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Targeted school funding is a potentially valuable policy lever to increase educational equality by race, ethnicity, and income, but it remains unclear how to target funds most effectively. We use a regression discontinuity approach to compare districts that narrowly passed or failed a school funding election. We use close tax elections in 9 states to identify effects of operating funds and close bond elections in 8 states to identify effects of capital funds. Results indicate positive achievement returns to spending, especially for math achievement and for operating funds. We find similar returns to spending by race, ethnicity, and income (not statistically different), but we find significantly larger returns for students in low-resource districts than in high-resource districts, including larger returns for Black, Latinx, and low-income students. Mediation analyses suggest spending on teacher salaries and counselors may be particularly effective mechanisms to increase achievement among Black and low-income students. [Additional funding for this report was provided by the Gilead Foundation Creating Possible Fund and the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University.]

The academic and economic benefits of school spending are well-established, but focusing on these outcomes may underestimate the full social benefits of school spending. Recent increases in U.S. child mortality are driven by injuries and raise questions about what types of social investments could reduce child deaths. We use close school district tax elections and negative binomial regression models to estimate effects of a quasi-random increase in school spending on county child mortality. We find consistent evidence that increased school spending from passing a tax election reduces child mortality. Districts that narrowly passed a proposed tax increase spent an additional $243 per pupil, mostly on instruction and salaries, and had 4% lower child mortality after spending increased (6-10 years after the election). This increased spending also reduced child deaths of despair (due to drugs, alcohol, or suicide) by 5% and child deaths due to accidents or motor vehicle accidents by 7%. Estimates predicting potential mechanisms suggest that lower child mortality could partly reflect increases in the number of teachers and counselors, higher teacher salaries, and improved student engagement. [Funding for this report was provided by the Gilead Foundation Creating Possible Fund and the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University.]

Amid a troubled overhaul of the federal process for applying for student financial aid, the share of Wisconsin high school seniors completing the application so far this year has plummeted. The largest declines have been at schools with greater proportions of marginalized students. While the gap may be narrowing as students near commitment deadlines, such delays could cause lasting impacts for students, colleges, and the workforce. [The publication date on the .pdf (May 2023) is incorrect. The correct publication date is May 2024.]

English learners (ELs) are one of the fastest-growing student groups in the U.S. K-12 system, making up about one in 10 students enrolled in public schools nationwide. Despite research showing that EL students need more resources and supports to be successful in school, funding at the federal, state, and local levels to provide those additional resources is largely inadequate and not well targeted to students' needs. This brief addresses the following questions: (1) Why is funding for EL students important? (2) What characteristics in the EL population are important to consider in funding systems? and (3) How are programs and services for EL students currently funded?

Wisconsin's technical colleges appear to receive unusually high funding levels per student compared to other public two-year colleges nationally. Yet our review has found more than 100,000 technical college students being served in Wisconsin are absent in national data, likely inflating the funding figures. Accounting for the missing students would leave spending levels in Wisconsin somewhat higher than nationally but much closer to what is typical for other two-year colleges.

In 2023, charter school advocates continued to make legislative gains in statehouses across the country. These gains were made in red, blue, and purple states, oftentimes in ways that showed bipartisan support for charter schools remains firmly in place. In looking at the results of this year's legislative sessions across the country, four developments in particular stand out. First, in perhaps the biggest win this year, Montana became the 46th state to enact a charter school law. Second, charter school advocates notched an unusually large number of major wins on funding and facilities legislation, with especially significant progress in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Colorado, and Wyoming. Third, charter school supporters opened the door to new types of authorizers in several states, including in Montana (new state authorizer), Nevada (cities and counties), North Carolina (new state authorizer), Oklahoma (new state authorizer, more types of universities, and accredited private institutions of higher learning), Utah (private institutions of higher education), and Wyoming (new state authorizer). Fourth, charter school supporters successfully played successful defense on anti-charter school efforts in several states, with three of the most notable defensive victories in blue states. In New Mexico, the Senate Education Committee voted down a charter school moratorium bill that was proposed by the Senate President Pro Tempore by a 7-1 margin. The bill would not have allowed any more charter schools in school districts where 20% of the students already attend a charter school. In California, Governor Newsom vetoed a bill that would have made harmful changes to the Charter School Facility Grant program and unnecessarily raise facilities cost for charter schools that want to establish or expand in low-income communities across the state. In Michigan, the legislature reversed a 20% cut to the funding of virtual charter schools proposed by the governor and instead level funded these schools. This report provides highlights from this year's state legislative activity across the country, organized into the following categories: funding and facilities, authorizing and accountability, other issues, no law states, and harmful legislation.

