A recent study published in "Educational Researcher" by White (2023) examined superintendent gender gaps. This work required 4 years of internet searches to identify and match superintendent names with each of the roughly 13,000 school districts in the United States. Although this study provided important insights into the superintendent…

The unprecedented challenges of teaching during COVID-19 prompted fears of a mass exodus from the profession. We examine the extent to which these fears were realized using administrative records of Massachusetts teachers between 2015-2016 and 2021-2022. Relative to prepandemic levels, average turnover rates were similar going into the fall of…

Scholars of early childhood education have urged qualitative researchers to adapt their methods for use with young children. However, unjust social imaginations of childhood (e.g., who is considered a "child") play out in qualitative research, particularly for young children who are made most vulnerable by intersecting oppressions (e.g.,…

The out-of-school time (OST) field in the United States has a complex history. The push to offer programming reflects a legacy rooted in moral panics about racially minoritized youth. However, this field is populated by community spaces that act as multipurpose sites of culturally sustaining educational practices supporting positive youth…

School-based actors can uphold racialized systems and White supremacy through the racialized youth trauma narratives they reproduce. With respect to the growing movement to better support trauma-exposed youth inside school contexts, it is imperative that school-based actors avoid perpetuating deficit views of youth of color, who are…

Using 7 years of administrative data from North Carolina public schools (NCPS), we track changes in teacher and principal attrition and mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic and assess how attrition is related to characteristics of educators and schools. We find that educator attrition and mobility increased sharply between Fall 2020 and Fall…

We compiled the first longitudinal data set with detailed state funding information to examine whether different funding strategies for public higher education correlate with college access and completion, with a focus on outcomes among racially minoritized students. We found no relationships between funding mechanisms and student outcomes at…

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a seismic and ongoing disruption to K-12 schooling. Using test scores from 5.4 million U.S. students in Grades 3-8, we tracked changes in math and reading achievement across the first 2 years of the pandemic. Average math test scores in the fall of 2021 in Grades 3-8 were 0.20-0.27 standard deviation (SD) lower…

The realities of a global pandemic coupled with economic, climate, and racial crises have exacerbated existing racial injustices in schools and society. Although many have argued for a principled refusal to return to an inequitable "normal" (Roy, 2020), dominant models of educational improvement prioritize technical-rational approaches…

Calls for justice-centered education approaches have gained traction over the years. Yet given the entrenched inequities that disproportionately harm multiply-marginalized students of color, it is evident that they remain incomplete. Using a specific incident as our launching point, we explore current conceptualizations of justice through a…

Most U.S. school districts draw "attendance boundaries" to define catchment areas that assign students to schools near their homes, often recapitulating neighborhood demographic segregation in schools. Focusing on elementary schools, we ask: How much might we reduce school segregation by redrawing attendance boundaries? Combining parent…

Concern about harsh and inequitable discipline over the past two decades has galvanized a host of discipline reforms. These reforms have gained renewed attention in recent months as both the COVID-19 pandemic and mass uprisings against anti-Black violence have both bolstered calls to reimagine schools as caring spaces. This moment raises urgent…

Existing scholarship suggests that schools do the work of social stratification by functioning as "sorting machines," or institutions that determine which populations of students are provided educational resources needed to help them get ahead. We build on this theory of social reproduction by extending it to better understand how…

Grow Your Own (GYO) programs are designed to recruit high school students, paraeducators, community organizers and parents, and/or career changers from the local community to join the educator workforce. When considering the nontraditional teacher pools that may enter the profession through GYO programs, commonly held assumptions about who…

Little is known about the professional experiences of trans school workers. This brief describes the demographic characteristics of a non-random sample of 296 trans PK-12 school workers (i.e., teachers, administrators, staff) in the United States and Canada and reports their workplace experiences and the structural and social supports for trans…