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This paper provides results from the randomized control trial project, Promoting Development and Home Reading of Supplementary Texts for Young Readers in Cambodia. One control and three treatment groups were assessed on how literacy and reading habits changed when households were provided a variety of high-quality and low-cost early reading materials along with varying degrees of encouragement toward building better reading habits. The findings show that providing books in isolation was not enough. Rather, books in conjunction with a network of reading supports was found to be an effective means to boost reading outcomes, including reading proficiency measures, frequency of reading, and attitudes toward reading. The results highlight the need for at-home reading materials in poor households as an integral step to improve early reading. [This paper is a product of the Education Global Practice.]

This paper describes high quality teaching practices in two schools that produce exceptional growth for all kinds of students. These practices focus on making the most of instructional time and exposing students to high quality content in a variety of contexts. They prove teachers don't need to choose between differentiating to meet students' needs and giving them access to grade-level learning.

In this paper we examine academic recovery in 12 mid- to large-sized school districts across 10 states during the 2021-22 school year. Our findings highlight the challenges that recovery efforts faced during the 2021-22 school year. Although, on average, math and reading test score gains during the school year reached the pace of pre-pandemic school years, they were not accelerated beyond that pace. This is not surprising given that we found that districts struggled to implement recovery programs at the scale they had planned. In the districts where we had detailed data on student participation in academic interventions, we found that recovery efforts often fell short of original expectations for program scale, intensity of treatment, and impact. Interviews with a subsample of district leaders revealed several implementation challenges, including difficulty engaging targeted students consistently across schools, issues with staffing and limitations to staff capacity, challenges with scheduling, and limited engagement of parents as partners in recovery initiatives. Our findings on the pace and trajectory of recovery and the challenges of implementing recovery initiatives raise important questions about the scale of district recovery efforts.

Protecting all people from the harmful effects of environmental exposures relies on the coordinated efforts of scientific researchers, regulatory agencies, legislators, and the public. Environmental justice addresses the disproportionate impact that harmful environmental exposures have on individuals and communities who are minoritized and marginalized. It has long been known that environmental problems disproportionately impact these groups; however, addressing these problems has been impeded by structural racism and other biases. Developing effective interventions to eliminate these disparities requires a more diverse and inclusive modern workforce produced by a bottom-up approach beginning with education and professional development of the next generation of researchers. The most effective approaches to addressing inequities rely on active input from impacted populations to ensure cultural and social acceptance and adoption of interventions. Credibly pursuing these efforts in a sustainable, inclusive manner will require a concerted shift in workforce demography. One potential strategy to address these workforce disparities features academic-industry partnerships with targeted professional development programs aimed at minoritized and underserved populations. [This paper was supported by strategic funds from the University Collaboration Office at RTI International and North Carolina Central University.]

Research has shown educators' implicit biases to be a key factor in creating and perpetuating disparities in students' experiences of schooling, learning, and longer-term outcomes, including job opportunities, wealth, and health. Current school reform and transformation efforts are aimed at addressing institutionalized racism in school policies, practices, and cultural systems by implementing implicit bias training for teachers and staff. In this paper, we explain how a school home visits program, Parent Teacher Home Visits (PTHV), is a promising intervention for counteracting implicit biases and improving outcomes for families and students. The PTHV "relational" home visit model focuses on promoting mutually supportive and accountable relationships between educators and families. We present data from a study examining the experiences of 107 educators and 68 family members who participated in PTHV, showing how educators shifted their deficit assumptions about families and students. Although the PTHV model was not created to address implicit biases, we found that the key components of these home visits align with strategies that psychological research has demonstrated effectively counteracting implicit biases and reducing discriminatory behaviors.

Intersectionality highlights that different aspects of individuals' identities are not independent of each other. Instead, they interact to create unique identities and experiences, which cannot be understood by analysing each identity dimension separately or in isolation from their social and historical contexts. Intersectional approaches in this way question the common classification of individuals into groups (male vs. female, immigrant vs. native etc.), which raises important implications for the policy-making process. In education, analyses with an intersectional lens have the potential to lead to better tailored and more effective policies and interventions related to participation, learning outcomes, students' attitudes towards the future, identification of needs, and socio-emotional well-being. Consequently, as elaborated in this paper, some countries have adjusted their policies in the areas of governance, resourcing, developing capacity, promoting school-level interventions and monitoring, to account for intersectionality. Gaps and challenges related to intersectional approaches are also highlighted.

