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Departmentalized instruction, in which teachers specialize in one or more core subjects and instruct multiple groups of students in a day, has become increasingly prominent in elementary schools. Using 8 years of data from Massachusetts and a difference-in-differences design, we estimate the effects of departmentalization on student achievement. We find that departmentalization has positive effects in English language arts (ELA) and science and mixed evidence of positive effects in math. These positive effects are not driven by teacher productivity improvements: Consistent with prior findings on teacher specialization, teachers are less effective when specializing in math and no more effective in ELA than when teaching self-contained classrooms. Rather, consistent with the theoretical underpinnings for specialization, departmentalized schools tend to assign teachers to their stronger subjects.

In 1993, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts dramatically overhauled its K-12 education system and created a new school finance formula, building an educational accountability structure to ensure every child has access to a high-quality education. The Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) established academic standards in core subjects, mandated assessments to measure student outcomes on those standards, and established a system for holding schools accountable when students failed to meet basic expectations. This system has helped Massachusetts' public schools become the highest performing in the country. Student outcomes in all tested subjects and across demographic groups have improved steadily over time, but disparities in achievement and attainment exist between the Commonwealth's most privileged students and their less privileged counterparts, many of whom are black or Hispanic. Without the MERA and its requirement to assess every student and publish aggregate academic outcomes, policymakers may not understand the extent of disparity or how to address it as student outcomes data are integral to understanding where Massachusetts' public schools have been, where they are going, and how they can get there. This paper illustrates the importance of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act and how it has positively impacted students over time. It explains why the current accountability system evolved as it did and why preserving the most important aspects of that system is critical if the state is going to fulfill its constitutional obligation to educate all children to a high common standard.

It is now well established that the COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating and unequal impact on student achievement. Test score declines were disproportionately large for historically marginalized students, exacerbating preexisting achievement gaps and threatening educational and economic inequality. In this paper, we use longitudinal student-level NWEA MAP Growth test data to estimate differences in test score declines for students at different points on the prepandemic test distribution. We also test the extent to which students' schools and districts accounted for these differences in declines. We find significant differences in learning loss by baseline achievement, with lower-achieving student's scores dropping 0.100 SD more in math and 0.113 SD more in reading than higher-achieving students' scores. We additionally show that the school a student attended accounts for about three-quarters of this widening gap in math achievement and about one-third in reading. The findings suggest school and district-level policies may have mattered more for learning loss than individual students' experiences within schools and districts. Such nuanced information regarding the variation in the pandemic's impacts on students is critical for policymakers and practitioners designing targeted academic interventions and for tracking disparities in academic recovery. [Additional funding for this report was provided by Kenneth C. Griffin.]

Civic learning is an increasingly salient topic in research, policy, and practice. However, the recent empirical evidence on access to civic learning opportunities is limited. We build on prior research using survey items from the 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress civics assessment and provide descriptive evidence on disparities in access to three categories of civics content and three evidence-based instructional approaches. We highlight inequalities in opportunities by student characteristics, school characteristics, and state characteristics among a national sample of more than 10,000 8th-grade students enrolled in a course with at least some civics focus (controlling for variation in the extent of civics focus). Our findings conflict with most of the prior evidence regarding disparities in access by race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background, favoring Black students, Hispanic students, and students of relatively lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This suggests a shift in recent years, potentially due to an increased focus on equity. English learners and students with disabilities also reported greater access than their counterparts. Other findings include inequalities across school types, school location (city students reporting greater opportunity than both rural and suburban students), census region, and state testing policy. Additional findings are presented, and implications and opportunities for future research are discussed.

Emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges make it difficult for many children and adolescents to engage and succeed at school. Research indicates that at least 20% of all children and adolescents have been diagnosed with one more mental health disorders. Behavioral problems, anxiety, and depression are the most diagnosed mental health issues, and they often co-occur. Moreover, these conditions are being diagnosed at increasingly younger ages. In the past several years there has been a rise in the number of adolescents and young adults with serious mental health issues such as major depression and suicidal ideation, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated mental health problems for children and adolescents. Schools offer promise for providing intensive clinical support to the most at-risk students, and schools are necessary environment to explore the implementation of multi-modal youth mental health services. This paper provides an analysis of an intensive, in-school mental health services model developed and implemented by Effective School Solutions (ESS), a New Jersey based provider of high acuity school based mental health services for K-12 students. We analyze this multi-modal model for its effectiveness in improving educational outcomes for over 3,000 students identified as requiring intensive clinical mental health support across the 2021-22 school year. This analysis reveals that those students receiving High- versus Low-fidelity programming (i.e., multiple sessions per week for at least half of the school year versus for less than half of the school year) had better educational outcomes. Students receiving High-fidelity programming had greater improvements in grade point average (GPA) and greater reductions in absences across the school year. A higher number of in-school clinical sessions per week significantly predicted a greater increase in GPA and a greater reduction in total disciplinary incidents (including out of school suspensions) across the school year. This report provides initial promising evidence that in-school intensive mental health clinical services yield positive effects on students' educational outcomes. Though future research is needed to validate and extend these findings, schools may consider implementing such services onsite to meet students where they are and to optimize students' mental, behavioral, and educational well-being. [This white paper report was published by the Yale Child Study Center."]

