Elementary and secondary district leaders seeking to recruit teachers and diversify their teaching workforce will find useful, research-based strategies in this brief from the Region 4 Comprehensive Center. The brief focuses on ways to develop work-based learning programs in secondary schools that engage students in considering teacher careers.…

Racial/ethnic minoritized youth are underrepresented in autism research. Documented inequities in accessibility to and utilization of autism-specific services highlight the importance of better understanding for whom and under what conditions autism evidence-based practices (EBPs) work. This report examines the race, ethnicity, sex, and gender of…

We describe alignment between high school career and technical education (CTE) and local labor markets across five states--Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Tennessee, and Washington. We find that CTE is partially aligned with local labor markets. A 10-percentage-point higher share of local jobs related to a CTE career cluster is associated with a…

Paraeducators are among the largest categories of public education employees and are increasingly seen as a pool of potential teachers. However, little is known about paraeducator-to-teacher transitions. Using statewide administrative data, we show that while paraeducators may be more racially/ethnically diverse than the teacher workforce, Black…

For decades, college tuition costs have been skyrocketing, yet state financial aid has failed to meet the increasing economic needs of college students -- leaving many young people with the choice of bridging the financial gap by taking out student loans or not attending college at all. This pressing issue of rising college tuition is not just a…

School district boundaries define more than just the area where a certain group of children attends a given set of schools. They also determine the taxing jurisdiction that supports those schools with local property taxes. Big differences in property value can lead to large funding gaps, even between neighboring districts. These disparities in…

This article evaluates the applicability at the state and district level of web scraping--an automated data-extraction technique that regularly exports and refreshes data from the Internet--to provide a low-cost way to get a close-to-real-time snapshot of the demand side of the teacher labor market. Once set up, web scraping can quickly build and…

In 2013, the Washington Student Achievement Council (WSAC) proposed as the state goal that 70 percent of the state's 25- to 44-year-olds (i.e., early and mid-career residents) should have a credential beyond high school. WSAC's Strategic Action Plan (SAP) provides a framework to organize the policy and practice innovation needed to achieve this…

In compliance with The Every Student Succeeds Act, many states report "chronic absenteeism" as an indicator of student success. While chronic absenteeism is prevalent across the country, marginalized youth experience differential rates compared to their White peers. The disproportionate overrepresentation of marginalized youth is partly…

At a time when so many other schools are struggling, this report tells the story of two diverse public charter schools in Washington State that cultivated whole-school wellbeing: Catalyst Public Schools and Lumen High School. Drawing on their experiences, researchers developed a model that conceptualizes whole-school wellbeing as meeting student…

In this paper we analyze the extent to which a mandated kindergarten assessment predicts 3rd grade outcomes, and the academic progression for students from 3rd grade to high school. We find that the kindergarten assessment strongly predicts 3rd grade outcomes, with the math skills assessment being especially predictive of 3rd grade academic…