Digital technologies can be used to support the inclusion of diverse student groups in education in a number of ways including enhancing accessibility of educational content, increasing personalisation and providing distance learning opportunities, as was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, persistent digital inequalities can undermine digital equity and inclusion and equity and inclusion in education generally, particularly for the most disadvantaged students. This paper explores the themes of digital equity and inclusion, and maps some of the policies and practices adopted in OECD countries for the equitable and inclusive use of digital tools in education. It highlights the importance of inclusive design and implementation of digital technologies, as well as the need for education systems to focus on capacity building such as teacher training, as well as adequate resourcing of digital tools. It discusses advantages and disadvantages of different approaches, and concludes by highlighting research and policy gaps.

This report, from researchers at ChildObesity180, an initiative of the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, explores the impact of the Boston Foundation's investment in four nonprofits that provide structured physical activity to students. The report finds that investments in "Build Our Kids Success (BOKS)"; "Community Rowing, Inc."; "Playworks"; and "Sportsmen's Tennis and Enrichment Center" had a notable impact on the amount of physical activity students received in school. Once the pandemic forced a remote learning environment, the programs pivoted and innovated to take their work to the online space, with some success. However, the overall amount of physical activity students received in remote learning was, not surprisingly, significantly reduced.

A number of school districts and states have implemented transition intervention programs designed to help high school students graduate ready for college. This study estimates the effectiveness of a transition program implemented statewide in Kentucky for high school seniors called Targeted Interventions (TI). Using 11 years of linked panel data, this study tracks the college progression of seven cohorts of students as they move from high school into college. Using a difference-in-regression discontinuity design, we estimate the program's impact on college credit attainment and transfer as well as the extent to which the program has helped reshape pathways through college. We find that the TI program significantly increased the likelihood that students would take at least 15 credits during the first term in college, a key measure that has been shown to be predictive of college completion. These early effects, however, do not translate into statistically significant impacts on the likelihood of transfers from a 2-year to a 4-year college, or the likelihood of earning enough credits to graduate from college. We discuss some possible explanations for why the TI program did not lead to observable improvements in college transfer or credit accumulation.

This review examines the current literature on the use of digital technologies to support young children with special needs in early childhood education and care (ECEC). It identifies four key areas of focus, which relate to understanding and articulating the purpose and focus for integrating assistive technologies (ATs) in ECEC; activating and integrating expertise in ECEC; developing an engaged community of experience and practice; and promoting and supporting quality AT design. Foundations for further developments are evident across the research literature and the review derives recommendations to provide direction for ECEC policy makers and staff, educational institutions and allied support networks for achieving the promise of AT for children with special needs in ECEC. [This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.]

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) seeks to provide practitioners information about "what works in education." One challenge in understanding "what works" is that effect sizes may not be comparable across studies, which limits the ability to compare the relative effectiveness of multiple interventions. One factor that consistently relates to the magnitude of effect sizes is the type of outcome measure. This paper uses WWC study data to examine differences in average effect sizes by outcome measure type. Controlling for other factors and using advanced meta-analysis, effect sizes found on researcher and developer measures are substantially larger on average than those found on independent measures not related to the intervention under study or the study authors. One implication of this finding is that the WWC should consider whether findings based on researcher and developer measures should be differentiated from those based on independent measures to meet the evidence needs of all WWC stakeholders.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been intensely disruptive to education all around the world. With children in many countries continuing to face prolonged absences from the classroom, innovative solutions are needed to maintain education continuity, especially for the most vulnerable students. Such crises require solutions that go beyond the resources of the 'traditional' education workforce, with local communities and inputs from other sectors playing a potentially important role in ensuring continuity of learning. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Education Development Trust has sought to be highly responsive to the changing needs of educators, system leaders and partners around the world. In doing so, Education Development Trust has developed an evidence base from which new thinking has been developed, called 'Learning Renewed', which reimagines what more effective, equitable and resilient education systems might look like, and how they might better withstand future shocks. This report, the second in the Learning Renewed series, explores the solutions adopted by a team in Kenya, where the roles of community health volunteers (CHVs) have been redesigned to support continuity of learning for the vulnerable girls, and identifies key lessons which may prove valuable both during and beyond the current crisis. To do so, Education Development Trust commissioned a research study to explore, in detail, CHV activities during school closure. Data was collected remotely through surveys, diaries written by CHVs and interviews with stakeholders. The research covered CHVs operating in both rural Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) and urban areas. The research highlighted both many positive outcomes for girls and significant challenges. [Foreword is written by Tony McAleavy. For "Learning Renewed: A Safe Way to Reopen Schools in the Global South. Paper 1 of the Learning Renewed Series," see ED614318.]

