This report analyzes new data on student debt and repayment, released by the U.S. Department of Education in October 2017. Previously available data have been limited to borrowers only, follow students for a relatively short period (3-5 years) after entering repayment, and had only limited information on student characteristics and experiences.…

There is increasing momentum behind the idea that curriculum materials, including textbooks, represent a powerful lever for education reform. As funders are lining up and state leaders are increasing their policy attention on curriculum materials, this report discusses the very real challenges of this effort. The report draws on my experience over…

We make use of matched birth-school administrative data from Florida, coupled with an extensive survey of instructional policies and practices, to observe which policies and practices are associated with improved test performance for relatively advantaged students in a school, for relatively disadvantaged students in a school, for both, and for…

There is a strong and politically bipartisan push to increase access to government-funded pre-K. This is based on a premise that free and available pre-K is the surest way to provide the opportunity for all children to succeed in school and life, and that it has predictable and cost-effective positive impacts on children's academic success. The…

We describe the findings from a randomized evaluation of a one-year kindergarten math enrichment program, the High 5s program. The program was designed to provide small-group math enrichment in a fun, club-like format to children who had received enriched math instruction the prior year. Participants included 655 kindergarten students in 24…

In this report, the authors examined the elimination of teacher tenure in Florida to better understand how job protections for teachers affect students. The authors focus on identifying the effect of removing tenure as part of Florida's 2011 Student Success Act on student outcomes, and in particular the effect if this legislation on student…

Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), dubbed the "nation's report card," are often used to compare student achievement across states. An important limitation of NAEP is that it does not track the performance of individual students over time, so inferences about how much students are learning must be made by…

The standard model of the role of early experience in human development assumes that children's environments in their first years of life are dominant influences on who they become as adults. The standard model favors interventions to improve children's long-term outcomes that start early in life and are intensive in time and attention from…