The first operational administration of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) took place during the 2014-2015 school year. In addition to the traditional paper-and-pencil format, the assessments were available for administration on a variety of electronic devices, including desktop computers, laptop computers,…

When using time series accountability data to evaluate system-wide education policies, concurrent changes often pose threats to internal validity. The standard difference-in-differences (DID) method resorts to a non-equivalent comparison group whose average outcome change is due to such confounding. This strategy relies on the strong assumption…

In 2003, Chicago schools required students entering ninth grade with below-average math scores to take two periods of algebra. This led to higher test scores for students with both above- and below-average skills, yet failure rates increased for above-average students. We examine the mechanisms behind these surprising results. Sorting by incoming…

To teach science writing effectively, scholars encourage combining writing to learn with applications of the science writing heuristic. How teachers learn to do so remains under-examined. This essay follows a cohort of ninth-grade science teachers who collaborated in a project to develop, test, and revise such a combination of writing prompts for…

The purpose of this research is to study the long-run impacts (i.e. on educational attainment) of a freshman math intervention called "double-dose algebra". The intervention was conducted in 2003 and 2004 within the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), a large, poor urban school district. In response to low passing rates in 9th grade algebra,…

This article suggests that contact with the legal system increased school dropout in a Chicago sample of 4,844 inner-city students. According to multilevel multivariate logistic models, students who were first arrested during the 9th or 10th grade were six to eight times more likely than were nonarrested students ever to dropout of high school and…

A sample of 96 ninth-grade vocational agriculture students in 21 Illinois high schools participated in a study of the relationship between socioeconomic status and reading comprehension. An instructional unit was tested for reading level and rewritten at an easier level. Students were classified by socioeconomic class and randomly assigned to…