Previous literature reported that Black students receive out-of-school suspensions (OSSs) and expulsions at disproportionately higher rates and have lower test scores than White students. This study provides recent evidence on the relation between racial disparities in discipline and in achievement, with particular focus on achievement gains, in…

"Excellence gaps" are the disparities in advanced academic performance that exist between student groups. These gaps have important implications for both academic equity and American economic competitiveness, as the most lucrative jobs often go to those who perform at the highest levels. Although considerable work has evaluated how and…

This report evaluates the effects of Lexia[TM] Core5[TM] Reading (Core5) -- a product of Lexia Learning Systems -- on the reading achievement of students in grades 3-5 during the 2021-2022 academic year. Core5 is a program that focuses on various student literacy skills, such as fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This report represents the…

While the ongoing academic impacts of the COVID pandemic in grades 3-8 has been well documented, far less is known about its effects on students who were in pre-K or kindergarten when the pandemic started in March 2020. In this brief, we focus on students who were in first and second grade in the 2021-22 school year, and for whom the majority of…

School disciplinary practices affect student academic and life outcomes. Many schools have recently shifted towards the prevention of behavioral disorders rather than the punishment of such disorders, but disciplinary actions are still disproportionately meted out to Black students. We took advantage of a natural experiment in a large school…

The purpose of this technical appendix is to share more detailed results and to describe more fully the sample and methods used in the research included in the brief, "Student achievement in 2021-22: Cause for hope and continued urgency." The authors investigated two main research questions in this brief: (1) How do achievement gains…

Research suggests more students have experienced more unfinished learning over the last year than ever before. With the COVID-19 pandemic waning, school systems are facing a critical choice about how to respond. Should they use the traditional approach of reviewing all the content students missed, known as "remediation?" Or should they…

The extent to which youth attend Tier 2 evidence-based intervention is an important dimension of implementation. This study examined attendance patterns of 369 middle schoolers involved in a randomized trial testing the impact of Coping Power, an evidence-based Tier 2 preventive intervention. We conducted latent profile analysis to examine student…

The extent to which youth attend Tier 2 evidence-based intervention is an important dimension of implementation. This study examined attendance patterns of 369 middle schoolers involved in a randomized trial testing the impact of Coping Power, an evidence-based Tier 2 preventive intervention. We conducted latent profile analysis to examine student…

Research Findings: The amount of time and type of program that children experience in early childhood settings may be associated with children's kindergarten-entry skills, or kindergarten readiness. Taking a person-centered perspective, in the present study, we examined the extent to which reliable and unique profiles of early childhood…

Recent work examining science test performance in the earliest grades of school has demonstrated that science test score gaps by race/ethnicity are apparent as early as kindergarten and that, in a number of cases, the racial/ethnic test score gaps in science are significantly larger than the corresponding gaps in reading or mathematics. This study…

Disparities in school discipline data indicate that children of color, particularly boys, receive more frequent and harsher disciplinary actions than their white peers, and this begins in early schooling. Within today's print-centered, bodily restricted school curricula, literacy instruction is often reduced to highly controlled, leveled readers…

Does student-teacher match quality exist? Prior work has documented large disparities in teachers' impacts across student types but has not distinguished between sorting and causal effects as the drivers of these disparities. I propose a disparate value-added model and derive a novel measure of teacher quality--revealed comparative advantage--that…

This study investigated children's and adolescents' predictions of inclusion and evaluations of exclusion in interracial and same-race peer contexts. The sample (N = 246) consisted of African American (n = 115) and European American (n = 131) children and adolescents who judged the likelihood of including a new peer, evaluated the group's decision…

Districts have been engaged in efforts to reduce "differential processing" of discipline-referred students based on their racial backgrounds. They strive for fair assignment of exclusionary consequences across racial groups. The current study examines discipline records for one academic year in an urban school district (N = 9,039…