The impact of the pandemic on student learning was significant and widened pre-existing achievement gaps for historically disadvantaged students. To provide insight on the most effective strategies that teachers and leaders can adopt, educators in three partner districts that have invested in improving classroom instruction as their primary lever…

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…

At what point will educational actors recognize the limitations and utilize the possibilities of policy implementation processes to actualize long overdue reform measures for students--particularly those from historically marginalized backgrounds? Previous literature has attended to ways schooling processes replicate persistent historical, social,…

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…

What if disadvantage need not correlate with poor academic achievement? If instead of researching the 'underachieving' groups (minorities, children for whom English is not their home language, and children of families in poor socioeconomic circumstances) you look at what works in schools to raise the attainment of all these groups, the results are…

Cooperation and partnerships between schools and public organisations, private companies and non-profit organisations have become a common model as a form of governance for addressing social problems. The aim of this article is to explore the strategies used by professionals to counteract segregation at a school located in a multi-ethnic suburb,…

Large achievement gaps exist between high- and low-income students and between black and white students. This article explores one explanation for such gaps: income segregation between school districts, which creates inequality in the economic and social resources available in advantaged and disadvantaged students' school contexts. Drawing on…

Teacher performance pay programs are theorized to improve student achievement by incentivizing teachers, but opponents counter that teachers are not motivated by money. We used regression discontinuity techniques and data on a census of the students, teachers, and schools in a large urban minority-majority school district to show receipt of a…

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 purpose of this study is to understand how two high school principals purposely worked to disrupt the inequities in educational opportunities and outcomes that had previously existed for marginalized students in their schools. Committed to a social justice agenda, the two principals systematically changed the culture, structures, and processes…

Policymakers aiming to close the well-documented achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students have increasingly turned their attention to issues of teacher quality. A number of studies have demonstrated that teachers are inequitably distributed across student subgroups by input measures, like experience and qualifications, as well…

Background: Racialized suspension gaps are logically and empirically associated with racial achievement gaps and both gaps indicate the endurance of racism in American education. In recent U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Office of Civil Rights data, it was revealed that nationally, Black boys are four times more likely to be suspended…

This report describes disadvantaged students' access to effective teaching in grades 4 through 8 in 29 diverse school districts, using value-added analysis to measure effective teaching. Recent federal initiatives emphasize measuring teacher effectiveness and ensuring that disadvantaged students have equal access to effective teachers. These…

Previous research demonstrates that collective efficacy positively predicts students' academic achievement (e.g., Bandura, 1993; Goddard et al., 2000). However, unaddressed by the current literature is whether collective efficacy also works to reduce inequity by closing achievement gaps. To learn about the operation of collective efficacy, we…