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Believe and Prepare is a teacher preparation reform implemented by the Louisiana Department of Education in collaboration with school systems and teacher preparation programs across the state. It was piloted in the 2014/15 school year and became mandatory in July 2018 for incoming teacher candidates in all 18 institutions of higher education that offer traditional teacher preparation programs. The reform focused on competency-based curricula, extended clinical experiences, and rigorous mentor teacher training. A central requirement of the reform is that teacher candidates must participate in a yearlong residency with a mentor teacher. This replaced the prior shorter-term student teaching requirement, typically six weeks. To explore the extent to which the reform is contributing to expected improvement in outcomes for early career teachers, this study examined the association between the reform and in-service teacher performance ratings, teacher retention, student test scores, teacher competency, and the likelihood of three placement outcomes (being placed in the school where the teacher completed a residency, filling a teaching position in a shortage area, and being placed in a rural school). Teachers who completed a program that had implemented Believe and Prepare were 2 percentage points more likely than teachers who completed a program that had not implemented it to stay in Louisiana for at least one year and 7 percentage points more likely to stay in the same school district for at least three years. Grade 4-8 students whose teachers completed a preparation program that had implemented Believe and Prepare during the pilot years scored 0.04 standard deviation lower on English language arts tests than students whose teachers completed a program that had not implemented it. Other teacher outcomes such as in-service performance ratings, competency as measured by Praxis II scores, school placement, and job assignment were not statistically different between teachers who completed a program that had implemented Believe and Prepare and teachers who completed other programs. [For the Study Snapshot, see ED624403. For the appendixes, see ED624404.]

New Mexico is one of 48 states that offer a biliteracy seal to high school graduates to recognize their proficiency in a non -English language. The Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest English Learners Research Partnership collaborated with a large urban district in New Mexico to study the characteristics and college readiness of students who earned different types of biliteracy seals (state, district, and global seals), the number of students who met some requirements for a seal but did not earn one, and the effect of earning a seal on college outcomes. The study used data from three cohorts of grade 12 students in the district from 2017/18 to 2019/20. Between 2017/18 and 2019/20, 7 percent of graduates earned at least one type of biliteracy seal, and these graduates were more likely than graduates who did not earn a seal to be Hispanic, to be eligible for the National School Lunch Program, to be a current English learner student, to have ever been an English learner student, and to speak Spanish at home. Graduates who earned a biliteracy seal were more likely than similar graduates who did not earn a seal to enroll in college within one year of high school graduation. Finally, among graduates who enrolled in college, graduates who earned a biliteracy seal were more likely than graduates who did not earn a seal to enroll in a four-year college and to enroll in college full time. The New Mexico Public Education Department and district leaders can use the findings to decide how to expand access to biliteracy seals. [For the Study Snapshot, see ED624244. For the appendixes, see ED624246.]

Teach For America (TFA) is an organization that aims to address educational inequity in part through a program of training and placing teachers in U.S. K-12 public schools that have the highest proportions of high-poverty students. In this report, the authors quantify the impacts of Teach For America Indianapolis (TFA Indy) on student and school outcomes in the Indianapolis area. They evaluate the effectiveness, retention, and career trajectories of TFA Indy teachers who work within the Indianapolis area, with comparisons made to other teachers hired during the same period. In additional subgroup analyses, the authors identify differential patterns of TFA Indy teacher retention, promotion, and career progression as a function of whether teachers are White versus non-White. [This study was sponsored by the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation.]

Teachers, like the students they serve, never stop learning. In-service teacher professional development (PD) gives educators opportunities to learn more about pedagogy and improve their own instruction methods to boost students' academic and social and emotional outcomes. Districts make a significant financial investment to provide teacher PD, and research on the impact of teacher PD on teacher instructional practices and student education outcomes has been mixed. In addition, there are only a few studies that examine the impact of teacher PD using rigorous empirical evaluation designs (such as randomized control trials) and consider PD across multiple contexts (public versus charter schools). The authors evaluated the Chicago Collaborative, a teacher PD program that is aligned to Common Core Standards and implemented by Leading Educators, a national nonprofit organization that partners with districts and charter management organizations to help teachers develop the leadership skills that they need to successfully transition from leading students to leading their peers. The authors conducted a randomized control trial evaluation using data from 40 schools across three school districts in the Chicago area during the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 school years. They examined how the Chicago Collaborative program was implemented and whether the program impacted student achievement. The authors found that the Chicago Collaborative was successfully delivered, despite the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic at the end of the research period in 2020. The authors also found robust evidence that the Chicago Collaborative increased student test scores. [This research report was published by the RAND Corporation (ED621808).]

