Castañeda v. Pickard (1981) mandated that educational programs for emergent bilinguals be tested for program efficacy. Since English language development (ELD) curricular materials are one part of an instructional program, we assess this mandate by examining the effectiveness of ELD materials in Texas. Using local linear matching, we find that…

This study uses the framework of the Adverse Selection model of Efficiency Wage to examine whether the pay stance (i.e., lead, lag or match the market) of South Carolina public school districts influences their students' math and science achievement outcomes. Four separate fixed effects regressions were estimated based on three years of panel data…

State lottery policies have been created to generate additional funds to support public initiatives, such as higher education scholarships. Through 18 participant interviews and document analysis, this study examined how decision makers in Arkansas socially constructed citizens while forming lottery policy. The social construction of target…

This paper examines preservice teachers negotiating and making sense of a particular policy, the Massachusetts' Rethinking Equity and Teaching for English Language Learners (RETELL). It addresses the following questions: First, what do preservice teachers know about policy in general and the RETELL language policy in particular? Second, how do…

Despite recommendations to extend prevention and early intervention related to behavioral health into school settings, limited research has been directed toward understanding how these recommendations have been translated by states into education policies and initiatives. This macro-level information is important toward understanding the…

In October 2014, the US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights issued a clarion call to school districts and states to review their policies and practices in order to ensure they are equitably providing educational resources to their schools. The quality of classroom instruction and the quality of the organizational systems supporting…

This chapter reports results from a national policy study that examined state dual credit policies and how state policies address the quality of dual credit courses.

The California Budget Act of 2012, through a trailer bill known as Senate Bill (SB) 1041, contained significant reforms to the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) program. CalWORKs is California's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, a central component of the safety net that provides cash aid for…

To address conceptual and methodological shortcomings in the extant literature on student mobility, this study employs event history modeling to describe and explain how state policy levers, specifically state grant aid, relates to mobility and baccalaureate degree completion. We find that state grant aid reduces mobility, but less so than…

Debates over the efficacy of tenure are longstanding but tenure reform is now more prominent in the public eye given recent high-profile legislative battles in states like Ohio and Wisconsin. This focus on tenure also is a natural outgrowth of the large body of research showing that differences between individual teachers can have profound effects…

Since 1958, the New York State Education Department has officially promoted the policy of consolidating small, rural schools. This policy is delineated in the Master Plan for School Reorganization, and while the centralization of most one-room rural schools has been successful, the state has been less successful in the consolidation of smaller,…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides an opportunity to produce high quality postsecondary indicators and, as available, publicly report them in ways that inform, engage, and empower communities. As first "required" in 2009's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus law, almost every state has linked its K-12 and…

In 2012, the Credit When It's Due (CWID) initiative was launched by the Funders Collaborative to "encourage partnerships of community colleges and universities to significantly expand programs that award associate degrees to transfer students when the student completes the requirements for the associate degree while pursuing a bachelor's…

How can we help significantly more students reach their educational goals and improve their employment outcomes? How can we reign in the growing time burden and ballooning costs students must shoulder throughout their educational journey? How can we recognize the learning and experience the vast number of nontraditional students bring when they…

Most public school teachers in the United States are enrolled in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using administrative micro data from four states, combined with national pension funding data, we show these plans have accumulated substantial unfunded liabilities -- effectively debt -- owing to previous plan operations. On average across 49…