College attendance has increased significantly over the last few decades, but dropout rates remain high, with fewer than half of all adults ultimately obtaining a postsecondary credential. This project investigates whether one-on-one college coaching improves college attendance and completion outcomes for former low- and middle-income income state aid recipients who attended college but left prior to earning a degree. We conducted a randomized control trial with approximately 8,000 former students in their early- to mid-20s. Half of participants assigned to the treatment group were offered the opportunity to receive coaching services from InsideTrack, with all communication done remotely via phone or video. Intent-to-treat analyses based on assignment to coaching shows no impacts on college enrollment and we can rule out effects larger than a two-percentage point (5%) increase in subsequent Fall enrollment.

We assess the role of information gaps in understanding gender differences in negotiation behavior by conducting a randomized information experiment on the 2018 to 2020 graduating cohorts of undergraduate business majors from Boston University. Prior to starting their job search, treated students were provided with objective information about the gender gap in negotiation among their peers along with the earnings changes conditional on negotiating. We find sizable immediate effects on negotiation intentions that persist to actual negotiation behavior, particularly for men. While the treatment affects women's negotiation behavior through belief-updating, the effects on men's behavior are primarily through increased salience of the information. Further, we find some evidence that gender-specific treatment spillovers likely contribute to the smaller average treatment effects on behavior for women. Overall, our findings suggest that such information interventions can help to nudge women who have potentially large financial returns to negotiation to realize these gains.

This report, commissioned by the Bay Area Geographic Leads Consortium, explores how five county offices of education and local school districts pivoted to reach, teach, and support the holistic needs of students experiencing homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report documents the rising number of students experiencing homelessness as well as the causes and consequences of childhood homelessness. It also describes how educators faced unique challenges and creatively found solutions to educating students without a stable home or an appropriate place to attend school remotely. Each county offers promising examples of ways to provide instruction and learning supports to students without homes and meaningful ways to deliver urgently needed social-emotional, mental health, and well-being assistance to students and families, including meeting basic needs such as food and shelter. The report also describes innovative ways that the counties addressed technology and connectivity gaps that resulted from the shift to distance learning and collaborated with community-based partners.

The main focus of the paper is on youth unemployment and wider transitions into work, but it also has some thoughts on adult unemployment and re-training. This paper is founded upon a basic assumption -- namely that if the public money available across the United Kingdom to support measures around skills and unemployment is finite, then targeting those most at risk and defining which kinds of measures are the most cost-effective will be important. The information already available (Wilson et al, 2020) suggests that it is known which sectors, occupations, localities and kinds of people will most likely be hardest hit by the coming recession. The main issues will be deciding: (1) What groups to prioritise, which interventions will work best and most cost-effectively, and also which can be delivered to swiftly address the immediate problems liable to emerge as the furlough scheme is wound down and school, college and university leavers hit a disrupted labour market; and (2) what additional measures will be needed in the longer term as some groups experience extended periods of unemployment.

This paper evaluates the academic impact of a growth-mindset intervention on students starting the secondary level in public schools in urban Peru. ¡Expande tu Mente! is a 90-minute school session aimed at instilling the notion that a person's own intelligence is malleable. Students in schools randomly assigned to treatment showed a small improvement in math test scores and educational expectations, with a large and sustained impact in test scores among students outside the capital city. At a cost of $0.20 per pupil, ¡Expande tu Mente! was highly cost-effective. The results show the potential that brief growth-mindset interventions have for developing countries. [This paper is a product of the Poverty and Equity Global Practice.]

Although policymakers generally appreciate the value of crafting policies that are responsive to teacher and principal voice, doing so in a systematic way is challenging. Educator voices in the room when policies are made are often those of teachers and principals closest to policymakers. In 2019, to broaden the range of educator voices available to policymakers in Wisconsin, we asked more than 2,200 teachers and 700 principals in public schools in Wisconsin how "they" would change policy to improve the academic success of economically disadvantaged students. In total, 1,559 teachers and 601 principals offered suggestions for changing policy across four categories: school level--academic, student level, school level--non-academic, and community level. Though we saw variation in responses based on percent of student body eligible for free and reduced-priced lunch, grade levels served (elementary, middle, high school) and community type (city, suburb, town, rural), many responses appear with similar frequency among practitioners across contexts--indicating promise for making broader changes that impact all schools.

