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We describe the extent and predictors of staffing challenges faced by school districts in Washington state throughout the 2021-22 school year using data collected from job posting websites for districts representing more than 98% of students in the state. These data suggest that school districts in the state faced considerable challenges filling paraeducator and, to a lesser extent, teaching positions at the beginning of the school year. When we focus specifically on teachers, we find that teacher staffing challenges were far more pronounced for special education positions and in schools serving more students of color, less pronounced for elementary positions, and highly correlated with teacher attrition from these types of positions after the prior school year. Accounting for these relationships, districts posted more teaching positions later in the school year when they had increasing student enrollments and received more Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds than nearby districts.

Most research about how to improve the teacher workforce has focused on interventions designed to improve incumbent teachers, far less attention has been directed toward teacher hiring processes and whether districts can make better hiring decisions. Using data from Spokane Public Schools and Washington state, we describe the findings from a study analyzing measures of the predictive validity of teacher applicant quality measures obtained from professional references. We find that professional reference ratings of prospective teachers are significantly predictive of teacher quality as measured by inservice performance evaluations and teacher value added in math. These findings are driven by applicants with at least some teaching experience and vary by rater type (e.g., principal or university supervisor); the magnitude of the relationship between the ratings of applicants and teacher performance is much smaller and not statistically significant for applicants that do not have teaching experience. Overall, the evidence suggests that obtaining explicit ratings of teacher applicants from professional references is a low-cost way to contribute to the applicant information available to hiring officials and has potential for improving hiring outcomes.

Many factors impact one's ability to complete an apprenticeship program. According to the 2015 National Apprenticeship Survey, the most commonly stated reasons for not completing an apprenticeship program were job instability, receiving a better job offer and financial constraints. This survey also showed that apprentices who dropped out of their programs experienced difficulties securing permanent employment with adequate benefits and were more likely to be self-employed (Frank & Jovic, 2017). In addition, those who discontinued had a lower median employment income compared with those who completed their training (Jin, Langevin, Lebel and Haan, 2020). Using data from the Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform (ELMLP), this study looks at apprentices who registered between 2008 and 2010 and discontinued their apprenticeship programs within six years of registration. Their future interactions with the Canadian postsecondary education system, up to 2020, are then profiled.

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.

This paper examines how international education (IE) as a tool of government foreign policy is challenged in an era of new geopolitics, where China's growing ambitions have increased rivalry with the West. It compares U.S. and Canada as cases first, by examining rationales and approaches to IE in both countries, second, IE relations with China before conflict and third, current controversies and government policy responses to IE relations with China. The paper concludes identifying contextual factors that shape each country's engagement with IE, but suggests that moving forward, the future of IE in a world of new geopolitics is likely to be far more complex and conflictual.

This paper analyzes how employers use discourse to ideologize the value of college internships--a historically emergent form of contingent, temporary, educational labor which has rapidly become a major feature of both higher education and labor relations in the United States (Frenette, 2015). The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with employers (n=38) in firms and organizations across a range of sectors who supervise and coordinate the work of college student interns from two public universities and two technical colleges located in different economic regions within the same U.S. Midwestern state. Using the anthropological theory of value (Graeber, 2001), we develop an analysis of how employers use discourse to ideologize and coordinate internship labor. Employers use three discourses of value to ideologize 1) the individual intern as the primary beneficiary of the internship ("entrepreneurial discourse of value"); 2) the organization or firm as the primary beneficiary of the internship ("corporate efficiency discourse of value"); and 3) the community, industry, or society in general as the primary beneficiary of the internship ("community service discourse of value"). The article develops the concept of a "discourse token of value"--discursive forms that (like cash) mediate value--as a central concept of the analysis of emergent forms of education and labor.

Approximately 450 community colleges nationally are part of formal statewide or national initiatives to implement guided pathways reforms to improve student success, and many other colleges are implementing guided pathways practices on their own. Because guided pathways is a whole-college reform--and because it takes several years to fully implement--it is challenging to evaluate. This paper presents a methodology for assessing the scale of adoption and estimating the causal effects of guided pathways within states and across colleges that have adopted the approach. To measure the scale of adoption of guided pathways practices, we will conduct institutional surveys and phone interviews with college leaders and examine the websites of every community college in Ohio, Tennessee, and Washington (70 institutions total). We plan to use these data to estimate each college's scale of adoption using a rubric with indicators for scale and timing. Drawing on strategies used in K-12 whole-school reform evaluations, we propose to examine pre-reform adoption trends and apply a single interrupted time series design to project what students' early outcomes would have been in the absence of guided pathways. We then propose to use a comparative interrupted time series design (which closely resembles a difference-in-differences approach) to exploit variation in the intensity of guided pathways practices and the timing of their adoption across colleges by comparing early student outcomes in colleges that have adopted guided pathways practices at scale and those that have not or those with a low scale of adoption. [This report was written with Hana Lahr.]

