Students who experience teacher caring and high expectations (i.e., warm demand) are typically more engaged and successful at school. Yet, relative to White students, students of color tend to report lower levels of school social belonging and more distant relationships with their White teachers. Leveraging data from 179 6th-9th grade Measures of…

Purpose: In an era of unprecedented student measurement and emphasis on data-driven educational decision making, the full potential for using data to target resources to students has yet to be realized. This study explores the utility of machine-learning techniques with large-scale administrative data to identify student dropout risk. Research…

"INSPIRE" is an Investing in Innovation (i3) development grant funded by the Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. "INSPIRE" provides an innovative integrated K-12 STEM pipeline approach focused on STEM course content and instructional redesign. The INSPIRE model was implemented in Cabarrus County…

In 2008, the California State Board of Education voted to require all students to enroll in algebra by 8th grade. This policy initiative, yet to be actually implemented, represents the culmination of a decades-long movement toward offering algebra instruction before the traditional high school years. Nationally, the proportion of 8th grade…

Exit rates from Limited English Proficiency (LEP) for students who enter the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) as LEP students vary by when students enter WCPSS (based on students entering in kindergarten, grade 6 or 7, or grade 9). Based on our 2008-09 cohorts, students entering in grades 6 or 7 were most likely to exit LEP status after…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

Unlike in elementary school, high-school teacher effects may be confounded with both selection to tracks and unobserved track-level treatments. I document sizable confounding track effects, and show that traditional tests for the existence of teacher effects are likely biased. After accounting for these biases, high-school algebra and English…

The 2013 North Carolina Youth Risk Behavior Survey (NCYRBS) was developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and adapted by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) to monitor health-risk behaviors and to measure progress toward achieving Healthy North Carolina 2020 objectives. The survey, administered in…

Each spring, the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) surveys 4th, 7th, and 10th grade students about their perception of various aspects of their school experience, measuring students' impressions of their school, school safety, teachers, academics, future ready skills, and technology. The 2013-14 results indicate that elementary school…

In 2006-07, seven Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) middle schools piloted Algebraic Thinking as an alternate approach to teaching middle school mathematics. Algebraic Thinking was developed to help students in grade 6 reach higher mathematics courses by combining the regular and advanced middle school mathematics courses into one…

This general achievement trends profile includes information that the Center on Education Policy (CEP) and the Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO) obtained from states from fall 2008 through April 2009. Included herein are: (1) Bullet points summarizing key findings about achievement trends in that state at three performance…

Dropping out of school has been presented as a serious problem affecting gifted students, with some authors suggesting that 20% or more of dropouts could be gifted (e.g., Rimm, 1995; Robertson, 1991). Longitudinal data from North Carolina were used to investigate high-school dropout rates among gifted students (N = 7916) who had participated in a…

The opportunity and right to obtain a free public education provides the opportunity for all Americans to achieve success socially, financially, and professionally. The public education system has endured decades of changes as it attempts to address social, cultural, and academic issues that arise as the nation evolves. The public education system…