All states have a formula that determines how state funding is distributed to school districts. Most state formulas anticipate or require that school districts raise some funds locally and adjust state allocations based on that anticipated local share of school funding. In theory, state funding formulas attempt to provide school districts with the resources needed for a high-quality education while also accounting for differences in student populations and economic conditions from district to district, among other factors. In practice, few state formulas achieve these goals, resulting in inequitable, inadequate, and inefficient spending. To better understand these disparities, it is important to understand how state school funding formulas typically work.

Total enrollment at Wisconsin's public and charter schools declined by 25,000 students from fall 2019 to fall 2020 and has continued to fall in the years since then. While declining birth rates and apparent movement of some students to private or home schools likely account for at least two thirds of the decline, somewhere between 0.5% and 1.2% of the state's school-age population may be unaccounted for, raising questions about their whereabouts and well-being, the state's workforce, school finances, and more.

Teacher preparation programs are geared toward preparing educators for traditional school models, which is reasonable, given that traditional models make up the lion's share of schools, but this means that the pool of talent available to alternative models might be small or nonexistent. If nontraditional schools have to essentially create their own teacher pathways, or invest heavily in professional development and retraining, that puts them at continued disadvantage to existing schools. To support the growth of alternative school models, pipelines need to be developed to create and support new teachers. This report aims to accurately diagnose the problem, using both polling data and an examination of educator preparation programs to show just how few educators are prepared for alternative models of schooling. This report highlights programs and courses preparing teachers for nontraditional school models. The report closes with some thoughts about what this all means, and what needs to be done.

The growth of homeschooling from a somewhat fringe movement during the 1970s and 1980s to a more widespread and socially accepted approach in recent decades has provided a strong foundation of flexible learning models. When Florida's school choice expansion, House Bill 1, was introduced in January 2023, one of its goals was to allow more homeschoolers to participate in the education savings account (ESA) program. But many homeschoolers and homeschool advocacy groups balked at the proposal. Having worked hard to achieve independence, they were loath to be linked to government funding. Even if the program were optional, they feared that associated regulations would eventually extend to traditional homeschoolers. In the end, the bill passed with new language that satisfied traditional homeschoolers by creating a new option for parents to educate their children at home. As states continue to enact and expand education savings accounts, Colleen Hroncich argues that it is crucial that policymakers craft bills in a way that maximizes freedom and minimizes roadblocks.

Corequisite remediation involves placing students who have been designated as underprepared directly into college-level courses with concurrent supports--such as in-class tutoring, online learning labs, or a supplemental class--rather than making them take non-credit-bearing developmental courses first. Despite the growing number of studies on corequisite remediation, there are still questions about which practices can address the needs of and advance equity for diverse groups of students, particularly students who struggle with basic math or English skills. CAPR researchers partnered with the Charles A. Dana Center to study and offer formative feedback about the implementation of corequisite course models at four colleges participating in the Corequisite Research Design Collaborative, the Dana Center's initiative for implementing equity-minded, holistic corequisite course models. CAPR researchers partnered with the Charles A. Dana Center to study and offer formative feedback about the implementation of corequisite course models at four colleges participating in the Corequisite Research Design Collaborative, the Dana Center's initiative for implementing equity-minded, holistic corequisite course models. This research brief and the supplement highlight the findings on the design and implementation of corequisite courses at the four colleges, as well as findings from a survey administered to students who were enrolled in these courses in fall 2021 and spring 2022. The researchers found that the implementation of corequisite support courses helped students understand course content and increased their engagement with their coursework. In general, students appeared more comfortable engaging in support courses than in the paired college-level courses. This suggests that support courses can play an important role in improving student engagement by providing an additional space for students to interact with the course content, their peers, and faculty. [This report was written with Ellen Wasserman. For the supplement, see ED631329.]