In this descriptive study, we use longitudinal student-level administrative records from 4 cohorts of high school graduates in Kentucky to examine the extent to which students persist and attain post-secondary credentials in the CTE fields of concentration they choose in high school. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to use student-level administrative data to examine how different fields of concentration in high school CTE are related to future postsecondary outcomes. We find that concentrating in a particular CTE field in high school is associated with both continuing on with that same field in college and obtaining a postsecondary credential in that field; this relationship is especially strong in health fields and especially for women in health. The secondary-postsecondary connection is the weakest among students concentrating in occupational fields in high school, who are also the most disadvantaged socioeconomically and academically before high school. Despite the existence of secondary-postsecondary pipelines of career interests, most students enroll and obtain credentials in fields that are "different" from the field of concentration in high school. In addition, relative to students with similar pre-high-school achievement as measured by grades and test scores, we find that CTE concentration in high school is strongly associated with being more likely to enroll in a two-year college and less likely to enroll in a four-year college.

We examine the role of universities in knowledge production and industrial change using historical evidence. Political shocks led to a profound pro-science shift in German universities around 1800. To study the consequences, we construct novel microdata. We find that invention and manufacturing developed similarly in cities closer to and farther from universities in the 1700s and shifted towards universities and accelerated in the early 1800s. The shift in manufacturing was strongest in new and high knowledge industries. After 1800, the adoption of mechanized technology and the number and share of firms winning international awards for innovation were higher near universities. [This paper was produced as part of the Centre's Growth Programme.]

This report seeks to explore some of the reasons Sweden developed an independent school sector dominated by for-profit schools by drawing on prior scholarship and reports as well interview material from Swedish school entrepreneurs, researchers, and prior public representatives that helped create and implement the Swedish voucher program. This report is based on a descriptive qualitatively-oriented, research approach drawing on archival material, public data, and information gathered from interviews with key informants. The implementation of the Swedish voucher program appears to have been propelled by an appetite for change, and quest for greater diversity among educational providers, that had taken root in political parties on both the left and right. Today, however, the situation looks rather different as debates regarding inequality, segregation, grade inflation, and the notion of "vinster i välfärden" (profits in welfare services) have shifted the perception and opinions regarding school vouchers, and for-profit voucher schools in particular. We do not want to speculate what is going to happen, but it seems feasible to assume that future for-profit school entrepreneurs will have to operate, and be willing to accept, a very different public and political climate when it comes to the role of for-profit providers in the Swedish school sector. If the U.S. desires to increase the number of for-profit school entrepreneurs it will require substantial revisions of many formal as well as informal institutions. The current formal institutions in most U.S. voucher systems, which typically limits who can participate combined with lower per-pupil voucher payments, would need to be altered in order make this calculus attainable and attractive enough to spur action. The following are appended: (1) Methodology; and (2) About the authors.

This fact sheet explores the association between parental income and the pathways of young adults in postsecondary education for students who began their studies in the 2012/2013 academic year. Students from low-income families have previously been shown to have lower rates of educational access and attainment. This fact sheet focuses on persistence and graduation indicators, which are now released annually, and furthers the analysis of these indicators by adding a parental income quartile dimension. Overall, the findings provide the following insights: (1) Students in the highest parental income quartile remained enrolled (persisted) and graduated at higher rates than students from the lowest parental income quartile for all selected educational qualifications and groupings. The differences in indicators by the level of parental income were more notable for the graduation rates than for the persistence rates; and (2) For students who graduated, those in the highest parental income quartile graduated as fast or faster than students in the lowest parental income quartile for all selected educational qualifications and groupings, though these differences were generally small. These findings are consistent with similar studies regarding postsecondary experiences of students by socioeconomic status.

