The early care and education (ECE) workforce plays a crucial role in supporting young children's development during a formative period in their lives. Despite the essential nature of this work, the ECE field is marked by low wages, limited support, and persistent disparities, leaving many educators without adequate resources to thrive…

We use data from the Stanford Education Data Archive to describe district-level trends in average academic achievement between 2009 and 2019. Though on average school districts' test scores improved very modestly (by about 0.001 SDs/year), there is significant variation among districts. Moreover, we find that average test score disparities between…

The purpose of this paper is to explore 10-year trends in the use of Assistive Technology (AT). Using 2006 and 2015 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data, univariate analysis were performed, and the rate of change was calculated. In both 2006 and 2015 data, a higher per cent of Blacks were using AT compared to Whites and…

Chronic absenteeism spiked during the pandemic and remains a serious problem. Drawing on the American Enterprise Institute's Return to Learn Tracker chronic absenteeism data collection, which includes district-level data from 44 states, this report documents modest progress: National chronic absenteeism fell to 25.4 percent in 2023 and to 23.5…

The purpose of this technical appendix is to more fully describe the sample, methods, and results of the research brief "Boys Regain the Advantage in Middle School STEM Skills: Post-COVID Trends in Gender Achievement Gaps." The authors investigated three research questions in this brief: (1) How have 8th grade gender gaps in STEM…

This policy brief is one in a series which examines selected topics related to Wisconsin's educator workforce. This brief presents a descriptive profile of Wisconsin's principal and assistant principal labor force over the past 20 years in terms of key attributes such as counts of both types of administrators, selected demographic characteristics…

Using a dataset of over 16 million students who took the ACT® test, we examined occupation choice trends from 2012 to 2023. Students increasingly were undecided or selected occupations in Finance, Computer and Information Sciences, and Math/Quantitative areas. Students decreasingly chose Pharmacy, Communications, Visual and Performing Arts, and…

This paper presents a critical interrogation of the recent drive towards the 'inclusive curriculum' in higher education (HE). Our arguments are grounded in the findings of a systematic scoping review that sought to understand how researchers have, to date, understood, conceptualised and theorised the inclusive curriculum in HE. The findings…

This study aims to review the STEM education intervention on the undergraduate level by applying CiteSpace software, an innovative tool for bibliometric analysis and visualization. The Web of Science (WOS) database was used and covers the period from January 2008 to August 2023. Based on keyword search, seven clusters with the largest research…

This report looks at trends since 1997, uniquely combining several data sources to give the most comprehensive view available on how patterns in access to higher education have changed in the years between 1997 and 2022. A major study of higher education trends over the past 25 years reveals persistent access gaps for disadvantaged students,…

This report documents chronic absenteeism over the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the American Enterprise Institute's Return to Learn Tracker Chronic Absenteeism Data Collection, it shows that increases in chronic absenteeism were widespread during the pandemic. More worrisome, using the most recent data for the 2022-2023 school year, even after…

The COVID-19 Transfer, Mobility, and Progress report series aims to identify the ways in which the pandemic is changing transfer pathways across higher education. The pandemic's impacts on transfer enrollment shifted as the pandemic progressed, with transfer pathways and student groups showing diverging patterns over time. As the ninth issue in…

Implementing police in schools is a common strategy for ensuring school safety, but it is unknown whether, to what extent, and for whom the presence of police in schools affects student arrest rates. Utilizing nationwide data from the 2013-2014 Civil Rights Data Collection (N = 92,620), this study examines how police presence is related to student…

Analyzing the test scores of more than 10,000,000 students who participated in the Advanced Placement (AP) math exams from 1997 to 2019, this study examined the direction and magnitude of the trend in gender disparity by race in participation in and top achievement on AP Calculus AB, Calculus BC, and Statistics exams. The results of this study…

Six-year college graduation rates for Hispanic and White students from 17 cohorts were analyzed using data from the U.S. Department of Education's IPED System. Results from regression analyses confirmed statistically significant positive linear trends for Hispanic and White students and statistically significant differences between the two…