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The purpose of this technical assistance paper is to assist education leaders and administrators in the consistent implementation of the Florida Career and Professional Education (CAPE) Act in Section 1003.491, Florida Statutes (F.S.). This technical assistance paper addresses questions on recent legislation, funding, and data reporting. [For the previous report, see ED616038.]

The United States retains many aspects of a healthy open society, but there are indicators of trouble and deep divisions around the meaning and importance of democratic values. This debate has significant repercussions for universities and their academic communities. In the most-simple terms, there is a red and blue state divide over the role and importance of public institutions, including universities -- red representing largely rural states in which most voters vote Republican and blue being majority Democratic voters, often with one of the two parties having majorities in their respective state legislatures. Then there are so-called purple states in which both parties are vying for dominance, but they are fewer in number. This brief discusses this contemporary dynamic and its implication for higher education and science policy.

The growth of homeschooling from a somewhat fringe movement during the 1970s and 1980s to a more widespread and socially accepted approach in recent decades has provided a strong foundation of flexible learning models. When Florida's school choice expansion, House Bill 1, was introduced in January 2023, one of its goals was to allow more homeschoolers to participate in the education savings account (ESA) program. But many homeschoolers and homeschool advocacy groups balked at the proposal. Having worked hard to achieve independence, they were loath to be linked to government funding. Even if the program were optional, they feared that associated regulations would eventually extend to traditional homeschoolers. In the end, the bill passed with new language that satisfied traditional homeschoolers by creating a new option for parents to educate their children at home. As states continue to enact and expand education savings accounts, Colleen Hroncich argues that it is crucial that policymakers craft bills in a way that maximizes freedom and minimizes roadblocks.

This paper examines the impact of Teach For America (TFA) on following-year student test and non-test outcomes in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. This paper measures the extent to which exposure to TFA is followed by improved student outcomes in the future. In particular, this paper measures days missed due to absences or suspensions, course grades in each core subject, and progression in math courses. We find that students taught by TFA math teachers go on to have higher grades in math courses in the following year and are less likely to miss school due to being absent or suspended. However, while students in TFA classrooms score higher on math and ELA assessments in a given year, these test score gains fade out by the following year.

Dual enrollment--in which students take college credit-bearing courses when still in high school--is becoming increasingly popular. Community college programs account for about 70% of the dual enrollment that more than one million high school students participate in each year nationwide. Yet dual enrollment can be a big financial burden for community colleges. In most parts of the country, community colleges receive less funding per dual enrollment student than they receive for their regular, non-dual-enrollment students. If community colleges are to continue to provide broad access to high-quality programs, they need to be able to sustain these programs. In this paper, we consider the economics of dual enrollment from the perspective of the community college. We illustrate how dual enrollment may not be financially sustainable in colleges and states where it is offered at a discount, but we also show how community colleges can structure their programs to be more efficient. To support our analysis, we describe case studies to show the conditions under which dual enrollment is affordable and efficient.

Digital learning, the use of computers and the internet to study courses taught in the classroom, is viewed by many educators as a breakthrough to helping those at-risk students stay in school and earn their diplomas. The flexibility afforded by digital learning, with students working on their own time at their own pace, is a way for students to meet the requirements of their courses while handling pressing responsibilities outside of school, problems at home or personal issues. Yet parents should scrutinize digital programs closely. Their quality and effectiveness vary widely. Students are poorly served by point-and-click assessments with no engagement, virtual schools with videos instead of real teachers and programs without pacing and scheduling support. This report presents ideas and examples of how teachers and policymakers across the country are using virtual learning to improve educational outcomes for at-risk students.

The purpose of this technical assistance paper is to assist education leaders and administrators in the consistent implementation of the Florida Career and Professional Education (CAPE) Act in Section 1003.491, Florida Statutes (F.S.). This technical assistance paper addresses questions on the legislation, funding, and data reporting.

Education savings accounts (ESAs) are education funding mechanisms that allow for families to receive a deposit of public funds to a government-authorized savings account. Using student-level longitudinal data, this paper examines how families participating in the Florida Gardiner Scholarship Program use education savings account funds. Results indicate that families use an increasing proportion of ESA funds when students remain in the program. The longer students remain in the program, the share of ESA funds devoted to private school tuition decreases while expenditure shares increase for curriculum, instruction, tutoring, and specialized services. Students in rural areas not only use a greater portion of their ESA funds than families in urban and suburban areas, but they also spend smaller portions of their funds on tuition and appear to customize more.