The critical role of communication is usually overlooked by higher education institutions. Here we argue that higher education institutions must consider an effective communication as one of their top priorities. This communication must go well beyond promoting the university's opportunities to potential new students, the pursuit of potential donors and outreach to policymakers: it must engage all aspects of internal academic life and seek the engagement of the larger society. Increasingly, higher education has to defend its purpose, integrity and legitimacy in a climate of growing neo-nationalist and populist movements. A comprehensive communication plan includes a deep revision of the University core values and practices, better teaching and learning strategies, as well as modern internal and external communication tools, including all sorts of social media.

This article focuses attention on a critical need for more evidence-based social emotional learning (SEL) programs for middle school students. First, we explore the definition of SEL, pointing out how it has evolved as our world has changed. We review key SEL domains and skills and describe universal school-based SEL programming as one approach to fostering students' SEL competencies. We highlight the ongoing need for evidence-based middle school SEL programs by demonstrating how few programs meet the rigorous What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), and Blueprints standards for evidence. We extend our summary of these programs by noting that even when positive effects have been demonstrated, these effects were often observed in a single domain, such as substance use, or outnumbered by null effects, which undermines efforts to understand program effectiveness. We conclude by considering the unique developmental needs of early adolescents and providing recommendations for the development or refinement of SEL programs that target middle school students.

International partnerships have become increasingly important for the mission and goals of universities and colleges globally. Understanding the nature of these partnerships and the perspectives of their senior leaders is critical. Senior international officers (SIOs) at 59 US public and private universities and colleges and 4 non-US universities completed surveys regarding: goals and criteria for developing the partnerships; number and country of their partners; types of existing partnerships; ways the university/college promotes/rewards international partnerships; challenges faced and important considerations for developing partnerships; and recommendations to enhance successful international partnerships. The SIOs' insights and recommendations were reviewed and analyzed. The most frequently identified major goals were "enhancing the quality of research and scholarship" and "strengthening students' education and preparation for life in a multicultural world and global economy." Conclusions included the recognition that successful strategic international partnerships and effective policy will likely: need to expand in scale, scope, diversity, and complexity; require strong, committed leadership; draw on the research and pedagogical knowledge worldwide; and carefully consider the wide, unique opportunities and challenges of these partnerships for practice and policy.

The rapid rise of online enrollments in public universities has been fueled by a reliance on for-profit, third-party providers--especially online program managers. However, scholars know very little about the potential problems with this arrangement. We conduct a mixed methods analysis of 229 contracts between third-party providers and 117 two-year and four-year public universities in the US, data on the financing structure of third-party providers, and university online education webpages. We ask: What are the mechanisms through which third-party relationships with universities may be exploitative of students or the public universities that serve them? To what extent are potentially predatory processes linked to the private equity and venture capital financing structure of third-party providers? We highlight specific mechanisms that lead to five predatory processes: the targeting of marginalized students, extraction of revenue, privatization by obfuscation, for-profit creep, and university captivity. We demonstrate that contracts with private equity and venture capital financed third-party providers are more likely to include potentially problematic contract stipulations. We ground our findings in a growing body of work on "platform capitalism" and include recommendations for state universities, accreditors, and federal policy.

METCO, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, enables over 3,000 mostly African-American and Hispanic students from Boston and Springfield to attend schools in three dozen surrounding communities. The program has been remarkably stable for decades, with enrollment rarely falling below 3,100 or rising above 3,300, and most suburban districts continue to participate each year. The primary funding for METCO is through a state grant. Through evaluation of data that is presented in this report, it was found that several minor changes could make the program even better. The authors recommend that the state simplify the grant formula, incorporate current enrollment figures, and publish information about Chapter 70 funds generated by METCO students. The legislature should also provide additional funds to support late afternoon transportation and cover the special education costs of METCO students. Some of these changes, such as basing the grant on current enrollment and covering special education costs, would also make it easier to expand METCO. To expand, the legislature should provide the METCO managers additional funds to cover the immediate costs of expansion and commit to providing adequate ongoing grant support for a larger program. A relatively small investment of education funds could allow the successful program to serve additional students and their families.

The success of many students with disabilities (SWDs) depends on access to high-quality general education teachers. Yet, most measures of teacher value-added measures (VAM) fail to distinguish between a teacher's effectiveness in educating students with and without disabilities. We create two VAM measures: one focusing on teachers' effectiveness in improving outcomes for SWDs, and one for non-SWDs. We find top-performing teachers for non-SWDs often have relatively lower VAMs for SWDs, and that SWDs sort to teachers with lower scores in both VAMs. Overall, SWD-specific VAMs may be more suitable for identifying which teachers have a history of effectiveness with SWDs and could play a role in ensuring that students are being optimally assigned to these teachers.

