About a third of the 7.7 million Venezuelans who have left their country due to political and economic turmoil have settled in neighboring Colombia. The extent to which the Colombian schooling system can absorb the massive demand for education of Venezuelan children is key for their future trajectory of human capital accumulation, as well as that…

Transitional Kindergarten (TK) is a relatively new model of early childhood education, with little evidence on whether and how it affects children's development. This study provides new evidence using data from Michigan, which has the nation's second-largest TK program. Using survey data (N=171) from administrators in 2021-2022, the paper…

Previous research has examined undergraduate student performance changes pre- and post-covid, overall and by institutional subgroupings. Standardized test scores tended to decline while high school and undergraduate grades increased. The current study expands upon this research by examining changes across student subgroups of interest, notably by…

The quality of the teaching force in our public schools has received great attention as one of the approaches to improve student performance, as there exists ample evidence that teacher quality matters for student achievement (see McCaffrey et al., 2004 for a review on this literature). Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain (2005) find large differences…

Since 2007, the Cowen Institute has conducted annual polls on perceptions of public education in New Orleans. These polls have served to provide insight on how parents, guardians, and the general public feel about the most relevant issues related to New Orleans' highly decentralized K-12 public education system. In previous editions of the poll,…

We provide evidence from a randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of a novel, 100-percent online math tutoring program, targeted at secondary school students from highly disadvantaged neighborhoods. The intensive, eight-week-long program was delivered by qualified math teachers in groups of two students during after-school hours. The…

This report is an updated version of analyses undertaken in previous years (Gill and Crawford, 2016; Gill, 2017; Gill, 2018) looking at the impact of the introduction of new accountability measures (Progress 8) on the qualifications and subjects taken by students at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4). The focus of this report is on changes to the uptake…

Academic achievement in American high schools is increasingly defined in terms of quantifiable values. Despite being designed to produce favorable data, explicit standardized-test preparation has an insignificant impact on scores and is counterproductive to the cultivation of attributes necessary for success in higher education and effective civic…

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has periodically published reports using results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to compare the proficiency standards states set for their students. Since standards vary across states, the results of the various state assessments cannot be used to directly compare…

The Improving Basic Programs effort in Title I, Part A (Title I) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA), is designed to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and achieve, at a minimum, proficiency…

The 2018 Michigan Public High School Context and Performance Report Card is the fourth edition in a series of analyses designed to measure high school performance. The first report was published in 2012 (ED541512) and was followed by analyses in 2014 (ED560065) and 2016 (ED588530). This report is a school-level assessment of academic performance…

Idaho uses the English Language Arts and Mathematics tests from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) for the Idaho Standard Achievement Tests. ISAT results have been reported almost exclusively as "percent proficient or above" statistics (i.e., the percentage of Idaho students who performed at the "A" level). This…

This publication marks the fourth edition of the Context and Performance (CAP) Report Card for Michigan elementary and middle schools, published every two years since 2013. The goal is to compare Michigan schools' relative performance by factoring in the role student poverty plays in affecting academic achievement. The CAP Report Card uses…

After a challenging fall semester, a national survey from Public Agenda finds that K-12 teachers and parents are largely on the same page regarding education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just over half of both teachers and parents feel that their communities value teachers more now than before the pandemic. While only one-third of parents think…

These are the appendixes for the report, "English Proficiency and the Pandemic: How Texas English Learner Students Fared during the COVID-19 Pandemic. REL 2023-144." This study examined levels of English proficiency before and during the COVID-19 pandemic among English learner students in grades 3-12 in Texas. In 2020-2021, nearly…