Newsela contracted with LearnPlatform by Instructure (LearnPlatform), a third-party edtech research company, to examine the relationship between Newsela ELA usage and outcomes for students. LearnPlatform designed the study to satisfy Level II requirements (Moderate Evidence) according to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The study included…

School boards remain one of the most powerful forces in American education, helping to set curricula, evaluate teachers, and direct hundreds of billions of dollars in education funding. Yet teachers' unions play an outsized role in determining who serves on these boards. If the interests of teachers are perfectly aligned with those of students,…

LXD Research analyzed data from 402 students from second and third graders who either participated in using the 95 Phonics Core Program (95PCP) or served as comparison students in a school district in AZ during the school year 2022-2023. This product adds explicit and systematic phonics instruction to the daily reading block. The demographic…

Studies consistently show benefits of teacher-student race/ethnicity matching, with some suggestion that these effects are driven by role modeling. We explore this hypothesis by examining effects on the educational outcomes of Black and Hispanic students for exposure to same-race/ethnicity professional staff (e.g., administrators, counselors),…

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

Each year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation, I explore the impact of school closures on…

The children of migrant workers are one of the most marginalized populations in the United States. Instability and poverty impact many aspects of most migrant students' lives, especially education. Migrant or seasonal workers travel between cities, states, and countries following employment in temporary and cyclical industries such as agriculture,…

Research is just beginning to describe with precision determinants of racial and ethnic achievement gaps. Work by Reardon, Kalogrides, and Shores found that factors such as parental income, parental education, and segregation are the strongest predictors of achievement gaps. In this study we expand this line of inquiry to examine the role of…

Hispanic students continue to be underrepresented among employees in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in the United States. Among students who decide to major in a postsecondary STEM field, Hispanic students persist at lower rates than non-Hispanic White students (Higher Education Research Institute, 2010). Concern…

The number of jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is growing rapidly and is expected to increase by approximately 1 million in the United States between 2012 and 2022 (Vilorio, 2014). People of many racial/ethnic minorities, however, including Hispanic people, are underrepresented among recipients of STEM degrees and among…

Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest conducted this literature review to identify malleable factors that can be measured in K-12 settings and that predict students' postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) success (defined as enrolling in, persisting in, and completing a postsecondary STEM major or degree), particularly…

In the United States, there is a broadly held presumption that the journey along the pipeline from kindergarten to early career success gradually reveals each child's innate abilities. This presumption is widespread not only in the general public, but among students themselves, who self-identify and identify each other as either academically…

This is the executive summary for the report, "Born to Win, Schooled to Lose: Why Equally Talented Students Don't Get Equal Chances to Be All They Can Be." Throughout their youth, relatively advantaged children enjoy protective and enriched environments that help ensure their success. Meanwhile, equally talented children from poor…

This study investigates the role of math perceptions on the college enrollment of Latinas in urban settings. Using primarily qualitative methods, this study examines the K-12 schooling experiences of 35 Latina students who were part of a larger fifteen-year study. Students had different college enrollment outcomes despite having similarly low…

In 2007, the case could be made that Rhode Island had, dollar for dollar, the worst-performing public education system in the United States. Despite per-pupil expenditures ranking in the top 10 nationally, the state's 8th graders fared no better than 40th in reading and 33rd in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Only…