Over the last quarter-century, tax-credit scholarship (TCS) policies have helped hundreds of thousands of American families provide their children with the learning environment that meets their individual needs. Although less well-known than school vouchers, TCS policies are the most-used form of private school choice. Now available in 23 states, more than 325,000 students nationwide use tax-credit scholarships to attend the school of their family's choice. TCS policies create an incentive for taxpayers to contribute to nonprofit scholarship organizations that aid families with tuition and, in some states, other K-12 educational expenses. This paper explores the central design features of TCS policies--such as eligibility, the tax credit value, tax credit caps, scholarship size and uses, and academic accountability provisions--and outlines the different approaches taken by the TCS policies in each state. The paper also offers suggestions regarding each feature for policymakers who want to design a TCS policy that most likely to succeed at its central purpose: empowering families to provide their children with the education that works best for them. Finally, the appendix offers policymakers with a wide variety of additional resources, including model legislation, parent satisfaction and public opinion surveys, research on fiscal effects, various policy briefs on tax-credit scholarships, information about the constitutional landscape, and public relations resources.

In this paper, we use NWEA MAP test data to examine variation in students' achievement and growth during the pandemic across multiple dimensions. Consistent with prior evidence, we find that students' test scores in fall 2021, on average, were substantially below historic averages. Moreover, the average scores of students of color, students attending high poverty schools, and students in elementary school were more negatively impacted, and more so in math than reading. We present novel evidence on the distributions of test scores and growth in fall 2021 relative to pre-pandemic distributions, finding disproportionately larger declines for students with lower previous achievement levels across districts. However, between districts, there was considerable variation in the extent to which their fall 2021 achievement and growth distributions shifted from their historical distributions by subject, student subgroups, and baseline achievement levels. Therefore, accurately targeting students and choosing interventions for pandemic-related recovery will require careful assessment by districts of their students' achievement and growth in the 2021-22 school year (and into the future): assuming that students in a district reflect the national trends of achievement will often lead to incorrect conclusions about the degree to which they suffered pandemic-related learning losses and the amount of support they will need to recover. [This research received funding from the Kenneth C. Griffin Foundation.]

This briefing paper explores Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health (IECMH) policies and practices that state early intervention (Part C) programs may consider implementing to meet the social-emotional and mental health needs of infants and toddlers in the context of relationships with their parents and other caregivers.

The Global Partnership for Education's (GPE) interest in broader education workforce issues is situated within the context of the partnership's current strategic plan (GPE 2025), which recognizes "quality teaching" as a priority area within a wider system transformation agenda. GPE's work includes providing technical support in this area for the benefit of country operations, including the development and/or dissemination of tools and guidelines. Some GPE partner countries have shown particular interest in diagnostic or analytical tools to better understand the scope of their challenges related to quality teaching and the broader education workforce. Guidance in diagnosing the challenges of the education workforce and leveraging its potential for strengthened teaching and learning would be useful especially for those involved in preparing education sector plans or strategies, or specific programs aimed at improving teaching and learning. This paper: (1) Analyzes the guidance that prominent existing international frameworks and tools can provide for diagnosing challenges and strengths related to teachers and the broader education workforce. Special attention is given to tools dealing with teachers, teaching and learning and/or related policies and management, and for which several country applications have been reported. Challenges concerning the implementation and use of these tools are also explored tentatively through a set of interviews with professionals involved in their application and/or monitoring; (2) Attempts to identify the main gaps and challenges that remain to be addressed as regards the contents, methodology and implementation of future education workforce diagnostics; and (3) Suggests possible directions and considerations for the development of future education workforce diagnostic tools.

A college credential can expand the range of career opportunities available to young adults. However, existing barriers to enrollment for prospective students pose equity gaps in college access and success, particularly for Black college aspirants. In Florida, racial and ethnic disparities in college enrollment contribute to disparities in educational attainment. Only 31% of Black Floridians hold a college degree. This report examines the attainment gap by exploring various factors contributing to Florida college applicants' decisions to enroll. This paper uses survey and enrollment information from two Florida community colleges (Hillsborough Community College and Miami Dade College) to identify factors related to college applicants' enrollment decisions. In the summer of 2021, nearly 15,000 applicants to the two colleges were surveyed about their pre-college experiences, and roughly 1,200 responded, resulting in a response rate of 8%. Of the respondents, 997 applicants identified as Black (i.e., African American, Black Hispanic, African, or West Indian/Caribbean).

