Many states, school districts, and information-sharing platforms report measures of school performance. Often called "school ratings," they are widely consulted by parents and educators alike. A school's rating is often strongly correlated with the racial make-up of its student body. In this paper, the authors analyzed this correlation…

In large urban districts, schools enrolling more white students tend to have higher performance ratings. We use an instrumental variables strategy leveraging centralized school assignment to explore this relationship. Estimates from Denver and New York City suggest the correlation between school performance ratings and white enrollment shares…

School assignment in Boston and New York City came to national attention in the 1970s as courts across the country tried to integrate schools. Today, district-wide choice allows Boston and New York students to enroll far from home. Although 1970s desegregation efforts likely benefited minority students, urban school transportation is increasingly…

The purpose of this study was to understand the nature of writing instruction across time and grade bands. We used quantitative and qualitative analyses of teacher interviews and video records of classroom instruction of English language arts writing instruction in 97 fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms in 2010 and 2018. Video records showed a…

This study examined preservice teachers' instruction of goals in specific learning domains in physical education class and students' interpretation of these goals. Four preservice physical education teachers (all male) from a large urban university taught two lessons to eight sixth-grade students at an urban K-6 elementary school. The theory of…

This is the policy brief for the discussion paper, "Still Worth the Trip? School Busing Effects in Boston and New York." While choice systems offer students in segregated neighborhoods access to schools that may be more integrated and of higher quality, does busing lead to improved academic performance as measured by higher test scores…

Background/Context: Many states, school districts, and third-party platforms report measures of school performance. Such school ratings are widely consulted by parents and educators alike. The ratings appear to affect families' choices of where to live and where to enroll students (Bergman and Hill, 2018; Hasan and Kumar, 2019), as well as…

This study identified the relationships among English Language Arts teacher teams, their collaboration in creating formative assessment, and its impact on the academic achievement of middle school students. The setting of this study was two urban private Nursery through Grade 8 elementary schools in 1 New York City district. The design for this…

A growing number of autistic students enter the school system, many with the capabilities of doing grade-level work. For these students, there seems to be a lack of focus on executive functioning, self-regulation, daily living skills (DLS), and self-determination. The Independence Curriculum (IC) is a set of units addressing identified areas of…

A safe environment is a prerequisite for productive learning. Using a unique panel data set of survey responses from New York City middle school students, the article provides insight into the relationship between feelings of safety in the classroom and academic achievement. The survey data include the reported feelings of safety for more than…

Although Black and Latinx students disproportionately face exclusionary school discipline, prior research finds that the likelihood of suspension for Black students decreases when they are taught by greater proportions of Black teachers. Little prior work, however, has examined whether these effects generalize to large, diverse, urban school…

This research sought to uncover challenges that arose in the implementation of the Reflective Educational Approach to Character and Health (REACH) after-school programme in a low-income public school in New York City. Additionally, we wanted to find and share some of the lessons learned, to help others avoid our pitfalls when implementing quality…

This article explores inequity in access to and provision of bus service across student sociodemographic groups and examines possible barriers to bus access and utilization. To so do, we use administrative data on New York City K-6 public school students from 2011-2017, including information on race/ethnicity, poverty status, distance from home to…

School buses may be a critical education policy lever, breaking the link between schools and neighborhoods and facilitating access to school choice. Yet little is known about the commute for bus riders, including the average length of the bus ride or whether long commutes harm academic outcomes. We begin to fill this gap using data from New York…

In November 2014, the New York City Department of Education classified 94 low-performing schools as "renewal schools." New York's Renewal School Program (RSP), announced Mayor Bill de Blasio at the program's launch, represented a big change to the city's education policy: whereas former mayor Michael Bloomberg favored closing failing…