Public policies often target individuals but within-family externalities of such interventions are understudied. Using a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of both children while the spillover is up to 30% of…

More than 20 percent of all school-aged children in the United States have vision problems, and low-income and minority children are disproportionately likely to have unmet vision care needs. Vision screening is common in U.S. schools, but it remains an open question whether screening alone is sufficient to improve student outcomes. We implemented…

In a response-to-intervention framework, schools typically employ a direct route approach to screening, in which students identified as at risk by a screening process are directly placed into intervention. Direct route approaches require screening decisions to be highly accurate, but few studies examining the predictive validity of reading…

The authors' purpose was to explore the effects of a supplementary, guided, silent reading intervention with 80 struggling third-grade readers who were retained at grade level as a result of poor performance on the reading portion of a criterion referenced state assessment. The students were distributed in 11 elementary schools in a large, urban…

Recent revisions of the Florida School Code by the Florida Legislature include a major component focusing on proficiency in reading. In particular, grade 3 students who do not score at level 2 or higher on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) SSS Reading Test must be retained, unless exempted for special circumstances. This new…