Secondary career and technical education has drawn increased attention from policymakers over the past several years. States have sought ways to connect secondary CTE to future learning and careers. Based on a review of 2021 legislative activity concerning secondary CTE, lawmakers in 46 states introduced at least 315 bills concerning CTE, and many…

School vouchers, a school choice policy that allows students and families to use public funds to fully or partially pay the cost of attending private schools, became a major area of policy debate once again during Betsy DeVos's tenure as United States Secretary of Education. Recent evaluations have found negative impacts of vouchers on academic…

While about three-fourths of all public school districts offer dual credit opportunities in Career Technical Education (CTE) courses, many programs face gaps in alignment between secondary and postsecondary CTE programs that lead to quality and equity inconsistencies in early postsecondary opportunities (EPSOs) across career pathways, ultimately…

This brief is one in a series aimed at providing K-12 education decision makers and advocates with an evidence base to ground discussions about how to best serve students during and following the novel coronavirus pandemic. It addresses one central question: What does research tell us about how to use community-based resources to address academic…

Which occupations are best for wellbeing? There is a large literature on earnings differentials, but less attention has been paid to occupational differences in non-pecuniary rewards. However, information on both types of rewards is needed to understand the dispersion of wellbeing across occupations. We analyse subjective wellbeing in a large…

This paper focuses on the increase in families who have chosen to homeschool their children in grades K-12 since the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. This update includes interviews with families who opted to homeschool their children in the conventional approach, rather than continue with the hasty remote learning that educators tried to transfer…

We use comprehensive administrative data from three states to document the relationships between geographic mobility and student outcomes during K-12 schooling. We focus specifically on "nonstructural" mobility events--which we define as school or district changes that do not occur naturally as the result of planned transitions between…

In addition to generally reporting on suspension and expulsion use, at least 22 states and the District of Columbia require such reported data to be disaggregated by race, ethnicity, gender or some other category, allowing the possibility of discipline disparities to be documented and addressed. This data point highlights state policy that creates…

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented effect on education worldwide. Countries around the world have had to go into lockdown, leading to widespread school closures which required education to be delivered remotely (UNESCO, 2021). Remote education can take various forms, but in many contexts, it has relied on the use of digital technology.…

Segregation on the basis of race or ethnicity is one of the most enduring and pervasive inequities in US public education. School segregation is determined not only by residential sorting and families' preferences but by local policy choices such as the drawing of school attendance boundaries. This report examines the role of individual school…

The State Indicators Database (SID), which is the School Finance Indicators Database's (SFID) primary product, includes approximately 125 variables, but this report focuses on three key school finance measures: fiscal effort, adequacy, and progressivity. This report discusses how states' systems tend to mediate the impact of economic downturns and…

The challenge of reopening US public schools in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has high-lighted the significant role that local teachers unions play in setting policy. The politics of school reopening during the pandemic has brought to the national spotlight the outsized role that teachers unions play in managing big cities. Bureau of Labor…

This "Equity by Design" brief is intended for preK-12 school leaders who want to better understand the root causes of inequitable outcomes in their systems. Despite educators' often good intentions to effectively serve all students, there is ample evidence of ongoing disparities negatively impacting students of Color in U.S. schools.…

In the 2020-21 school year, school districts provided data on classroom-level use of educational technology assessments. Districts also reported data about instructional opportunities in educational technology at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. The educational technology assessments developed by the Office of Superintendent of…

Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are private savings accounts funded by a deposit from the state government and managed by a parent. The deposit amount varies from state to state and is typically based on the state's per-pupil amount. To use an ESA, parents withdraw their child from the public school system and use ESA funds to purchase specified…