Background/Context: The "college-for-all" movement has guided education reform efforts over the last few decades. Of college-for-all adopters, the "no-excuses" charter school model is arguably the most successful and controversial. Schools that use this model produce high standardized test scores and four-year college…

The article reports on the efforts to establish a secondary school, set up within the free school legislation, to be comprehensive, serving the diverse population of the city in which it is located. This was achieved through a policy which admitted students from four 'nodes' across the city and gave priority to children with special educational…

This dissertation examines how children make sense of the boundaries of technology and nature through a case study of thirty students in the sixth through seventh grade, attending a public charter school in the Ohio River Valley region of the United States of America (US). Using data collected via a range of ethnographic methods including…

Challenges to teaching in the post-COVID classroom plagued schools across the globe. This qualitative study followed two middle-school teachers in a charter school located in the Western United States to identify the changes to classroom teaching and their effects on the classroom environment through the first year of teaching after the 2020…

Charter schools are public schools that operate free from some government regulations in return for a commitment to achieve a set of student outcomes specified in their charter. Nearly 8,000 public charter schools enrolled 3.7 million students in the U.S. in 2020-21. In major cities, charter schools receive less funding per pupil compared to…

We study the total, market-level effects of charter schools, and their mechanisms, on a national level and across multiple outcomes. Using a generalized difference-in-differences method, we find that increasing the charter market share by 10 percentage points increases math and ELA elementary/middle test scores of the entire geographic district in…

The work of teachers has historically been highly controlled, but one area teachers have been granted considerable autonomy is in instruction and planning. Teacher autonomy is a complex concept with important implications for both the quality of instruction and teacher persistence in the field. The rise of charter management organizations (CMOs)…

School-based education in England has undergone significant changes since 2010, with a huge expansion of academies, schools outside local authority control, funded directly by central government. Academies and local authority (LA) maintained schools are subject to different legislative and regulatory frameworks. This paper focuses on the…

This paper estimates the causal effects of enrollment in one of five oversubscribed high-quality Los Angeles charter schools using a lottery design. Enrolling in a charter school increased eleventh-grade standardized test scores and enrollment and persistence in four-year colleges substantially, but had no effect on high school GPA. Charter…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of a one-to-one intensive tutoring program in English and Mathematics on improving English learners' test scores on standardized assessments like the Pre-Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT). The program of interest in this study is called The Rising Stars Program and is designed based on…

This article investigates students' engagement with a historical inquiry into redlining--a practice of discriminatory lending that originated in the 1930s as part of the New Deal. The authors developed and implemented a week-long curricular intervention for high school sophomores using StoryQ--an Artificial Intelligence (AI) textual modeling…

High school graduation represents a pivotal milestone with far-reaching implications for an individual's future in social, economic, professional, and personal spheres. Despite its significance, only approximately 85.5% of students in the United States successfully earn their diploma each year, with groups such as black, Hispanic, American…

Drawing upon principles of participatory action research, this study collected input from secondary school stakeholders (teachers, students, caregivers, alumni, staff, and administrators) to create a local definition of quality teaching for students at an urban charter school in the northeastern United States. Analysis of stakeholder input…

This engaged scholarship study includes three parts, a grant proposal to redesign the greenhouse at Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School into a learning garden and two mixed method studies. The Costco Charitable Giving grant proposal to redesign the greenhouse is provided as a supplemental document to this dissertation. The two mixed method studies…

Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit charter management organization that starts and manages public charter schools, primarily in traditionally underserved communities. As part of a 2016 grant awarded to Uncommon from the U.S. Department of Education's Charter Schools Program to support replication and expansion of its school model, we conducted a…