Racism exists within communities and within colleges. It is ever-present in the structures that professionals in the California Community Colleges system work within and that students of color must navigate. Striving to achieve equity is not enough and is not possible within the current community college system. Policies, processes, and other systemic structures built on a history of racism must first be dismantled and then rebuilt with a focus on equity and inclusion. Dismantling racist structures requires a review of the history that created those structures. It requires understanding the history of the construct of race as a culture, the white supremacy ideology, the centuries of laws intended to maintain positions of power for whites, and the ways in which the equity and diversity efforts within California's community colleges have fallen short. Constructing anti-racist structures and developing anti-racist campus cultures require an understanding of the tenets of antiracism education and principles for professional development. This paper provides foundational information for California community college practitioners to better understand the origins of today's racial conflict and reasons why gaps in achieving equitable educational outcomes for students, particularly for students of color, cannot be closed within current systems. The paper is intended to engage college practitioners in self-reflection and critical consciousness as they develop and deliver the strategic anti-racism education and professional development needed to reconstruct campus cultures and learning environments built on principles of equity and inclusion. It concludes with recommendations for individual growth, for local academic senates, for colleges and districts, and for the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges. [Title varies: "Anti-Racism Education in the California Community Colleges: Acknowledging Historical Context and Assessing and Advancing Effective Anti-Racism Practices for Faculty Professional Development."]

Although many programs remotely disseminate information to students about the college application process, there is little evidence as to how students experience these programs. This paper examines a large-scale remote counseling program in which college counselors initiated interactions with 15,000 high school seniors via text message to support them through the college application process. Given the passive nature of text messaging, not all of the counselors' prompts elicited similar responses from students. I use text-as-data methods (combining qualitative coding and supervised machine learning) to measure which interactions lead to productive engagement between counselors and students, and which do not. I show that interactions about financial aid offers and financial aid applications are much more likely to generate productive engagement than interactions about college lists. This finding may help to explain why recent remote counseling interventions that have sought to influence students' college lists have been ineffective.

Key competences are important for personal development, employment, integration into society and lifelong learning. They are transversal and form the basis for all other competences. Acquiring key competences is possible through various learning pathways, including vocational education and training (VET). However, little is known at the European level of how VET supports the key competence development. This research paper investigates three key competences: digital, multilingual and literacy. It analyses the extent to which they are included in initial upper secondary VET in the EU-27, Iceland, Norway and the UK, as well as national policies supporting their development since 2011. It focuses on four areas of intervention: standards, programme delivery, assessment and teacher/trainer competences.

This study adds to the currently limited evidence base on the efficacy of interventions targeting non-college-ready high school students by examining the impact of Kentucky's Targeted Interventions (TI) program. We focus on interventions that students received under TI in the senior year of high school based on their 11th grade ACT test scores. Using difference-in-regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference designs with seven cohorts of 11th grade students, we find that, for an average per-student cost of about $600, TI significantly reduces the likelihood that students enroll in remedial course in both 2- and 4-year postsecondary institutions by 5-10 percentage points in math and 3-4 percentage points in English. These effects are similar among students who are eligible for free-or reduced-price lunch, Black and Hispanic students, students with remediation needs in multiple subjects, and students in lower-performing schools. Evidence also shows that TI increases the likelihood that students enroll in and pass college math before the end of the first year by four percentage points in 4-year universities. However, little evidence exists for TI affecting credit accumulation or persistence.

In the past decade, hundreds of impact evaluation studies have measured the learning outcomes of education interventions in developing countries. The impact magnitudes are often reported in terms of "standard deviations," making them difficult to communicate to policy makers beyond education specialists. This paper proposes two approaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of learning interventions, one in "equivalent years of schooling" and another in the net present value of potential increased lifetime earnings. The results show that in a sample of low- and middle-income countries, one standard deviation gain in literacy skill is associated with between 4.7 and 6.8 additional years of schooling, depending on the estimation method. In other words, over the course of a business-as-usual school year, students learn between 0.15 and 0.21 standard deviation of literacy ability. Using that metric to translate the impact of interventions, a median structured pedagogy intervention increases learning by the equivalent of between 0.6 and 0.9 year of business-as-usual schooling. The results further show that even modest gains in standard deviations of learning--if sustained over time--may have sizeable impacts on individual earnings and poverty reduction, and that conversion into a non-education metric should help policy makers and non-specialists better understand the potential benefits of increased learning. [This paper is a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Africa Region and the World Development Report 2018 Team.]

