The No Child Left Behind Act, enacted in 2002, aimed to improve learning and eliminate achievement gaps by raising accountability in schools. The new requirements also generated volumes of valuable long-term data on students and teachers—data that are now grounding and guiding education policy and allowing researchers to answer long-held questions about what leads to student success. Read more.
Increasing parental choice has been a leading theme of recent education policy intended to enhance the academic achievement of low-performing students in the United States. These policies aim to "level the playing field" in access to high-quality education for disadvantaged students who cannot otherwise afford higher-quality schooling options. Public school choice programs in D.C. are successful; disadvantaged students are able to attend higher-performing schools than their neighborhood public schools, even with prolonged commutes. Overall, the findings provide evidence that the relatively advantaged students are taking advantage of public school choice programs. However, choice exacerbates student quality disparities between low- and high-poverty schools, casting some doubt on the benefits of such programs.
The growing presence of young children of immigrants is changing the demographic makeup of classrooms, yet debates about early education and school reform often do not mention them. As high-quality education for all becomes a prominent policy and political goal, key questions remain unanswered about whether schools and early childhood programs are addressing their needs. This paper summarizes the Urban Institute's 2010 roundtable "Young Children of Immigrants and the Path to Educational Success" discussion, which focused on the specific needs of young children of immigrants.
While prior research has documented differences in the distribution of teacher characteristics across schools serving different student populations, few studies have examined how teacher sorting occurs within schools. Comparing teachers who teach in the same grade and school in a given year, we find less experienced, minority, and female teachers are assigned students with lower average prior achievement, more prior behavioral problems, and lower prior attendance rates than their more experienced, white and male colleagues. Though more effective (higher value-added ) teachers and those with advanced degrees are also assigned less difficult classes, controlling for these factors does not eliminate the association between experience, race, gender, and assignments. These patterns have negative implications for teacher retention given the importance of working conditions for teachers' career decisions.
Principals tend to prefer working in schools with higher-achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals often use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments. District leadership can also exacerbate principal turnover by implementing policies aimed at improving low-performing schools such as rotating school leaders. Using longitudinal data from one large urban school district we find principal turnover is detrimental to school performance. Frequent turnover results in lower teacher retention and lower student achievement gains, which are particularly detrimental to students in high-poverty and failing schools.
Faced with budget shortfalls, states and localities are considering cuts to K-12 education, including reductions in teaching staff. Consequently, governors, lawmakers, and school officials are taking a second look at seniority provisions in their collective bargaining agreements and weighing the costs and benefits of the prevailing system under which the last hired is typically the first fired.
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