The presence of tablets and laptops in schools has burgeoned in recent years, with $4.9 billion spent on over 10.8 million devices in 2015. Despite the large and increasingly prevalent monetary and time investments in education technology, little causal evidence of its effectiveness exists. I estimate the effect of a Math and English Language Arts…

Professional learning should be designed in a way that is responsive to the needs of teachers and intentionally planned with adult learning principles in mind. This article outlines one practitioner's professional journey to redefine how professional learning is designed with best practices in adult learning in mind. Strategies utilized during…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how teachers who teach 6th, 7th, or 8th grade English language arts in a virtual charter school environment describe the gamification process to support student engagement in the classroom. The overarching research question was: How do teachers who teach 6th, 7th, or 8th grade…

The purpose of this action research is to evaluate the impact of gamified peer feedback in a high school English Language Arts classroom at Southern Charter High School. National assessments on writing show that student proficiency is low in part because many high school students lack revision skills. Compounding the problem is that as classroom…

This grounded theory study explored how primary-grade teachers perceive and enact dialogic English Language Arts (ELA) comprehension pedagogy in the novel context of pandemic-induced digital learning. The study involved nine diverse rural primary teachers teaching digitally during the coronavirus disease pandemic. The researchers followed a…

Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit charter management organization that starts and manages public charter schools, primarily in traditionally underserved communities. As part of a 2016 grant awarded to Uncommon from the U.S. Department of Education's Charter Schools Program to support replication and expansion of its school model, we conducted a…

A variety of databases were used to answer questions about charter and public schools with regard low-income students, special education students, and academic performance. Charter schools in Dallas and Detroit served comparable numbers of poor children, but charter schools enrolled far fewer students in special education.…

We exploit information about parental preference and a randomized component in the assignment of students to schools within a deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism to estimate the causal effect of enrolling in a charter school in Newark, New Jersey, on student test scores. The estimates incorporate variation from students attending about 70% of the…

This paper expands on previous work on charter school typology and presents disparities in standardized test outcomes across models by using standardized Z-Scores weighted by NAEP performance. Analyses indicate that in ELA, Classical schools have the highest relative performance, followed by Montessori and Art schools. In math, Classical schools…

We seek to build a framework with which researchers can track the trends in charter school specialization and parents can better understand their options. This report examines the entire charter school population operating in the 2018-19 school year and calculates the rate of specialization among charter schools based on key terms found on their…

Most studies have focused on whether charter schools perform better than TPS. However, for the vast majority of students who remain in TPS, a more relevant question is whether charter schools have a positive or negative impact on their schools. This study uses national, district-level panel data to examine how charter school prevalence influences…

Closing the achievement gap has been a continuous topic of conversation in the United States for decades. School leaders have explored many ways to address the academic achievement of their marginalized student population. One approach has been the implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy and curriculum. By implementing a curriculum in which…

This quantitative causal-comparative study, based on secondary data analysis, measured the differences between neighboring Title I traditional elementary schools and Title 1 charter elementary schools in Florida in terms of (a) ELA performance and (b) math performance. More specifically, the study examined the third grade ELA and math scores of 60…

The problem explored in this study was the low achievement of third grade students on the English Language Arts (ELA) Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers Assessment (PARCC). The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore teacher perceptions about third grade students in one charter school who were…

When the number of charter schools in a given area increases, are students who remain in traditional public schools worse off? This is a claim often made by opponents of school choice; gains made by students in charter schools, they say, come at the expense of students left behind. There is scant evidence to support this view in the existing…