This paper evaluates and compares two randomized interventions in Tonga, one targeting the home environment of children up to age 5 and one targeting the school environment for first and second grade students. The first intervention supports communities to set up and run playgroups that aim to improve caregiver-child interaction at home and ultimately improve children's readiness for school. Among children of mothers without high school education, being in a treatment community positively affects the school readiness literacy domains and overall score by 0.19 and 0.2 standard deviation, respectively, for girls and the literacy domains for boys by 0.17 standard deviation. The second intervention provides teachers with training, materials, and coaching to improve reading instruction practices and students' reading ability. It increased average early grade reading scores by approximately 0.18 standard deviation per year of exposure. Two cohorts of children were potentially exposed to both interventions, providing an opportunity to compare, for the same population of children, the effects of an early childhood intervention with a school-based intervention using a common measure of learning achievement. The school readiness intervention is found to have positive effects on early grade reading scores only among children in the reading intervention's control group; effect sizes of approximately 0.29 standard deviation were found at the end of second grade for children exposed to one year of the school readiness intervention and at the end of first grade for girls exposed to two years of the intervention. [This paper is a product of the Education Global Practice.]

In spite of advances in recognising that girls and boys, and women and men, do not have to be bounded by traditional roles, gender stereotypes persist in education and beyond. Children and youth are affected by gender stereotypes from the early ages, with parental, school, teacher and peer factors influencing the way students internalise their gender identities. As such, not only is intervening in pre-primary education necessary, but also measures at the primary and secondary levels are key to eradicate gender stereotypes and promote gender equality. Based on the analytical framework developed by the OECD Strength through Diversity project, this paper provides an overview of gender stereotyping in education, with some illustrations of policies and practices in place across OECD countries, with a focus on curriculum arrangements, capacity-building strategies and school-level interventions in primary and secondary education.

The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction "Guidelines for Serving Students with Specific Learning Disabilities in the Education Setting" (ED591017) recognizes that dyslexia is associated with a specific learning disability in the area of basic reading skills. Students with dyslexia may have difficulty not only with reading, but also with spelling and performing other skills related to the use of printed language. Many students with dyslexia have difficulties identifying separate speech sounds within a word and learning how individual letters represent sounds. A student with dyslexia does not lack intelligence or the desire to learn. This purpose of this document is to provide parents, educators, administrators and others with a resource that may assist in learning more about dyslexia. Additional resources that may increase in understanding dyslexia are listed the end of this document.

Many students still leave school without a good grasp of basic literacy, despite the negative implications for future educational and labour market outcomes. We evaluate a programme that involves changing how resources are used within classrooms to reinforce the teaching of literacy. Specifically, the programme involves training teaching assistants to deliver a tightly structured package of materials to groups of young children. Further, we compare the effectiveness of computer-aided instruction using available software with the paper equivalent. We implement the experiment in the context of a Randomised Control Trial in English schools. Both interventions have a short-term impact on children's reading scores, although the effect is bigger for the paper intervention and more enduring in the subsequent year. This paper shows how teaching assistants can be used to better effect within schools, and at a low cost.

This working paper will share the experience of Ashta No Kai (ANK), a grassroots nonprofit the author founded in 1998 in 10 villages in Shirur County, Maharashtra state, India, to promote the empowerment and education of women and girls in rural areas. The paper will, at first, examine the state of education in India including the Indian government's policies and programs that are attempting to address the gender gap in girls' education. Next, the barriers that girls in rural areas face to access their right to an education will be discussed followed by an introduction of various holistic, need-based, and low-cost educational interventions that ANK has initiated to address some of these impediments. Findings will then be reported from quantitative and qualitative surveys conducted, as well as case studies to gauge the impact of these interventions. Finally, the paper will propose evidence-based recommendations of integrated and sustainable strategies and approaches as guidance to policy practitioners to help promote educational outcomes and enhanced agency for adolescent girls to better navigate their world.

