This article evaluates the impact and cost-effectiveness of offering an innovative middle school model--the Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial (SAT)--to Honduran villages instead of traditional middle schools. We identified a matched sample of villages with either type of school and collected baseline data among primary school graduates eligible to…

Colleges and universities are being pressed to seek innovative ways to measure student learning outcomes and identify the conditions that lead to their development. Understanding how students group according to a multidimensional set of learning outcomes provides information on the extent to which institutions are meeting goals. This study…

It is often difficult and costly to obtain individual-level student achievement data, yet, researchers are frequently reluctant to use school-level achievement data that are widely available from state websites. We argue that public-use aggregate school-level achievement data are, in fact, sufficient to address a wide range of evaluation questions…

Interim assessments are increasingly common in U.S. schools. We use high-quality data from a large-scale school-level cluster randomized experiment to examine the impact of two well-known commercial interim assessment programs on mathematics and reading achievement in Indiana. Results indicate that the treatment effects are positive but not…

States vary greatly in their implementation of standards-based accountability under No Child Left Behind, yet little evidence is available to guide policymakers on what attributes of state policy advance more tightly aligned instruction. This study uses survey data and content analyses from the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum to describe elements of…

Analyzing mathematics and reading achievement outcomes from a district-level random assignment study fielded in over 500 schools within 59 school districts and seven states, the authors estimate the 1-year impacts of a data-driven reform initiative implemented by the Johns Hopkins Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education (CDDRE). CDDRE…

The Supplemental Educational Services (SES) provision of the No Child Left Behind Act offers free tutoring services to students attending perennially underperforming schools. The author assesses the extent to which Chicago Public Schools students most in need of and who could potentially benefit the most from additional academic instruction…

In this article the authors analyze the effect of private voucher education on student academic performance using new data on Chilean students and a novel identification strategy. Most schools in Chile provide either primary or secondary education. The authors analyze the effect of private voucher education on students who are forced to enroll at…

The authors expand on research evaluating public school response to school choice policies by considering the particular influence of voucher programs for disabled students--a growing type of choice program that may have different implications for public school systems from those of more conventional choice programs. The authors provide a…

Many policymakers suggest that school-based reading coaches can improve teachers' practice, which consequently will improve students' literacy skills. Although reading coaches are increasingly prevalent in schools nationwide, empirical evidence for their effects on student achievement is scarce. This article helps to address this gap by conducting…

Schools that have not made adequate yearly progress in increasing student academic achievement are required, under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), to offer children in low-income families the opportunity to receive supplemental educational services (SES). In research conducted in Milwaukee Public Schools, the authors explore whether parents and…

Evaluating the impacts of public school funding on student achievement has been an important objective for informing education policymaking but fraught with data and methodological limitations. Findings from prior research have been mixed at best, leaving policymakers with little advice about the benefits of allocating public resources to schools…

This article evaluates changes in racial and ethnic composition of three Texas universities following the ban on affirmative action imposed by the 1996 "Hopwood" decision. The authors estimate the extent to which universities practiced affirmative action before the ban and evaluate how officers at these universities responded by changing relative…

This article presents evidence from a national evaluation of the effects of 21st Century Community Learning Center after-school programs. The study was conducted in 12 school districts and 26 after-school centers, at which 2,308 elementary school students who were interested in attending a center were randomly assigned either to the treatment or…

The supplemental educational services (SES) provision of No Child Left Behind introduces a federally mandated after-school tutoring intervention in schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress. This article examines market dynamics in relationship to the law's goals of expanding access to and improving the quality of after-school…