In the 1995 legislation establishing charter schools in the state of Louisiana, the Louisiana Legislature indicated their intention "that the best interests of at-risk pupils be the overriding consideration in implementing the provisions of this Chapter" (Charter School Demonstration Programs, 1997). Furthermore, the legislation required…

COVID-19 shuttered schools across the United States, upending traditional approaches to education. We examine teachers' experiences during emergency remote teaching in the spring of 2020 using responses to a working conditions survey from a sample of 7,841 teachers across 206 schools and 9 states. Teachers reported a range of challenges related to…

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic shuttered schools across the United States, upending traditional approaches to education and requiring large scale school transformation on a pace never before seen. Though prior research on organizational change has emphasized the importance of working conditions for teacher satisfaction and student achievement…

In the past few years, four states have established programs that provide public financial support to students who choose to attend a private school. These programs--a tax-credit-funded scholarship initiative in Florida and voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio--offer a glimpse of what expansive statewide choice might look like. What…

To fulfill educational promises such as "every student succeeds," district leaders must embrace an agenda committed to equitable opportunities for students. Doing so requires breaking from managerial norms to identify new ways forward that prioritize historically low-performing schools. Coby Meyers, Lamar Goree, and Keith Burton distill…

This is the second in a series of policy notes and related publications exploring prospects for developing indicators of teaching quality. The first examined federal databases that include information about teachers, demonstrating that almost none of the measures in these datasets provides indication of teaching quality. This policy note takes the…

This report presents key findings from "Learning in the Fast Lane: The Past, Present, and Future of Advanced Placement," by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Andrew E. Scanlan, and published by Princeton University Press in 2019. American education has long been plagued by excellence gaps among the young people who make it into the highest levels…

A central argument for school choice is that families value the freedom to exercise choice and can make wise decisions. This principle may underlie why lottery-based school evaluations, which exploit over-subscription due to excess demand, have almost always reported positive or zero achievement effects. This paper reports on a striking empirical…

Under new school-choice policies, schools feel increasing pressure to market their schools to parents and students. I examine how school leaders in New Orleans used different marketing strategies based on their positions in the market hierarchy and the ways in which they used formal and informal processes to recruit students. This study relied on…