This report examines how students are performing across the entire 2020-2021 school year in reading and mathematics during the pandemic. Based on insights from millions of student assessments, the report explores key questions effected by COVID-19 in education, including: (1) How much did students grow during the 2020-2021 school year compared…

Notwithstanding dramatically low levels of professed religiosity in Western Europe, the religious school sector continues to thrive. One explanation for this paradox is that nowadays parents choose religious schools primarily for their higher academic reputation. Empirical evidence for this presumed denominational advantage is mixed. We examine…

This study examines student reading engagement with children's science books in elementary classrooms. "Reading engagement" in science is conceived in terms of a Transmission-Transaction continuum. When centered on transmission, science reading entails passive reception of a textually encoded scientific message. By contrast, when science…

Prior research estimating the effect of Catholic schooling has focused on high school, where evidence suggests a positive effect of Catholic versus public schooling. In this article, we estimate the effect of attending a Catholic elementary school rather than a public school on the math and reading skills of children in kindergarten through fifth…