While the importance of social-emotional learning for student success is well established, educators and researchers have less knowledge and agreement about which social-emotional skills are most important for students and how these skills distribute across student subgroups. Using a rich longitudinal dataset of 221,840 fourth through seventh…

In March 2020, most schools in the U.S. transitioned to distance learning. During the transition a significant number of students did not fully engage in learning opportunities. This brief uses administrative panel data from the CORE Districts in California to approximate the impact of the pandemic by analyzing how absenteeism has affected student…

School value-added models are increasingly used to measure schools' contributions to student success. At the same time, policymakers and researchers agree that schools should support students' socialemotional learning (SEL) as well as academic development. Yet, the evidence regarding whether schools can influence SEL and whether statistical growth…

California's Kindergarten Readiness Act of 2010 established transitional kindergarten (TK), the first year of a two-year kindergarten program for students affected by the change in the birthdate cutoff for entry into kindergarten from December 2 to September 1. This final report from the program's evaluation focuses on results from a five-year…

In 2010, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the Kindergarten Readiness Act into law, which changed the kindergarten entry age so that children must turn 5 by September instead of December to enroll. The new grade level was put into place to promote school readiness for California's youngest learners. It also established a new grade…

This is the full report, and a separate research brief also was published. Austin Independent School District (AISD) served 5,450 pre-K students in 2009-2010. Approximately 70% of sampled English-speaking pre-K students and 74% of sampled Spanish-speaking pre-K students had faster than the expected growth rate on an assessment of receptive…