In many countries, schools and classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse along a variety of dimensions, including migration; ethnic groups, national minorities and Indigenous peoples; gender; gender identity and sexual orientation; special education needs; and giftedness. To navigate this diversity, adopting a multidimensional and intersectional lens could help education systems promote equity and inclusion in education and foster the well-being and learning of all students. Such an approach could also support education systems in preparing all individuals so that they can engage with others in increasingly complex and diverse societies. To build equitable and inclusive education systems, analysing policy issues regarding governance arrangements, resourcing schemes, capacity building, school-level interventions, and monitoring and evaluation is key. The "Strength through Diversity: Education for Inclusive Societies" project seeks to help governments and education systems address diversity to achieve more equitable and inclusive education systems. This paper presents the project's theoretical and analytical framework.

This paper presents findings on the implementation and impacts of Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) in Oakland, California, where the school district conducted the nation's first randomized controlled trial of LLI in secondary grades. LLI is a short-term, intensive intervention designed to help teachers provide small-group instruction to struggling readers. Many school districts across the country have used LLI, which research evidence has shown to rapidly improve outcomes for students in early elementary grades. During the trial, secondary schools in Oakland faced various challenges implementing LLI, leading students to experience different levels of LLI duration, intensity, and fidelity. LLI had no impact on students' reading comprehension and a negative impact on their mastery of English language arts/literacy standards. Students who were pulled out of other classes to receive LLI were particularly negatively affected, possibly as a result of missing grade-level content. This study's findings highlight challenges in implementing effective literacy interventions for struggling adolescent readers.

In the summer of 2013, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) issued public, highly-visible ratings of teacher education programs as part of their ambitious and controversial Teacher Prep Review. We provide the first empirical examination of NCTQ ratings, beginning with a descriptive overview of the ratings and documentation of how they evolved from 2013-2016, both in aggregate and for programs with different characteristics. We also report on results from an information experiment built around the initial ratings release. In the experiment we provided targeted information about specific programmatic changes that would improve the rating for a randomly selected sample of elementary teacher education programs. Average program ratings improved between 2013 and 2016, but we find no evidence that the information intervention increased program responsiveness to NCTQ's rating effort. In fact, treated programs had lower ratings than the control group in 2016.

The Center for Positive Practices (CPP) conducted an analysis and synthesis of K-12 educational achievement gaps in New Mexico. The white paper was requested by the New Mexico based Coalition for the Majority, which includes various institutions, organizations and individuals supporting the New Mexico English Learner Teacher Preparation Act. The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize some current research preferably conducted in New Mexico regarding the achievement gap faced by two academically lower-achieving ethnic sub-groups: Hispanic/Latino and Native American students. These ethnic populations account for about 60 percent and 10 percent respectively of the state public education system. Based on NAEP results, New Mexico school children have for more than 20 years performed lower than the national average in what are often considered the fundamental subjects of mathematics, reading, writing, and science. With just a few exceptions, New Mexico frequently ranks near the bottom across grades and academic subjects when compared to all 50 U.S. states. When disaggregated both nationally and within-state, results show that the studied ethnic groups consistently perform at lower levels. Because of the multivariate nature of achievement gaps in education, the author finds that there is no one-size-fits-all approach that would solve the equity issues across the state's many districts and schools. Current national and statewide strategies are not producing adequate solutions for reducing the gaps. CPP suggests that schools need to combine in-school action research with external guidance to find solutions at the school level. The state system should also increase relevant training and supports in action research strategies for the stream of future leaders and emerging experts we place into education. Doing so will improve their performance capabilities for their respective roles as active researchers, analysts, strategists and evaluators (i,e. experts) in their specific contexts, which includes the classroom level. Also included is Appendix A: Legislative History.

According to UNESCO, one-third of the world's youths are victims of bullying, which deteriorates academic performance and mental health, and increases suicide ideation and the risk of committing suicide. This paper analyzes a four-month parent-directed intervention designed to foster empathy in middle schoolers in China. Our implementation and evaluation study enrolled 2,246 seventh and eighth graders and their parents, whom we assigned, at the classroom level, to the control or intervention condition randomly. We measured, before and after the intervention, parental investments, children's empathy, and self-reported bullying perpetration and victimization incidents. Our analyses show that the intervention increased investments and empathy and reduced bullying incidents. In addition, we measured costs and found that it costs $12.50 for our intervention to reduce one bullying incident. Our study offers a scalable and low-cost strategy that can inform public policy on bullying prevention in other similar settings.