A large share of Wisconsin's 400+ school districts are rural, and nearly half of all students enrolled in public schools statewide attend rural schools. Persistent challenges faced by rural districts in attracting and retaining educators, however, are contributing to an increasingly dire situation for the state's rural communities. This report summarizes findings from a yearlong research project investigating strategies being used by rural districts to address educator shortages, including a diverse set of "grow your own" (GYO) initiatives which involve school districts working with educator preparation programs (EPPs) and other local partners to identify, recruit, and prepare local candidates to become educators. The mixed-methods research design draws upon two statewide surveys (of rural superintendents and local site coordinators of the Educators Rising GYO program), along with site visits to five rural districts, to accomplish two main goals: (1) to identify strategies being used by rural districts to attract, recruit, and hire teachers; and (2) to describe the landscape of GYO initiatives being utilized by rural Wisconsin districts and local partners to address educator shortages. Broadly speaking, the work suggests that rural school districts are not waiting on state or federal policymakers to solve longstanding staffing challenges for them, but instead are actively engaged in implementing a mix of national GYO programs such as Educators Rising and "homegrown" GYO initiatives as one solution to chronic educator shortages. Not surprisingly, a distinct set of both successes and challenges have emerged as rural districts attempt to implement, launch, sustain, and scale up GYO initiatives that meet their needs. [Paper's original version August 2023; revised version September 2023. This work was made possible by a research grant from UW-Madison's Tommy G. Thompson Center for Public Leadership.]

To comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 and related U.S. Department of Education peer review guidance, state education agencies must provide evidence demonstrating clear alignment (technically referred to as correspondence) between their K-12 English language proficiency standards and their academic content standards. This technical paper provides evidence of match, breadth, consistency [balance of representation], and depth of correspondence between WIDA consortium member state academic content standards in English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies, as of Fall 2022, and the components of the WIDA English Language Development Standards Framework, 2020 Edition--specifically the four WIDA Key Language Uses and their grade-level cluster and content area instantiation in the WIDA Language Expectations. It also illustrates the relationship between the grade-level cluster Language Expectations and Proficiency Level 5 of the Proficiency Level Descriptors. State correspondence evidence helps ensure that K-12 students identified as English learners (referred to as multilingual learners by WIDA) have the opportunity to learn the critical elements of language that facilitate access to and achievement of academic content. [For the summary report, see ED631052.]

Youth mental health concerns are on the rise and can have serious implications for student well-being and success (Clayborne et al., 2019). Consequently, more educators and mental health professionals are identifying mental health as an important student need (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2021). This report summarizes the key principles underlying comprehensive school mental health and trauma sensitive schools. The present synthesis of studies and reports emphasizes core features, key principles, and associated core components. [This report was co-produced by the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative and originally prepared for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI).]

A quarter of Wisconsin's high school students earned some college credit in a dual enrollment program during the 2021-22 school year. The two-fold increase in students over the past decade represents a substantial potential savings of time and money for students and families, but better data collection and analysis is needed to determine how these programs affect students' readiness for the workforce or higher education. This report discusses dual enrollment programs in Wisconsin and assesses the growing impact of dual enrollment in Wisconsin. The data in this report come from the annual reports distributed by the University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS).

Nearly 70 years after Milton Friedman first proposed K-12 education vouchers, students in Arizona, Iowa, Utah, West Virginia, and other states can customize their education using education savings accounts (ESAs). ESAs allow parents to spend public education funding on expenses such as private school tuition, tutoring, and homeschooling curricula. However the vast majority of students nationwide (84 percent) still attend traditional public schools--and will for the foreseeable future. Conservatives would be wise to support policies that give families choice within the public education system. The authors argue that cross-district open enrollment does precisely that, and it has strong bipartisan support. One state where families are reaping the benefits of open enrollment is Wisconsin. This article describes the state's experience with open enrollment over the past 25 years.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is required to submit this report to the Legislature regarding the status of existing charter schools, the number of petitions for new charter schools, and the action taken by school boards and DPI on petitions for new charter schools (see Wis. Stat. §115.28 (49)). This report offers the results of the charter school activity survey in the 421 Wisconsin school districts during the 2021-2022 school year. Independent authorizer charter school activity is not included in the survey. This report documents two distinct stages of decision-making regarding new charter school proposals. The first is a "development" decision (previously known as first-level decision) which includes the following: (1) further study of a new charter school; (2) considering participation in a charter consortium; or (3) study of a federal Charter Schools Program grant or subgrant for a new or replicated charter school. The second is an "implementation" decision (previously known as a second-level decision) which is defined as (1) an approved charter contract between the district and the operator of a charter school for a new charter school; (2) an approved written agreement to participate in a consortium; or (3) a signature on a federal Charter Schools Program grant or subgrant for a new or replicated charter school. For the purpose of this definition, petition and proposal can be used interchangeably. The department conducted an electronic survey and personally contacted school district officials to compile the necessary data. One hundred percent of Wisconsin school districts responded to the survey. During the 2021-2022 school year, 21 districts (five percent) reported charter school activity as defined above, including at least one district in 10 of the 12 regional Cooperative Educational Services Agencies (CESA). A breakdown of the activity shows 13 school boards made 16 "development" charter school decisions, and 16 school boards made 18 "implementation" charter school decisions. Of the "development" decisions, 14 of 16 (88 percent) were approved. Of the implementation" decisions, 17 of 18 (94 percent) were approved. [This report was developed by the DPI Charter Schools Team, Parental Education Options.]

