development, this paper reviews 35 methodologically rigorous studies that have demonstrated a positive link between teacher professional development, teaching practices, and student outcomes. It identifies features of these approaches and offers descriptions of these models to inform those seeking to understand how to foster successful strategies.
Research illustrates the importance of greater teacher diversity because of the substantial benefits teachers of color provide to all students, and to students of color in particular. Studies also show that policies must focus more effectively on retention of teachers of color, if diversity in the teaching profession is to be sustained. While more teachers of color are being recruited than in years past, their turnover rates are high, in part due to inadequate preparation and mentoring, poor teaching conditions, and displacement from the high-need schools in which they teach. Increasing the number of teachers of color in the workforce requires building high-retention pathways into the field that offer high-quality preparation and financial supports, including service scholarships, loan forgiveness programs, teacher residencies, Grow Your Own programs, ongoing mentorship, and other policies and strategies that improve teacher licensure, hiring, professional growth, and teaching conditions for current and aspiring teachers of color.