House Report 116-450 includes a provision for the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) to report on Charter Schools Program (CSP) grants, with a particular focus on charter schools that eventually closed or never opened. This report examines the extent to which CSP-recipient schools stayed open or closed compared to non-recipient charter…

Propensity score methods account for selection bias in observational studies. However, the consistency of the propensity score estimators strongly depends on a correct specification of the propensity score model. Logistic regression and, with increasing popularity, machine learning tools are used to estimate propensity scores. We introduce a…

Vocational Education and Training (VET) programs are prevalent in a European context, but often struggle with drop-out rates that exceed those of general upper-secondary education. Using Danish administrative data, we study the effects of reform-induced reductions in shares of VET students who did not pass their lower secondary final exams on…

Teacher turnover has adverse consequences for student achievement and imposes large financial costs for schools. Some have argued that high-stakes testing may lower teachers' satisfaction with their jobs and could be a major contributor to teacher attrition. In this paper, we exploit changes in the tested grades and subjects in Georgia to study…

The "Academic Mindsets and Behaviors, Prior Achievement, and the Transition to Middle School" study examined the relationship between 2016/17 grade 5 student responses to a Clark County School District (Nevada) survey on levels of academic mindsets and behaviors and the predicted probability of earning a low GPA (below 2.0) at the end of…

Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two…

Few elementary students on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) are scoring at grade level or higher on the ACT Aspire reading assessment. To better understand factors associated with the reading proficiency of CNMI grade 3 students, stakeholders there asked the Regional Educational Laboratory Pacific to examine the demographic…

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings' college options, we present evidence from the United States, Chile, Sweden and Croatia that older siblings' college and…

This paper presents the results of a national validity study examining relationships between new SAT Essay scores and first semester grades in English and writing courses, as well as first-year grade point average (FYGPA) in college. The sample includes more than 180,000 first-year students across 171 four-year institutions. Results show that…

These are the appendixes for the report, "Progress of Arizona Kindergartners toward English Proficiency in Grade 3 by English Learner Student Classification." The study examined the English language proficiency and English language arts (ELA) proficiency (reading and writing at grade level) of non-native English speaker students in…

These are the appendixes for the report, "Investigating the Relationship between Adherence to Connecticut's Teacher Education and Mentoring Program and Teacher Retention." This study was conducted to explore the relationship between adherence to TEAM Program requirements and the outcome of interest-teacher retention. Teacher induction,…

These are the appendixes for the report "Effects of an Inquiry-Oriented Curriculum and Professional Development Program on Grade 7 Students' Understanding of Statistics and on Statistics Instruction." This cluster-randomized controlled trial compared the Supporting Teacher Enactment of the Probability and Statistics Standards (STEPSS)…

These are the appendixes for the report "Enrollment Rates of Children in Universal Prekindergarten Programs in Vermont in 2016/17. REL 2020-015." The purpose of this study was to examine the enrollment patterns in Vermont's universal, mixed-delivery prekindergarten (preK) program and the child characteristics associated with the…

For 25 years, nearly 3,000 colleges and universities have used the Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL) Satisfaction-Priorities Surveys to assess their students, strengthen the student experience, increase student success and completion, and prioritize campus planning initiatives. The surveys are valued so highly because they reveal where institutions are…

Traditionally, teacher salaries have been determined solely by experience and educational attainment. This has led to chronic shortages of teachers in particular subject areas, such as math, science and special education. We study the first long-running statewide program to differentiate teacher pay based on subject area, Georgia's bonus system…