Despite the attempts by lawmakers to legislate a closing of the achievement gap, persistent gaps in performance for students based on ethnicity, race, economic level, disability, and first language persist throughout public schools in the United States. Occasionally, a principal will receive attention for raising the performance of minoritized…

There have been substantial advances in the development of states' education data systems over the past 20 years, supported by large investments from the federal government. However, the availability of modern data systems has not translated into meaningful improvements in how consequential state policies, such as funding and accountability…

Efforts to bridge educational achievement gaps and address inequities remain a central challenge across the United States. The multitiered system of supports has emerged as a prominent intervention framework with which to equip educators for this task. Given its growing adoption across school districts, a deeper understanding of teacher…

Acceleration of digital communication has changed the nature of reading and young people today need to engage multimodal skills for reading success in the digital world. While historically there have been social justice issues for marginalised students in terms of reading, the digital age is creating new equity issues across the globe. This…

The gaps in education in America continue to march on at staggering rates. Gaps in academic achievement, college acceptance, standardized test scores, and access to resources continue to marginalize Black students in the United States compared to their white counterparts. Pittsburgh, PA, with the second-largest school district in Pennsylvania and…

In 1993, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts dramatically overhauled its K-12 education system and created a new school finance formula, building an educational accountability structure to ensure every child has access to a high-quality education. The Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) established academic standards in core subjects, mandated…

Despite the myriad of challenges that families, students, teachers and policymakers faced in 2021, the momentum to transform education did not waver. New opportunities for students unfolded in more than a dozen states through expanded private and public school choice. An additional 1.7 million students gained eligibility for private choice alone,…

The public school system in U.S. has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Institutionally, neo-liberal reform has created a new educational apparatus known as charter schools. As they admit students without school boundaries, these schools promise to offer great opportunities for disadvantaged students. The enrollment in charter schools…

In 2013, California implemented an ambitious school funding reform, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which allocates state funding by the proportion of unduplicated "high-need" students in the district: those from low-income families, English learners, and those in foster care. The goal of LCFF was to reduce academic achievement…

In 2013, California implemented an ambitious school funding reform, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which allocates state funding by the proportion of unduplicated "high-need" students in the district: those from low-income families, English learners, and those in foster care. Using student-level longitudinal data for all…

Pakistan's Punjab province has witnessed numerous education reforms in recent years. Many of these reforms have been aimed at improving the well-documented low levels of learning by focusing on improving teaching quality. The rhetoric suggests that government schools, particularly those in rural areas with a more disadvantaged pupil base, are…

To innovate for the future and improve equity, while also protecting foundational and proven principles that support high-quality education, ExcelinEd is committing to 5 goals over 5 years to impact 5 million students. Those goals hold the key to impactful and far-reaching changes in education, with the power to transform schools, students' lives,…

Publicly funded pre-K is often touted as a means to narrow achievement gaps, but this goal is less likely to be achieved if poor and/or minority children do not, at a minimum, attend equal quality pre-K as their non-poor, non-minority peers. In this paper, I find large "quality gaps" in public pre-K between poor, minority students and…

The disparities in achievement among income and racial-ethnic groups of students have long been a major concern of educational policies. Among several identified factors that help explain the student performance gap, this paper focuses on inequity in funding for education among school districts, which resulted from heavy reliance of school…

The significant growth of charter schools in the United States has brought both praise for the excellent results achieved by some schools and criticism that charter schools may not be serving the most disadvantaged students. In New York City and elsewhere, a significantly smaller proportion of students enrolled in charter schools are classified as…