Most states' teacher evaluation systems have changed substantially in the past decade. New evaluation systems typically require school leaders to observe teachers' classrooms two to three times a school year instead of once (Doherty & Jacobs, 2015). The feedback that school leaders provide to teachers after these observations is a key but understudied step in the teacher evaluation cycle. The feedback and subsequent professional development are intended to help teachers change their instructional practices and improve student achievement (Correnti & Rowan, 2007; DeNisi & Sonesh, 2011; Taylor & Tyler, 2012). However, little is known about the feedback that school leaders provide to teachers following classroom observations or about how to train leaders to make that feedback more effective. This study examined the impact of disseminating a detailed checklist intended to structure an effective feedback conference between a school leader and a teacher following a classroom observation. The feedback conference checklist is a modified version of one created by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Tang & Chow, 2007). The checklist, along with short testimonial videos, was a low-cost, low-intensity intervention provided to a randomly selected half of 339 participating New Mexico principals in fall 2015 by the study team. These principals' schools constituted the treatment group. Principals in the treatment group schools received an email with an attachment containing a guide and a 24-item feedback conference checklist, plus a hyperlink to a three-minute testimonial video featuring a principal. Principals were encouraged to distribute the checklist to other school leaders and to use the checklist in all their feedback conferences in the 2015/16 school year. Principals were also asked to distribute the checklist to all their teachers in order to promote greater teacher participation in the feedback conference. The study team also emailed the same checklist plus a hyperlink to a three-minute testimonial video featuring a teacher to up to 10 randomly sampled teachers in each treatment group school. The other half of the principals in the study schools formed the control group. Each of the control group principals received a two-page principal guide as an email attachment in fall 2015. The two-page guide reprised the five tips about feedback included in the summer 2015 New Mexico Public Education Department--sponsored professional development for principals and informed principals about the study. In addition, the study team sent up to 10 randomly sampled teachers in each control group school a two-page teacher guide summarizing the teacher evaluation system (Skandera, 2013) and teachers' right to receive post-observation feedback. All principals and teachers in both the treatment group and the control group who consented to be in the study were asked to complete an online survey (one for principals, another for teachers) in spring 2015 and again in spring 2016. The main outcomes of the study were principals' and teachers' reports of the impacts of the checklist and testimonial video on the perceived quality of feedback conferences following formal classroom observations; principals' recommendations for and teachers' take-up of professional development; and the quality of teachers' subsequent instructional practices as measured by principals' formal classroom observation scores and teachers' self-reported scores. Additional exploratory outcomes included the impact of the checklist on student achievement (school-average math and English language arts scores on the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers assessment) and school report card grades (reported as an A, B, C, D, or F of multiple measures of a school's student achievement) compiled annually by the New Mexico Public Education Department. The study also documented how many recipients reported using the checklist and what they thought about it. The checklist had few clear impacts on the quality of feedback, professional development outcomes, instructional practice, or student achievement. There were two exceptions: teachers who received the checklist reported that their principals were less likely to dominate the feedback conferences, and they reported that they were more likely to follow their principal's professional development recommendations. Use of the checklist in the treatment group was moderate: 77 percent of principals surveyed who received the checklist reported viewing it, and 58 percent said they used it with one or more teachers. At the same time, 29 percent of control group principals (who were not emailed the checklist) reported that they had seen the checklist, and 10 percent reported using it with one or more teachers. The relatively moderate use of the checklist by treatment group principals, combined with the reports by some control group school leaders that they were using it, implies that the estimated impacts of using the checklist would be larger than the estimated impacts of receiving it. Though distribution of the feedback conference checklist to principals and teachers had a few modest impacts, this study indicates that distributing the checklist is unlikely by itself to substantially alter feedback conferences, teachers' classroom practices, or student achievement, at least during the first school year in which the checklist is used. This study suggests that only a fraction of school leaders are likely to use the checklist if it is distributed in the low-cost manner followed in this study. But the checklist may also have failed to help principals overcome common barriers to effective feedback, such as providing critical comments to teachers or recommending appropriate professional development. The study results raise the possibility that additional (or different) investments might be necessary to improve school leaders' feedback conferences with teachers--for example, pairing training with written guidance.

The Leading Educators Fellowship program selects promising mid-career teachers through a competitive application process and develops their skills as leaders of school improvement efforts. The specific objectives of the program are to (1) increase the leadership skills and capacity of teacher leaders in order to improve student achievement in high-need schools and (2) retain highly effective teachers in high-need schools by encouraging commitment to the schools and improving the school leadership pipeline. This report presents findings from preliminary analyses of the program's impacts on student achievement and teacher retention in both Louisiana and Missouri in the 2011-2012 through 2013-2014 school years for teachers who are program fellows and for the teachers mentored by fellows. The findings from this early analysis of the program impacts of fellows are promising but mixed, and overall do not conclusively demonstrate that the program has affected student achievement. For mentees, the findings show some positive effects on student achievement among mentees who teach math and social studies in Louisiana. The findings do not point to a consistent pattern of retention impacts across cohorts or states. Future analyses with larger samples of both fellows and mentees will provide greater statistical power for more reliably detecting any true program effects. A technical appendix contains propensity score matching and power analyses.