This study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS pre-K from 2012-2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups. The largest differences in enrollment emerged with respect to race and…

Parents often select schools by relying on subjective assessments of quality made by other parents, which are increasingly becoming available through written reviews on school ratings websites. To identify relationships between review content and school quality, we apply recent advances in natural language processing to nearly half a million…

This study examines the psychometric properties of two assessments of children's approaches to learning: the Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA) and a 13-item approaches to learning rating scale (AtL) derived from the Arizona Early Learning Standards (AELS). First, we administered questionnaires to 1,145 randomly selected parents/guardians…

Studies using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K:1999) revealed gender gaps in mathematics achievement and teacher perceptions. However, recent evidence suggests that gender gaps have closed on state tests, raising the question of whether such gaps are absent in the ECLS-K:2011 cohort.…

Students of color are underrepresented in gifted programs relative to White students, but the reasons for this underrepresentation are poorly understood. We investigate the predictors of gifted assignment using nationally representative, longitudinal data on elementary students. We document that even among students with high standardized test…