The Pennsylvania Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (PALSPAC) Twin Registry was developed to capture a representative sample of multiple births and their parents in the state of Pennsylvania. The registry has two main efforts. The first began in 2012 through recruitment of adolescents in Pennsylvania schools. The second effort, began in…

This study explores social studies teachers' self-reported instruction about teaching the 2020 election in U.S. secondary schools. We analyzed survey responses from 1,723 secondary social studies teachers from 12 states (3 left-leaning, 3 right-leaning, 6 battleground) collected in the weeks after the election, examining self-reported pedagogies,…

"Believing in Public Education: A Demographic and State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends" is a new data analysis that examines enrollment trends during the last four school years (2019-2023). Over the last four school years (2019-20 to 2022-23), charter schools have gained more than…

The American Community Survey (ACS), a nationwide study collected continuously every year in every county in the United States, is designed to provide communities with reliable and timely demographic, social, economic, and housing data each year. These ACS estimates are not averages of monthly or annual values, but rather an aggregation of data…

This research strives to enrich criminological and educational literature by providing a better understanding of relationships among school performance and achievement, attendance, and demographic information based upon the number of exclusionary disciplinary actions within public high schools. Using data on 409 traditional high schools from the…

This chartbook is the 14th version to be produced for the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). The Chartbook describes the diversity of the Appalachian Region on a host of demographic and economic measures and provides an important annual view of the area and its people. The data contained in the…

Utilizing longitudinal data from the national Schools to Watch (STW) program, this paper examines school demographic characteristics and teacher ratings of the implementation of STW criteria in STW schools and schools that have applied but have not yet been designated as a STW. The STW program was established by the National Forum to Accelerate…

Pennsylvania's public four-year colleges currently confront a funding and enrollment crisis, with three of the most distressed Universities in northern and western Pennsylvania regions that lack community colleges. This crisis presents Pennsylvania, and its state legislators: do they want to continue the policies of the past three decades, which…

This executive summary highlights the value of making chronic absence data transparent and available to families, community partners, and other stakeholders outside school systems. Aimed at motivating action, this report: (1) shares key findings from the analysis of the scale, scope, and concentration of chronic absence in schools throughout the…

Over the past decade, chronic absence has gone from being a virtually unknown concept to a national education metric that provides every school in the nation with critical data on how many students are missing so many days of school it jeopardizes their academic success. The inclusion of chronic absence in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was…

In this descriptive and comparative study, we present results highlighting the complexity and scope of the challenges facing rural districts as they navigate the changing demographics of the students and families they serve. Rapid increases in the number and concentration of racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students in rural areas…

This technical report is one of a series of four technical reports that describe the results of a study comparing eight alternative models for estimating school academic achievement using data from the Arizona, North Carolina, Oregon, and Pennsylvania accountability systems. The purpose of these reports was to evaluate a broad range of models…

The purpose of this research was to determine if the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System Average Growth Index (PVAAS AGI) scores, derived from standardized tests and calculated for Pennsylvania schools, provide a valid and reliable assessment of teacher effectiveness, as these scores are currently used to derive 15% of the annual…

Background: Sexting, the sharing of sexually suggestive photos, may be a gateway behavior to early sexual activity and increase the likelihood of social ostracism. Methods: Youth Risk Behavior Survey (N = 6021) data from 2015 among Pennsylvania 9th-12th grade students were used to examine associations between consensual and nonconsensual sexting…

Recently, the Pennsylvania Department of Education provided new data for 2016-17 that include the race and gender of the 155,854 teachers in Pennsylvania's public schools. Research for Action (RFA) compiled and cleaned the raw data and is providing, for the first time, a public dataset with the race and gender demographics of each public school,…