In the 2013-2014 school year, the state of California implemented a new equity-minded funding system, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). LCFF increased minimum per-pupil funding for educationally underserved students and provided greater autonomy in allocating resources. We use the implementation of LCFF to enrich our understanding of rural…

The roles of technology and education were at the forefront throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This mixed-methods study examines the role of the three levels of the digital divide (i.e., access, capability, and outcomes) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Kentucky. We create and analyze a new multifaceted measure of district-level digital capacity to…

The U.S. Department of Education made recent technical changes reducing eligibility for the Rural and Low-Income School Program. Given smaller budgets and lower economies of scale, rural districts may be less able to absorb short-term funding cuts and experience stronger negative achievement effects. Kansas implemented a state-level finance change…

The unprecedented arrival of COVID-19 upended the lives of American children with rapid shifts to remote and hybrid schooling and reduced access to school-based support. Growing concerns about threats to students' mental health and decreased numbers of students transitioning to postsecondary education suggest access to school counselors is needed…

We use data collected between April 2020 and March 2021 from the Understanding America Survey, a nationally representative internet panel of approximately 1,450 households with school-age children, to document the access of American households to K-12 education during the COVID-19 crisis. We also explore disparities by parent race/ethnicity,…

Using repeated cross-sectional nationally representative data, we demonstrate how the teacher labor markets for rural contexts are different from those in urban-suburban areas. We also show that teacher attrition is not uniform across various rural settings. In particular, novice teachers in rural schools in sparsely populated states are more…

Using state-representative teacher surveys in three states--Texas, Ohio, and Kentucky--we examine teachers' implementation of college- and career-readiness (CCR) standards. What do teachers report about the specificity, authority, consistency, power, and stability of their standards environment? How does their policy environment predict…