The paper evaluates math performance at four high-need middle schools during a four-year intervention, which was designed to help math teachers diagnose students' areas of need and to design lesson plans responsive to those needs. Before the intervention began, the researchers pre-selected four comparison schools by matching based on achievement and also on demographics. A difference-in-difference analysis finds a significant increase of about 0.11 standard deviation in test scores per year for students in the program schools. Supplementary event study and synthetic control analyses to detect year-by-year effects lack precision but are weakly suggestive of a smaller impact in year 1 than later years. A cost analysis considers the affordability of extending similar programs.

Under waivers to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the federal government required states to identify schools where targeted subgroups of students have the lowest achievement and to implement reforms in these "Focus Schools." In this study, we examine the Focus School reforms in the state of Kentucky. The reforms in this state are uniquely interesting for several reasons. One is that the state developed unusually explicit guidance for Focus Schools centered on a comprehensive school-planning process. Second, the state identified Focus Schools using a "super subgroup" measure that combined traditionally low-performing subgroups into an umbrella group. This design feature may have catalyzed broader whole-school reforms and attenuated the incentives to target reform efforts narrowly. Using regression discontinuity designs, we find that these reforms led to substantial improvements in school performance, raising math achievement by 17 percent and reading achievement by 9 percent.

States that received federal waivers to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act were required to implement reforms in designated "Focus Schools" that contribute to achievement gaps. In this study, we examine the performance effects of such "differentiated accountability" reforms in the state of Louisiana. The Focus School reforms in Louisiana emphasized school-needs assessments and aligned technical assistance. These state reforms may have also been uniquely high-powered because they were linked to a new letter-based school-rating system. We examine the impact of these reforms in a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design based on the assignment of schools to Focus status. We find that, over each of three years, Louisiana's Focus School reforms had no measurable impact on school performance. We discuss evidence that these findings may reflect policy uncertainty and implementation fidelity at the state and local level.

Recent studies show that texting-based interventions can produce educational benefits in children across a range of ages. We study the effects of a text-based program for kindergarten parents, distinguishing a general program from one that adds differentiation and personalization based on the child's developmental level. Children in the differentiated and personalized program were 50 percent more likely to read at a higher level (p<0.01) compared to the general group; and their parents reported engaging more in literacy activities by 0.31 standard deviations (p<0.01) compared to the control group. Effects were driven by children further from average levels of baseline development.

Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge by using information produced by its evaluation and compensation reforms as the basis for effectiveness-adjusted payments that provided large compensating differentials to attract and retain effective teachers in its lowest achievement schools. The Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program offers salary supplements to educators with records of high performance who are willing to work in the most educationally disadvantaged schools. We document that ACE resulted in immediate and sustained increases in student achievement, providing strong evidence that the multi-measure evaluation system identifies effective educators who foster the development of cognitive skills. The improvements at ACE schools were dramatic, bringing average achievement in the previously lowest performing schools close to the district average. When ACE stipends are largely eliminated, a substantial fraction of highly effective teachers leaves, and test scores fall. This highlights the central importance of the performance-based incentives to attract and retain effective educators in previously low-achievement schools.

The effective governance of local public services depends critically on the civic engagement of local citizens. However, recent efforts to promote effective citizen oversight of the public-sector services in developing countries have had mixed results. This study discusses and evaluates a uniquely designed, low-cost, scalable program designed to improve the governance and performance of primary and middle schools in the Punjab province of Pakistan. The School Council Mobilization Program (SCMP) used mobile-phone calls to provide sustained and targeted guidance to local school-council members on their responsibilities and authority. We examine the effects of the SCMP on school enrollment, student and teacher attendance, and school facilities using a "difference in difference in differences" (DDD) design based on the targeted implementation of the SCMP. We find that this initiative led to meaningful increases in primary-school enrollment, particularly for young girls (i.e., a 12.4 percent increase), as well as targeted improvements in teacher attendance and school facilities, most of which were sustained in the months after the program concluded.

The 2020 EUA Learning & Teaching Thematic Peer Group on "Approaches in learning and teaching to promoting equity and inclusion" explored how universities can best support inclusion and equity and accommodate the different backgrounds, needs and aspirations of students through various approaches, initiatives and methods. This paper outlines the main challenges identified in addressing equity and inclusivity and provides recommendations for mitigating these challenges for higher education institutions in Europe and elsewhere.