To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assess summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Based on students' spring to fall progress, we find a positive impact for summer school on math test achievement (0.03 standard deviation, SD), but not on reading tests. These effects are predominantly driven by students in upper elementary grades. To put the results into perspective, if we assume that these districts have losses similar to those present at the end of the 2022-23 school year (i.e., approximately -0.2 SD), we estimate summer programming closed approximately 2% to 3% of the districts' total learning losses in math, but none in reading. [This research received funding from Kenneth C. Griffin.]

Students' academic motivation has been highlighted as one of the most significant and malleable factors that influence their academic behaviors, college major and career choices, and academic performance. The AIR National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) research team has conducted four studies focused on the role of motivation, relating motivation to NAEP achievement in reading, mathematics, and science across different grade levels in three of the studies and exploring its relationship to students' choice of a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major in college in the fourth study. The current summary report provides a synthesis of these four NAEP studies focused on the role of motivation. First, the reading motivation study analyzed the 2015 grade 8 NAEP reading data to identify the unique effects of student-level reading motivation and aggregated school-level mean reading motivation on reading achievement. Second, the science motivation study used 2015 grade 8 NAEP science assessment data to examine whether student-level science motivation measured by science self-efficacy and science interest, and aggregated school-level science motivation are associated with student science achievement. Both studies applied Hierarchical Linear Modeling techniques to partition variability in student academic achievement (i.e., reading and science) into within- and between-school components after student- and school-level demographic variables are taken into account. Third, the mathematics motivation study used the overlap sample of about 3,500 students who participated both in the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) and the 2013 grade 12 NAEP mathematics assessment to investigate whether mathematics motivation (mathematics identity, self-efficacy, and interest) at grades 9 and 11 is related to grade 12 NAEP mathematics performance, simultaneously taking into account grade 9 mathematics achievement, family and school background factors, and grade 11 educational expectations and high school mathematics course-taking. The fourth study built on the mathematics motivation study to develop a comprehensive conceptual framework that describes how high school STEM course-taking, STEM GPA, and STEM motivational beliefs (mathematics identity, science identity, mathematics self-efficacy, and science self-efficacy) are related to students' decision to choose a STEM major at 4-year colleges, taking into consideration student, family, and school background factors. This study used a nationally representative sample of data from HSLS:09 and the 2013 NAEP grade 12 mathematics assessment.

Despite the growing interest in incorporating response time data into item response models, there has been a lack of research investigating how the effect of speed on the probability of a correct response varies across different groups (e.g., experimental conditions) for various items (i.e., differential response time item analysis). Furthermore, previous research has shown a complex relationship between response time and accuracy, necessitating a functional analysis to understand the patterns that manifest from this relationship. In this study, response time data are incorporated into an item response model for two purposes: (a) to examine how individuals' speed within an experimental condition affects their response accuracy on an item, and (b) to detect the differences in individuals' speed between conditions in the presence of within-condition effects. For these two purposes, by-variable smooth functions are employed to model differential and functional response time effects by experimental condition for each item. This model is illustrated using an empirical data set to describe the effect of individuals' speed on their reading comprehension ability in two experimental conditions of reading medium (paper vs. digital) by item. A simulation study showed that the recovery of parameters and by-variable smooth functions of response time was satisfactory, and that the type I error rate and power of the test for the by-variable smooth function of response time were acceptable in conditions similar to the empirical data set. In addition, the proposed method correctly identified the range of response time where between-condition differences in the effect of response time on the probability of a correct response were accurate. [This is the online version of an article published in "Journal of Educational Measurement."]

This occasional paper is the ninth in a series on the National Quality Framework (NQF). The Education and Care Services National Law and National Regulations govern the minimum standards and requirements that all providers of NQF regulated services must meet, including health and safety requirements. Quality Area 2 of the National Quality Standard (NQS) upholds children's right to be protected and kept safe. The approved provider, nominated supervisors, coordinators and educators have responsibility for supporting the health, safety and wellbeing of all children. In exercising their responsibilities, they must take reasonable care to protect children from foreseeable risk of harm, injury and infection. This paper uses data from the National Quality Agenda Information Technology System (NQA ITS) to provide analysis of trends in serious incidents resulting in injury, trauma or illness in Australian children's education and care services between 1 April 2020 and 31 March 2022.

