We used a situated approach to examine the aftermath of citations for racial disparities in special education and discipline. The study was conducted in one suburban school district and examined staff's interpretations and responses to multiple disproportionality citations. We found that historical, spatial, and sociocultural contexts mediated…

New York City's Pre-K for All (PKA) is the nation's largest universal early childhood initiative, serving over 64,000 four-year-olds annually. Stemming from the program's choice architecture as well as the city's stark residential segregation, PKA programs are extremely segregated by child race/ethnicity. Our current study explores the complex…

We use data from the Stanford Education Data Archive to describe district-level trends in average academic achievement between 2009 and 2019. Although on average school districts' test scores improved very modestly (by about 0.001 standard deviations per year), there is significant variation among districts. Moreover, we find that average test…

At least 38 states have created service areas or "districts" for each of their community colleges. However, little is known about the geographic boundaries of community college districts and the policymaking process that defines them. We studied state policy documents nationally and the actual district boundaries of Texas community…

This study examines implementation of college-and-career-ready (CCR) education standards across five school districts in Ohio, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Drawing on the policy attributes theory, we found that the specificity of districts' approaches to two long-recognized policy levers, curriculum and professional…

Latinx students now make up the largest share of charter school students nationally. In this article, I focus on Latinx charter school choosers in Houston, Texas, and ask what motivates Latinx parents to exit district schools. Drawing on interviews with 31 families, I find that perceptions of present and future risk motivate charter school choice.…

A core motivation for the widespread teacher evaluation reforms of the past decade was the belief that these new systems would promote teacher development through high-quality feedback. We examine this theory by studying teachers' perceptions of evaluation feedback in Boston Public Schools and evaluating the district's efforts to improve feedback…

The transition to new assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards was a significant turning point in the standards' implementation. Concerns about the transition led districts to suspend the use of value-added scores for evaluating teachers, but changes to other measures, such as classroom observations, were rare. Using data from the…

Using a nationally representative sample of U.S. public school districts, we explored the current landscape of social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) approaches and their impact on behavioral outcomes. Data suggest SEB screening is the exception rather than the rule, with most districts reporting that students are referred to an internal support…

Resource exposure was a key mechanism linking patterns of racial segregation and student outcomes during the Brown v. Board of Education era. Decades later, past progress on school desegregation may have stalled, raising concerns about resource equity and associated student outcomes. Are recent trends in segregation associated with racial…

The Every Student Succeeds Act builds on prior efforts to bridge the gap between research and practice through the imposition of evidence requirements. This article presents findings from a small-scale micro-process study of three districts in one state during their first year of implementing those requirements. Informed by past conceptualizations…

In recent years, some U.S. school districts have shifted away from direct management of schools, toward systems in which some or all schools operate under enhanced autonomy, accountability, and parental choice. Yet dynamics driving these changes are understudied, and there are few comparative studies of system-level governance shifts. To address…

This article documents the patterns of White-Black and White-Hispanic enrollment gaps in Advanced Placement (AP) and Dual Enrollment (DE) programs across thousands of school districts in the United States by merging several data sources. We show that the vast majority of districts have racial enrollment gaps in both programs, with wider gaps in AP…

Using mixed methods, we investigated (a) the association of the extent of English learner (EL) classroom-level segregation (proportion EL) and number of EL English proficiency levels with elementary EL academic achievement, using 2 years of administrative data, and (b) school staff--reported opportunity to learn-related advantages and…

In this experimental study, 20 multiple-choice test items from the Massachusetts Grade 5 science test were linguistically simplified, and original and simplified test items were administered to 310 English learners (ELs) and 1,580 non-ELs in four Massachusetts school districts. This study tested the hypothesis that specific linguistic features of…