A news story on a WestEd working paper about failure in dual-enrollment courses. Quoting co-author Jenna Howard Terrell, it reports that disadvantaged students fail more often, but that even students who fail still enroll in college at higher rates than peers who never took dual enrollment.
An explainer summarizing research on four-day school weeks. It describes Cade Lawson's Texas study of teacher turnover and the Brighton, Colo., study by Nowak, Perrone and Smith (linked from the article), along with other research on achievement, behavior and costs.
A Q&A with co-author Carly Robinson about a randomized study that paired 9th grade Algebra 1 students with tutors of the same or opposite gender. Robinson describes how girls with female tutors reported more STEM interest and earned somewhat better grades.
A news story on Christopher Redding's study of teachers' second jobs, based on federal data from 1994 to 2021. It reports how common and how lucrative extra work is, and that extra jobs inside schools are linked to better retention while outside jobs are linked to leaving.
An overview of new state teacher-pay experiments in Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas and Utah. For Arkansas's LEARNS salary floor, it cites early findings from Gema Zamarro and colleagues that the raise improved rural recruitment and retention.
A news story on a working paper about Ohio's third-grade reading retention policy. It reports Sarah Souders and colleagues' finding that the threat of retention raised scores for students near the cutoff, possibly because of the reading interventions they received.
A news article on a working paper that tracked about 9,000 Boston students and found that absence rates well below the 10% chronic-absence cutoff predicted later below-grade-level test scores. Lead author Tiffany Wu explains the analysis and argues for a lower threshold.
A news story on a new study of Michigan's Read by Grade 3 law. Co-author Brian Jacob explains that reading gains for students flagged for retention seem to come from the extra support they receive, since very few students were actually held back.
An opinion essay by Thomas Dee arguing that the links between education research, policy and practice are broken. As evidence he cites his own study with Sarah Novicoff of California's Early Literacy Support Block Grant, and he links EdWorkingPapers on declining achievement and on early-literacy policies.
An animated explainer showing how small classroom interruptions add up over a school day. It is built on Matthew Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum's Providence study of external interruptions, including its estimate of instructional time lost.