Research on the big-fish-little-pond effect demonstrates that class-average achievement negatively affects students' academic self-concept via social comparison processes. The neighborhood-effects literature reports positive effects of advantageous socioeconomic neighborhood conditions on students' academic development via collective socialization…

National interest is growing in Integrated Student Support (ISS) interventions, which offer schools systematic ways to reduce barriers to learning. The present study exploits the random component embedded within the school assignment system of a large urban school district to estimate the effect of schools providing ISS on student academic…

The notion of belonging is an often-referenced but under-theorized concept in studies of school organization. The purpose of this study is to examine the politics of belonging in schools and accompanying implications for how schools are organized and led. This research employs an autophotographic methodology. Student participants took photographs…

Research documents positive associations between school climate and student outcomes, and, as such, many policymakers have positioned it among their chief priorities for school improvement. Despite this increased focus, extant research has offered mixed findings on the presence and magnitude of racial school climate disparities. The present study…

This study investigated whether a restorative practice initiative improved school climate. The study presents findings from a cluster randomized, controlled trial conducted with 2,248 students from grades 5 to 12 (38% Black, 32% Hispanic) attending 18 schools in the U.S. Northeast. After 1 year of implementation, the experimental analyses of the…

School discipline is a salient problem of educational policy and practice. Teachers play an important role in the production and disruption of racial inequities in school discipline, yet there remains a need to disentangle the relationship between teacher characteristics, their perceptions of school climate, and school discipline patterns. This…

The U.S. Department of Education's School Climate Survey (EDSCLS) is a free, open-source school climate survey available for any local or state education agency to use to measure three domains of school climate: engagement, safety, and environment. The present study leverages EDSCLS data from 3,416 students from 26 middle and high schools in…

Research has shown that mathematical proficiency gaps are related to students' and schools' indicators of poverty, with fewer studies on neighborhood effects on achievement gaps. Although this literature has accounted for students' nesting within schools, so far, methodological constraints have not allowed researchers to formally account for…

This mixed methods study explored elementary students' (N = 263) writing enjoyment, their perceptions of teacher writing enjoyment, self-regulation, and grades. In the quantitative strand, we examined how student perceptions of teacher writing enjoyment and student writing enjoyment relate to student writing self-regulation and writing grades…

This article examines associations between child care subsidy use in early childhood and children's middle school outcomes. Using a unique database linking administrative records of child care subsidy receipt with parental earnings, social assistance data, and students' public school outcomes, we generate quasi-experimental estimates of subsidy…

This study tested the theory that an authoritative school climate characterized by disciplinary structure and student support is conducive to positive academic outcomes for middle and high school students. Multilevel multivariate modeling at student and school levels was conducted using school surveys completed by statewide samples of 39,364…

Policymakers and researchers have for many years advocated disparate approaches to ensuring teachers deliver high-quality instruction, including requiring that teachers complete specific training requirements, possess a minimum level of content knowledge, and use curriculum materials and professional development resources available from schools…

In this article, we present analyses from a researcher-practitioner partnership in the District of Columbia Public Schools, where we are exploring the impact of educational software on students' academic achievement. We analyze a unique data set that combines student-level information from the district with data of student usage of a mathematics…