Policy makers frequently use education as a welfare policy instrument. We examine one such case, where students from large and financially constrained families, were given the opportunity to be transferred to university departments in their hometown as part of the social policy of the Ministry of Education in Greece. Multiple law changes meant that there was a large and quasi-random variability in the number of transferred students over time, which was orthogonal to the quality of receiving students. We construct a novel dataset by linking students' characteristics and pre-university academic performance with their university academic record until graduation for the top economics department. We present consistent evidence showing how a social policy that is meant to help poor families and to alleviate inequalities has gone bad educationally, by lowering the academic performance of receiving students. [This paper was produced as part of the Centre's Education & Skills Programme. Financial support was provided by Drasi II (2019/2020) AUEB.]

This paper provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link between educational inequality and social mobility. We interpret this evidence from the perspective of economic models of skill acquisition and investment in human capital. The models account for different channels underlying unequal education and highlight how endogenous responses in parents' and children's educational investments generate a close link between economic inequality and educational inequality. Given concerns over the extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also summarize early evidence on the impact of the pandemic on children's education and on possible long-run repercussions for educational inequality.

This government's Levelling Up mission for schools is that, by 2030, 90% of children will leave primary school having achieved the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, up from 65% in 2019. In addition, this white paper sets an ambition to increase the national GCSE average grade in both English language and in maths from 4.5 in 20193 to 5, for all secondary school pupils by 2030. In this report it is estimated the economic returns associated with achieving these ambitions. To achieve the Levelling Up mission, around one in four pupils will need to make sufficient improvements in Key Stage 2 (KS2) attainment by 2030 to reach the expected standard. It is estimated that the size of the attainment improvement will need to be equivalent to 0.87 of a standard deviation, or around 10 months of progress.

This report summarizes the findings of MA DESE's 2020 review of the Boston Public Schools, highlighting key findings around the teaching and learning, operational, financial, and enrollment challenges the state identified. It also describes why, according to the report, BPS persistently struggles in these areas and how its struggles negatively impact students. Finally, the paper describes several options the district and the state have for rectifying the problems and helping BPS meet its constitutional and moral obligations to the students and families it serves. Ultimately, it recommends that the state place BPS in receivership, a controversial model that may be the district's best hope for recovery.

This occasional paper presents national demographic subgroup data for the 1975-2021 Monitoring the Future (MTF) national survey results on 8th, 10th, and 12th graders' use of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. The study covers all major classes of illicit and licit psychoactive drugs for an array of population subgroups. The 2020 subgroup data presented here accompany the "Monitoring the Future National Survey Results on Drug Use: 1975-2021: Overview, Key Findings on Adolescent Drug Use" (see ED618240) and the "Monitoring the Future National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975-2021, forthcoming: Volume I, Secondary School Students." The trends offered here in tabular and graphic forms cover demographic subgroups based on: (1) Gender; (2) College plans; (3) Region of the country; (4) Population density; (5) Education level of the parents (a proxy for socioeconomic level); and (6) Racial/ethnic identification. Detailed descriptions of the demographic categories are provided in the section starting on page 469 of this paper. The graphs and tables in this occasional paper present trend data for 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade respondents separately. Data for 12th grade begins with 1975, the first year in which a nationally representative sample of high school seniors was surveyed. Data for 8th and 10th grades begin with 1991, when the study's nationally representative annual surveys were expanded to include surveys of those lower grade levels.

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.

As the COVID-19 crisis disrupted schooling, recovery efforts to ensure educational continuity in California included the adoption of Senate Bill 98, which mandated local educational agencies (LEAs) to complete Learning Continuity and Attendance Plans (LCPs). These plans act as critical snapshots of sensemaking in the midst of crisis; however, their details have yet to be explored statewide, concealing the potential trends that arise in local planning when traditional schooling is disrupted by crisis. Through a multiphase, mixed methods approach, this study examines the legislative requirements of an educational policy that orchestrated large-scale local planning. Results suggest that, during a crisis, equity is centered in both policy and the plans of public school districts, threaded through accessibility to instruction as well as academic and social-emotional supports. [For the Policy Brief, see ED624610.]