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.

Chetty et al. (2022) say county density of cross-class friendships (referred to here as "adult-bridging capital") has causal impacts on social mobility within the United States. We instead find that social mobility rates are a function of county density of family capital (higher marriage rates and two-person households), community capital (community organizations, religious congregations, and volunteering), and mean student achievement in grades 3-8. Our models use similar multiple regression equations and the same variables employed by Chetty et al. but also include state fixed effects, student achievement, and family, community, schoolbridging (cross-class high school friendships), and political (participation and institutional trust) capital. School-bridging capital is weakly correlated with mobility if adult-bridging is excluded from the model. R-squared barely changes when adult-bridging is incorporated into the model. When it is included, mobility continues to be significantly correlated with the achievement, family, and community variables but not with school-bridging and political ones. We infer that county mobility rates are largely shaped by parental presence, community life, and student achievement. To enhance mobility, public policy needs to enhance the lives of disadvantaged people at home, in school, and in communities, not just the social class of their friendships.

This paper assesses the reliability and validity of cognitive and socioemotional skills measures and investigates the correlation between schooling, skills acquisition, and labor earnings. The primary data from Pakistan incorporates two innovations related to measurement and sampling. On measurement, the paper develops and implements a battery of instruments intended to capture cognitive and socioemotional skills among young adults. On sampling, the paper uses a panel that follows respondents from their original rural locations in 2003 to their residences in 2018, a period over which 38 percent of the respondents left their native villages. In terms of their validity and reliability, our skills measures compare favorably to previous measurement attempts in low- and middle-income countries. The following are documented in the data: (a) more years of schooling are correlated with higher cognitive and socioemotional skills; (b) labor earnings are correlated with cognitive and socioemotional skills as well as years of schooling; and (c) the earnings-skills correlations depend on respondents' migration status. The magnitudes of the correlations between schooling and skills on the one hand and earnings and skills on the other are consistent with a widespread concern that such skills are under-produced in the schooling system. [This report was prepared by the World Bank Group's Development Research Group, Development Economics. Funding was provided by RISE and World Bank's Strategic Research Program Fund.]

Anecdotal evidence points to the importance of school principals, but the limited existing research has neither provided consistent results nor indicated any set of essential characteristics of effective principals. This paper exploits extensive student-level panel data across six states to investigate both variations in principal performance and the relationship between effectiveness and key certification factors. While principal effectiveness varies widely across states, there is little indication that regulation of the background and training of principals yields consistently effective performance. Having prior teaching or management experience is not related to our estimates of principal value-added.

Reading has been at the forefront of early-grade educational interventions, but addressing the educational needs of students in math early on is also critical given that early gaps in math skills widen further over the course of schooling. In this study, we examine the effects of Kentucky's Math Achievement Fund -- a unique state-level program that combines targeted interventions, peer-coaching, and close collaboration among teachers to improve math achievement in grades K-3 -- on student outcomes and the costs associated with this policy. We find significant positive effects of the program not only on math achievement, but also on test scores in reading and non-test outcomes including student attendance and disciplinary incidents. The benefits exist across racial/ethnic groups and students from different socioeconomic statuses, and they are slightly higher for racial minorities. These findings, along with the cost estimate of the program, suggest that this program could provide a cost-effective blueprint to address the educational needs of students in math in early grades.

To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assess summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Based on students' spring to fall progress, we find a positive impact for summer school on math test achievement (0.03 standard deviation, SD), but not on reading tests. These effects are predominantly driven by students in upper elementary grades. To put the results into perspective, if we assume that these districts have losses similar to those present at the end of the 2022-23 school year (i.e., approximately -0.2 SD), we estimate summer programming closed approximately 2% to 3% of the districts' total learning losses in math, but none in reading.

The recent turn toward core practices and practice-based teacher education has been accompanied by a growing literature on the definitions, pedagogies to teach, and assessments of core practices. Despite these developments, the field lacks core practices performance assessments designed to be used across course sections, courses, and subjects. This paper provides an existence proof of this type of assessment and investigates the affordances and constraints of the approach. The study describes three types of mixed-reality simulation-based performance tasks of three core practices. More than 400 novices in 64 teacher preparation programs in the United States reported that they were able to use the simulation environment and believed the tasks measure important teaching skills. Scores on the tasks were positively related to novices' prior academic and teacher education experiences. Implications for the formative use of such simulations are discussed.