Wisconsin's Circles of Reflection (CoR) addresses early learning challenges and opportunities for American Indian or Alaskan Native (AI/AN) children and families. Developed by the National Comprehensive Center's Native Education Collaborative, CoR engages state, tribal, and local education agencies in cycles of issue discovery, stakeholder engagement, and implementation planning to provide high quality, motivating educational experiences that improve Native students' academic attainment. Recognizing historical inequities, Wisconsin's Act 31 requires K-12 educators to build knowledge on Tribes in the state so that they can accurately teach about these Nations and their sovereignty. Despite Act 31, challenges still exist. Non-Indigenous educators, policy makers, and leaders have difficulty entering authentic partnerships to improve Native student education due to insufficient knowledge and capacity concerning tribal history, culture, and sovereignty. CoR provides a way to address these issues by honoring the expertise and sovereignty of Native educators while deepening DPI's understanding of critical aspects of Native student education. The project's ultimate goal is to develop a more collaborative relationship between the Nations, the educators instructing their students, and the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), leading to concrete improvements for students. This report examines how CoR's multi-jurisdictional approach can be part of long-term, structural changes in how Wisconsin engages with Wisconsin's 12 Tribal Nations to address systemic gaps and historic inequities.

Trellis' Student Financial Wellness Survey (SFWS) seeks to document the financial well-being of post-secondary students and provide institutions with a detailed profile of the financial issues their students face, some of which could potentially impact their success in college. This report details aggregated findings for the 89 colleges and universities across the country that participated in the fall 2022 implementation of the survey. [For "Student Financial Wellness Survey: Fall 2021 Semester Results. National Aggregate Report," see ED625724.]

Early childhood education and care is critical to Wisconsin's families and businesses, offering a safe place for children to grow and learn during formative years while parents and other guardians participate in the workforce. Despite its importance, child care can be prohibitively expensive for some Wisconsin families, and the industry operates on easily eroded margins and relies on low-paid labor. This brief shows how all three sets of stakeholders within the child care system--families, employees, and operators--can be struggling at the same time. An understanding of this mutual challenge is essential to analyzing potential policy solutions and is a safeguard against proposals that, in seeking to address challenges for one group, might exacerbate difficulties for others. To illustrate these challenges, this brief examines the costs of child care provided in a licensed group center setting in Milwaukee County. [Additional financial support was provided by Mary Kellner.]

After trailing the national average for five years, funding per student at public colleges and universities in Wisconsin overtook it in 2021. State and local tax and tuition funding per student dropped nationally after adjusting for inflation and rose in Wisconsin, though it remains lower for four-year campuses in Wisconsin. The state's colleges have shed students at an alarming rate, leaving their future and that of Wisconsin's workforce murky. The funding and enrollment data are published by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) and were used in "Falling Behind? The State of Wisconsin's Public Colleges and Universities" (ED612810), examining challenges to state higher education institutions. This brief updates key data from that report and looks at the issues facing the University of Wisconsin System and Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) as lawmakers draft the 2023-25 state budget. The SHEEO data presented in this brief look at tax and tuition funding used for operations and exclude revenues used for capital projects and debt payments, research, medical education, hospitals, and financial aid and tuition discounts.

In an era in which public postsecondary institutions increasingly face budget constraints, the state residency of students has become an important factor in complex decisions on tuition-setting policies and enrollment management. This report examines the current trends and impact of out-of-state tuition premiums -- defined as the additional amount of tuition and fees for nonresident students -- at public four-year institutions in the U.S. Regional approaches to reducing out-of-state tuition premiums are described, and past research on the effects of tuition premiums is summarized.

This paper relates how leaders of a higher education program, the Wisconsin Collaborative Education Research Network, sparked and managed innovation across communities of scholarship, research, and practice. This paper uses a "design narrative" method to describe how leaders orchestrated organizational change by bringing diverse communities together into research-practice partnerships. The narrative uses the idea of "boundary objects" to describe how initiatives were progressively developed to create more inclusive spaces for sustained innovation. The insights and the capacity that resulted from initial design efforts created a richer space for subsequent initiatives. The paper shows how design narratives can illustrate the role that boundary objects can play in organizational change and concludes with a discussion of the role that leaders can play in creating inclusive cultures of innovation in higher education.