We estimate the education and earnings returns to enrolling in technical two-year degree programs at community colleges in Missouri. A unique feature of the Missouri context is the presence of a highly-regarded, nationally-ranked technical college: State Technical College of Missouri (State Tech). Compared to enrolling in a non-technical community college program, we find that enrolling in a technical program at State Tech greatly increases students' likelihoods of graduation and earnings. In contrast, there is no evidence that technical education programs at other Missouri community colleges increase graduation rates, and our estimates of the earnings impacts of these other programs are much smaller than for State Tech. Our findings exemplify the importance of institutional differences in driving the efficacy of technical education and suggest great potential for high-quality programs to improve student outcomes.

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.

Prior work on teacher candidates in Washington State has shown that about two thirds of individuals who trained to become teachers between 2005 and 2015 and received a teaching credential did not enter the state's public teaching workforce immediately after graduation, while about one third never entered a public teaching job in the state at all. In this analysis, we link data on these teacher candidates to unemployment insurance data in the state to provide a descriptive portrait of the future earnings and wages of these individuals inside and outside of public schools. Candidates who initially became public school teachers earned considerably more, on average, than candidates who were initially employed either in other education positions or in other sectors of the state's workforce. These differences persisted at least 10 years into the average career and across transitions into and out of teaching. There is therefore little evidence that teacher candidates who did not become teachers were lured into other professions by higher compensation. Instead, the patterns are consistent with demand-side constraints on teacher hiring during this time period that resulted in individuals who wanted to become teachers taking positions that offered lower wages but could lead to future teaching positions.

Calls are intensifying for workforce reskilling and a re-engineering of education and training to meet the demands of the future. Current policy in England focuses on technical, digital and green economy skills, underpinned by strong literacy and numeracy and a knowledge-rich school curriculum. National Foundation for Educational Research's Nuffield-funded research study, "The Skills Imperative 2035: Essential skills for tomorrow's workforce" investigates: (1) which essential employment skills will be most needed in 2035; (2) what will their likely supply be and where will the gaps be; (3) which occupations and workers are most at risk of not having these skills; (4) which skills will affected workers need to develop to transition into new employment opportunities; and (5) the role of educators and employers in helping to prepare young people and workers for the future labour market. This first report, a review drawing on a wide-ranging and growing evidence base, sets the scene for the wider research study by bringing together what the literature suggests about: (1) what the world of work will look like in 2035; and (2) which essential employment skills will be in demand and how what should be done to prepare.

This analysis uses the case of the Better Math Teaching Network (BMTN) to explore whether individuals participating in a networked improvement community (NIC) experienced common developmental trajectories on known dimensions of engagement. The analysis included quantitative data from annual network member surveys and qualitative data from annual member interviews. Evidence suggests potential developmental trajectories on three key dimensions of network participation: (1) learning how to engage in a network; (2) learning to use the tools of improvement science; and (3) learning to take up the theory of improvement. Additional findings show preliminary variations based on participant characteristics such as teaching tenure, whether they participated in the network with a colleague they knew prior to joining the network or with a school-based colleague, the context of their school, and how student centered they were at the outset of their participation.

Following a landmark court ruling in 2005, more than half of Germany's universities started charging tuition fees, which were subsequently abolished until 2015. We exploit the unusual lack of grandfathering in these policies to show that fees increase study effort and degree completion among incumbent students. However, fees also decrease first-time university enrollment among high school graduates. Combining this enrollment impact with the effect on completion, we find that fees around the zero-price margin have only little effect on overall educational attainment. We conclude by discussing policies targeting the separate effect margins of fees and caution against a general abolition. [Funding for this report was provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation).]

Over the last two decades, twenty-two states have moved away from traditional defined benefit (DB) pension systems and toward pension plan structures like the defined contribution (DC) plans now prevalent in the private sector. Others are considering such a reform as it is seen as a means of limiting future pension funding risk. It is important to understand the implications of such reforms for end-of-career exit patterns and workforce composition. Empirical evidence on the relationship between pension plan structure and retirement timing is currently limited, primarily because, most state pension reforms are so new that few employees enrolled in those alternative plans have reached retirement age. An exception, and the subject of our analysis, is the teacher retirement system in Washington State, which introduced a hybrid DB-DC plan in 1996 and allowed employees in its traditional DB plan to transfer into the new plan. Our analysis focuses on a years-of-service threshold, the crossing of which grants employees early retirement eligibility and, in many cases, a large upward shift in retirement wealth. The financial implications of crossing this threshold are far greater under the state's traditional DB plan than under the hybrid plan. We find that employees are responsive to crossing the yearsof-service threshold, but we fail to find significant evidence that the propensity to exit the workforce varies according to plan enrollment.