After-school programs receive federal support through the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, established in 1999. A primary purpose of the program is to provide opportunities for academic enrichment to help students meet state and local standards in core content areas. Findings from a previous national evaluation of the program indicate that…

This paper examines the estimation of two-stage clustered RCT designs in education research using the Neyman causal inference framework that underlies experiments. The key distinction between the considered causal models is whether potential treatment and control group outcomes are considered to be fixed for the study population (the…

One of the main policy responses to the problems of turnover and inadequate preparation among beginning teachers is to support them with a formal, comprehensive induction program. Congressional interest in formal, comprehensive teacher induction has grown in recent years. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which reauthorized the…

For RCTs of education interventions, it is often of interest to estimate associations between student and mediating teacher practice outcomes, to examine the extent to which the study's conceptual model is supported by the data, and to identify specific mediators that are most associated with student learning. This paper develops statistical power…

Improving the ability of disadvantaged students to read and comprehend text is also fundamental to the federal education policy aimed at closing the achievement gap between low- and high-achieving students. Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 calls on educators to close the gap using approaches shown to be effective through…

Many U.S. children start school with weak math skills, and children from poor households lag behind those from affluent ones. These differences grow over time, resulting in substantial differences in math achievement by the time students reach grade 4. The federal Title I program provides financial assistance to schools with a high number or…

This report summarizes the findings from a national evaluation of mentoring programs funded under the U.S. Department of Education's Student Mentoring Program. The impact evaluation used an experimental design in which students were randomly assigned to a treatment or control group. Thirty-two purposively selected School Mentoring Programs and…

The purpose of this large-scale, national study is to determine whether some early elementary school math curricula are more effective than others at improving student math achievement, thereby providing educators with information that may be useful for making adequate yearly progress (AYP). This report presents results from the first cohort of…

The purpose of this large-scale, national study is to determine whether some early elementary school math curricula are more effective than others at improving student math achievement, thereby providing educators with information that may be useful for making adequate yearly progress (AYP). This report presents results from the first cohort of…

The "District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act of 2003," passed by the Congress in January 2004, established the first federally funded, private school voucher program in the United States. The purpose of the new scholarship program was to provide low-income residents, particularly those whose children attend schools in need of improvement…

The "District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act of 2003," passed by the Congress in January 2004, established the first federally funded, private school voucher program in the United States. The purpose of the new scholarship program was to provide low-income residents, particularly those whose children attend schools in need of improvement…

In randomized control trials (RCTs) in the education field, the complier average causal effect (CACE) parameter is often of policy interest, because it pertains to intervention effects for students who receive a meaningful dose of treatment services. This report uses a causal inference and instrumental variables framework to examine the…

This study addresses two questions related to teacher preparation and certification: (1) What are the relative effects on student achievement of teachers who chose to be trained through different routes to certification and how do observed teacher practices vary by chosen route to certification?; and (2) What aspects of certification programs…

In the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Congress called for the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to conduct a rigorous study of the conditions and practices under which educational technology is effective in increasing student academic achievement. A 2007 report presenting study findings for the 2004-2005 school year, indicated that, after one…

This document reports on the impacts on student achievement for four supplemental reading curricula that use similar overlapping instructional strategies designed to improve reading comprehension in social studies and science text. Fifth-grade reading comprehension for each of three commercially-available curricula (Project CRISS, ReadAbout, and…