The purpose of this study was to examine the accuracy of function-based decisions made in consideration of scores from the Intervention Selection Profile (ISP)-Function, a tool founded upon direct behavior rating methodology. The ISP-Function is designed to be a brief measure, given the need for efficient and low resource assessments in schools. Data from a previous investigation were used to create data reports for each of 34 elementary students with a history of exhibiting disruptive behavior in the classroom. The first report summarized ISP-Function data that the student's classroom teacher collected. The second report was representative of more typical functional behavior assessment (FBA), summarizing data collected via a functional assessment interview with the teacher, as well as systematic direct observation data. Nine school psychologists conducted blind reviews of these reports and derived decisions regarding the function of each student's behavior (e.g., adult attention or escape/avoidance). Gwet's agreement coefficients were statistically significant and suggested Fair to Almost Perfect correspondence between ISP-Function and FBA reports. Limitations and implications for practice are discussed herein. [This paper was published in "School Psychology."]

Corequisite remediation involves placing students who have been designated as underprepared directly into college-level courses with concurrent supports--such as in-class tutoring, online learning labs, or a supplemental class--rather than making them take non-credit-bearing developmental courses first. There are multiple corequisite course models; the Corequisite Research Design Collaborative (CRDC) colleges used a support corequisite model and an embedded corequisite model. The support corequisite model involved enrolling corequisite students in a college-level math or English course that also included students who placed out of developmental education; the corequisite students were also enrolled in a separate, supplementary support course that was offered before, after, or on different days than the college-level course. Students conceptualized these as two courses paired together. The support courses had smaller class sizes and they provided students additional time to become familiar with the content taught in their paired college-level courses. The embedded corequisite model involved enrolling the same group of students (or a cohort) in a college-level course and a developmental course that were taught back to back; this combination of courses is referred to as an "embedded course" in this supplement. Students conceptualized these back-to-back courses as a single course. During the fall 2021 and spring 2022 semesters, a student survey was distributed to every CRDC college except Houston Community College, which is located in Texas.2 The other three CRDC colleges--Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College (FDLTCC), St. Cloud Technical and Community College (SCTCC), and St. Cloud State University (SCSU)--are located in Minnesota. The survey was intended to evaluate students' experiences in their corequisite courses. [This report was written with Ellen Wasserman. For the full report, see ED631328.]

In January 2021, Eric Loepp, a faculty member in the department of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and Will Hinz, a member of the student government, administered a survey to students in order to answer big questions surrounding higher education during the fall 2020 semester. Like other institutions, theirs was working through ideas about what a post-pandemic educational experience should look like. Indeed, this is fundamentally what motivated this project: the desire to help their institution navigate what the near-future of pandemic/post-pandemic education should look like to best serve our students, instructors, and programs. Specifically, the following key questions guided this study: (1) How did the student experience differ across modalities in terms of satisfaction, engagement, and performance?; (2) How successful were we as students and instructors adapting conventionally face-to-face activities--like group work and certain types of assessments--into purely online activities?; (3) How can we best promote learning in a largely or exclusively online environment moving forward (e.g., investing in professional development for instructors vs. non-academic support centers vs. technical training)?; (4) Can we gain systemic insight into pandemic-specific questions--like why students do or do not use webcams--for which most of our current understanding is principally anecdotal?; and (5) Ultimately, as we emerge from the pandemic, what aspects of teaching in 2020 and 2021 should we retain, reject, or revise?

As COVID-19 upended the lives of students around the state, schools across Wisconsin saw a troubling increase in chronic absences. This report discusses where chronic absenteeism grew more sharply in Wisconsin. The highest rates of absenteeism occurred in schools with greater numbers of students of color and from low-income households, thus posing an additional threat to efforts to bridge the state's longstanding achievement gaps for these K-12 students.

This report contains the proceedings of a forum held on June 28, 2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to discuss issues surrounding meaningful accessibility of assessments. The forum was a post-session to the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) National Conference on Student Assessment (NCSA) and was a collaboration of the "Assessment, Standards, and Education for Students with Disabilities" (ASES) Collaborative and the National Center on Educational Outcomes (NCEO). A specific goal of the forum was to gather representatives from state education agencies (SEAs), assessment vendors, assistive technology experts, and others to discuss the meaningful accessibility of assessments and to identify possible solutions to the challenges that students face when accessing assessments. [This report is a result of a collaboration with the Assessment, Standards, and Education for Students with Disabilities (ASES) Collaborative.]