Our research team explored a political campaign that targeted the Magic City Acceptance Academy (MCAA) as the 'first transgender public school in the South'. Located near Birmingham, Alabama, MCAA opened in fall 2021 as one of the first LGBTQ + affirming charter schools in the United States. In spring 2022, gubernatorial candidate Tim James…

Advocates of charter schools hold that the marketization of education compels all schools to be innovative in raising student achievement outcomes. Opponents of charter schools dispute whether the impact of charter schools on student achievement is statistically sufficient to justify taking resources from traditional public schools. Another…

Lacking a union and having a lower salary rating than most of the nation's states, North Carolina has had an increased number of teacher vacancies over the past decade. The problem addressed by this study was the lack of retention of qualified K-6 teachers across the state of North Carolina. The purpose of this qualitative narrative inquiry study…

School nurses represent cost-effective investments in students' health and educational success. Alternative high schools (AHSs) serve an understudied population of youth who are at risk for school dropout and face numerous social inequities, heightening their risk for poor health outcomes. In this two-phase explanatory sequential mixed methods…

The American School District Panel (ASDP) is a nationally representative set of more than 1,000 school district leaders who agree to take surveys over time. RAND recruits ASDP members using probabilistic sampling methods, which allow researchers to weight survey results to generalize to the national population of school districts and charter…

This fact sheet reports data from the 2017-18 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), a biennial survey of nearly all public schools and school districts, including charter schools, in the United States. It explores information about identified English learners (ELs) who attended charter schools in school year (SY) 2017-18. Graphics include: (1)…

The presence of tablets and laptops in schools has burgeoned in recent years, with $4.9 billion spent on over 10.8 million devices in 2015. Despite the large and increasingly prevalent monetary and time investments in education technology, little causal evidence of its effectiveness exists. I estimate the effect of a Math and English Language Arts…

Principal leadership is at the core of successful school turnaround. This qualitative study explored principals' perceptions of the success or failure of turnaround methods in their New York City charter school communities. Principal leadership of low-performing schools is one of the most important elements of turnaround success (Stronge & Xu,…

The purpose of this causal-comparative, ex post facto quantitative study was to determine "What are the differences in third-grade reading at the college and career readiness level in charter schools compared to traditional public schools?" The study took place in North Carolina charter and traditional public schools. The sample…

Each year school administrators find themselves in the position of hiring new teachers and onboarding them to the unique expectations and context of the school. Such work most often happens while these new teachers are actively doing the work of teaching, with few contracted hours of training available. Limited research has focused on the…

The purpose of this research was to explore the lived experiences of high school mathematics teachers with regards to postsecondary readiness, specifically how those experiences informed their perceptions of and experience with developing postsecondary readiness skills in their students. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in person and via…

The 2023-2024 Indiana Assessments Policy Manual communicates established guidelines regarding appropriate test administration in Indiana for key stakeholders including educators and Test Coordinators. This document contains policy guidance and appendices that delineate specific aspects of test implementation, including test security protocol,…

Research on charter schools tends to focus on direct and immediate effects on student outcomes. However, there may be unintended indirect effects on, for example, the teacher labor market. Charter schools tend to hire teachers with fewer traditional teaching credentials, which may reduce the equilibrium quantity of teachers who have traditional…

The purpose of this quantitative action research study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an organization-wide book study in the K-12 environment. A growing charter school network was working towards an improved organizational culture to meet its mission. This study examined whether an organization-wide book study can make a difference in…

Historically marginalized students, especially urban students attending under-resourced schools, experience lower levels of belongingness than their white peers in suburban, well-resourced schools. Much research highlights that student belongingness increases student outcomes such as on-time graduation, standardized test achievement, and lifetime…