Student-teacher relationships are at the core of student experiences in schools and, arguably, fundamental to influencing student outcomes. Using a statewide, student-level school climate survey from Massachusetts, we investigate teachers' contributions to school climate, which we refer to as climate value added (VA), and how it varies by student race/ethnicity. We first show that climate VA contributes to student learning: Teachers whose students report positive feelings about climate also contribute more to student test scores and to an aggregate of nontest student outcomes (student absences, suspensions, and grade progression). And teachers identified by students of color as contributing to better school climate have outsize effects on learning gains for these students. Differences in teachers' climate effects across racial/ethnic groups are largest on topics aligned with cultural competency, school participation, and comfort with faculty. Lastly, we find that Black students assigned to Black teachers report better school climate than Black students assigned to other teachers.

We use data from the Stanford Education Data Archive to describe district-level trends in average academic achievement between 2009 and 2019. Though on average school districts' test scores improved very modestly (by about 0.001 SDs/year), there is significant variation among districts. Moreover, we find that average test score disparities between non-poor and poor students and between White and Black students are growing; those between White and Hispanic students are shrinking. We find no evidence of achievement-equity synergies or tradeoffs: Improvements in overall achievement are uncorrelated with trends in achievement disparities. Finally, we find that the strongest predictors of achievement disparity trends are the levels and trends in within-district racial and socioeconomic segregation and changes in differential access to certified teachers.

We examine how different measures of teacher quality are related to students' long-run trajectories. Comparing teachers' "test-based" value-added to "nontest" value-added -- based on contributions to student absences and grades -- we find that test and nontest value-added have similar effects on the average quality of colleges that students attend. However, test-based teacher quality measures have more explanatory power for outcomes relevant for students at the top of the achievement distribution such as attending a more selective college, while nontest measures have more explanatory power for whether students graduate from high school and enroll in college at all.

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.

The study examined the effect of National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) on social-emotional competencies of fifth and sixth graders in the 2018-19 academic year in Spokane, Washington. The study used archival data and quasi-experimental design with matching to compare social-emotional competencies of students taught by NBCTs and students taught by non-NBCTs. The study examined 10 social-emotional competencies. The results suggest that NBCTs are significantly more effective than non-NBCTs at facilitating students' self-efficacy approximately 2 months after the start of the school year (effect size = 0.21). Results for self-management are in the same direction (effect size = 0.10), however not statistically significant. Findings for the remaining eight social-emotional competencies are not statistically significant, and the effect sizes are small. The results also suggest that NBCTs are effective at developing social-emotional competencies for students who are native English speakers for two social-emotional measures: self-efficacy (effect size = 0.23) and social awareness (effect size = 0.16). The study is the first attempt to rigorously examine the effect of NBCTs on students' social-emotional competencies. Although the evidence is encouraging, additional rigorous research is needed to make confident conclusions, particularly for students who are English language learners and from different racial/ethnic subgroups because of the small number of these students in the current study. [This study was funded by the Supporting Effective Educator Development Grant.]

Measures of student disadvantage--or risk--are critical components of equity-focused education policies. However, the risk measures used in contemporary policies have significant limitations, and despite continued advances in data infrastructure and analytic capacity, there has been little innovation in these measures for decades. We develop a new measure of student risk for use in education policies, which we call Predicted Academic Performance (PAP). PAP is a flexible, data-rich indicator that identifies students at risk of poor academic outcomes. It blends concepts from emerging "early warning" systems with principles of incentive design to balance the competing priorities of accurate risk measurement and suitability for policy use. PAP is more effective than common alternatives at identifying students who are at risk of poor academic outcomes and can be used to target resources toward these students--and students who belong to several other associated risk categories--more efficiently.

Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus D.C.), we investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty. We find that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps. Math gaps did not widen in areas that remained in-person (although there was some widening in reading gaps in those areas). We estimate that high-poverty districts that went remote in 2020-21 will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related achievement losses.

We present new estimates of the importance of teachers in early grades for later grade outcomes, but unlike the existing literature that examines teacher "fade-out," we directly compare the contribution of early-grade teachers to later year outcomes against the contributions of later year teachers to the same later year outcomes. Where the prior literature finds that much of the contribution of early teachers fades away, we find that the contributions of early-year teachers remain important in later grades. The difference in contributions to eighth-grade outcomes between an effective and ineffective fourth-grade teacher is about half the difference among eighth-grade teachers. The effect on eighth-grade outcomes of replacing a fourth-grade teacher who is below the 5th percentile with a median teacher is about half the underrepresented minority (URM)/non-URM achievement gap. Our results reinforce earlier conclusions in the literature that teachers in all grades are important for student achievement.