This article contributes to our understanding of American education politics by exploring when and why states redistribute K-12 education dollars to poorer schools. It does so by examining three explanations for intrastate changes in progressivity: court-ordered finance reforms, political trends, and demographic changes. Using state-level data…

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…

We used multivariate generalizability theory to examine the reliability of hand-scoring and automated essay scoring (AES) and to identify how these scoring methods could be used in conjunction to optimize writing assessment. Students (n = 113) included subsamples of struggling writers and non-struggling writers in Grades 3-5 drawn from a larger…

One overarching goal for rural place-based education is to influence adolescents' aspirations to stay in the community to help sustain and revitalize the local economy. The authors explore the relationship of place-based workforce development in science and mathematics classes with motivation (i.e., expectancy beliefs and science, technology,…

Supporting teacher learning for normative change in classroom learning environments creates significant demands on principal leadership. We offer an analytic framework that aims to understand principal practice for instructional transformation. The framework examines how the principal's conception of teacher learning shapes practice in relation to…

This study examines the impacts of two AmeriCorps programs, Minnesota Reading Corps and Wisconsin Reading Corps, where AmeriCorps volunteers provide literacy tutoring to at-risk kindergarten through third-grade (K-3) students utilizing a response-to-intervention framework. This evaluation replicates a prior randomized controlled trial evaluation…

Informational text--resources whose purpose is to inform--is essential to daily life and fundamental to literacy. Unfortunately, young children typically have limited exposure to informational text. Two 9-week randomized controlled trials with 263 first-grade children from low-income communities examined whether free educational videos and digital…

Many Black educators in the United States demonstrate a political clarity about white supremacy and the racialized harm it cultivates in and out of schools. We highlight the perspectives of some of these educators and ask, (1) How do they articulate the need to protect Black children? and (2) What mechanisms of protection do they enact in their…

The Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) is a system of standardized portfolio assessments of teaching performance mandated for use by educator preparation programs in 18 states, and approved in 21 others, as part of initial certification for preservice teachers. Because of the high stakes involved for examinees, it is critical that…

Attracting and retaining teachers can be an important ingredient in improving low-performing schools. In this study, we estimate the expressed preferences for teachers who have worked in low-performing schools in Tennessee. Using adaptive conjoint analysis survey design, we examine three types of school attributes that may influence teachers'…

This cluster randomized controlled trial investigated the impact of project-based learning with professional development supports on social studies and literacy achievement and motivation of second-grade students from low-socioeconomic status school districts. At random in within-school pairs, 48 teachers were assigned to the experimental or…

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…

More than a third of students enter higher education at a community college; most aim to earn a baccalaureate. Drawing on sense-making theory and longitudinal qualitative data, we examined how community college students interpret state transfer policies and how their interpretations influence subsequent behavior. Data from 3 years of interviews…

We draw on rich longitudinal data from one of the largest teacher education programs in Texas to examine the properties of rubric-based observational evaluations of preservice teachers (PSTs) during clinical teaching. Using a variance decomposition approach, we find that little of the variation in observation scores is attributable to actual…

Prior research has shown that English learner (EL) classification is consequential for students; however, less is known about how EL classification affects student outcomes. In this study, we examine one hypothesized mechanism: teacher perceptions. Using a national data set (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Cohort of 2010-2011 or…