High school graduation rates in the United States are at an all-time high, yet many of these graduates are deemed not ready for postsecondary coursework when they enter college. This study examines the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of remedial courses in middle school using a regression discontinuity design. While the short-term test score benefits of taking a remedial course in English language arts in middle school fade quickly, I find significant positive effects on the likelihood of taking college credit-bearing courses in high school, college enrollment, enrolling in more selective colleges, persistence in college, and degree attainment.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides services to students who have disabilities. These IDEA-funded services are afforded to students between the ages of 3 and 21 who attend not only public schools (including charter schools), but also private schools. IDEA contains comprehensive guidelines on 3 processes which, by design, are meant to ensure that IDEA-funded services are granted without prejudice to any private school student who may by law be eligible to receive them. These processes IDEA refers to as "child find," "consultation," and "proportionate share." For a variety of reasons, the execution of these processes has been decidedly flawed. As a result, tens of thousands of private school students with disabilities have been denied the services to which IDEA, as a federal law, entitles them. Relying on raw data from certain public-school districts and state departments of education regarding their respective execution of the "child-find" process, the authors assess the extent to which, nationwide, private school students' (and their teachers') fair and full access to IDEA-funded services has been systemically denied. Based on this assessment, the authors offer recommendations on how, in the short-term, the current IDEA statute and regulations might be better enforced and IDEA's regulations might be improved. In view of IDEA's anticipated re-authorization, the authors also offer recommendations on how Congressionally approved statutory changes to the current law would ensure that, in the future, private school students will finally be able to freely and fully participate in IDEA.

We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among White and comparatively affluent students, in response to the presence of immigrant students in the school. We propose a new identification strategy to partial out the unobserved non-random selection into schools, and find that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of US-born students, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Moreover, the presence of immigrants does not affect negatively the performance of affluent US-born students, who typically show a higher academic achievement compared to immigrant students. We provide suggestive evidence on potential channels.

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging three alternative identification strategies, we explore how increase in access to charter schools in twelve districts in Florida affects students remaining in traditional public schools (TPS). We consistently find that competition stemming from the opening of new charter schools improves reading--but not math--performance and it also decreases absenteeism of students who remain in the TPS. Results are modest in magnitude.

Individual teachers, administrators, and parents made tremendous efforts to continue educating the Commonwealth's children between March and June of this year. But no amount of dedicated individual effort could have overcome fundamental challenges: weak guidance to districts from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) against a backdrop of deficient knowledge and sophistication statewide with regard to virtual learning. Digital education has been empirically proven to be most successful when schools prepare and follow best distance learning practices. However, the Commonwealth lacks even the minimum technological infrastructure for virtual learning, as exemplified by districts scrambling to obtain electronic devices and internet connections during the school closure. It is encouraging that Governor Baker and the DESE have described a fall 2020 return to brick-and-mortar schooling--with appropriate health measures to maximize safety--as a significant priority. The present challenge is how to implement this much-needed return to school, optimally balancing the importance of in-person schooling with the countervailing importance of protecting against the virus. The following paper contributes important insights, based upon careful review of other countries that have already successfully reopened their schools. [Foreword written by David S. Clancy and Dr. John G. Flores.]

Although many programs remotely disseminate information to students about the college application process, there is little evidence as to how students experience these programs. This paper examines a large-scale remote counseling program in which college counselors initiated interactions with 15,000 high school seniors via text message to support them through the college application process. Given the passive nature of text messaging, not all of the counselors' prompts elicited similar responses from students. I use text-as-data methods (combining qualitative coding and supervised machine learning) to measure which interactions lead to productive engagement between counselors and students, and which do not. I show that interactions about financial aid offers and financial aid applications are much more likely to generate productive engagement than interactions about college lists. This finding may help to explain why recent remote counseling interventions that have sought to influence students' college lists have been ineffective.

The clinical teaching experience is one of the most important components of teacher preparation. Prior observational research has found that more effective mentors and schools with better professional climates are associated with better preparation for teacher candidates. We test these findings using an experimental assignment of teacher candidates to placement sites in two states. Candidates who were randomly assigned to higher quality placement sites experienced larger improvements in performance over the course of the clinical experience, as evaluated by university instructors. The findings suggest that improving clinical placement procedures can improve the teaching quality of candidates.

This study examines the effects of internal migration driven by severe natural disasters on host communities, and the mechanisms behind these effects, using the large influx of migrant students into Florida public schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. I find significant adverse effects of the influx in the first year on existing student test scores, disciplinary problems, and student mobility that vanish entirely in the second year. I also find evidence that compensatory resource allocation within schools is an important factor driving the adverse effects of large, unexpected migrant flows on some incumbent students in the short-run.

Dual language learners make up an increasing share of preschool students, but they often perform worse than monolingual students on assessments measuring school achievement. This study compares Head Start classrooms implementing either the dual language model or the English with home language support model. The author examines how the models affect gains in English or Spanish oral proficiency over a school year and how classroom organization and quality affect potential proficiency gains. Students in dual language classrooms showed significantly greater average gains from pretest to posttest in English oral proficiency and Spanish oral proficiency than did students in classrooms using the English with home language support model. The difference was even more pronounced among classrooms with low organization. Findings highlight the need for professional development on language model use to ensure consistency in delivery. [This work was funded through the Young Scholars Award.]

This report analyzes the effects of implementing a personalization for academic and social emotional learning (PASL) program in selected Broward County high schools. PASL was implemented with a continuous improvement model promoting deliberate adaptations to class- and school-level conditions. PASL practices include goal setting, use of data, educator teams, and points of contact between teachers and students. The implementation of PASL started at three high schools in 2014-2015 (the "innovation year") and expanded to an additional five high schools in the 2015-2016 "scale-out year." Because of the nature of the adaptive continuous improvement, there were many differences in implementation and treatment practices across schools. As a result of these differences, the authors analyze program effects both collectively and on a school-by-school basis. Overall, the effects of PASL were quite varied across schools and outcomes. Findings revealed the most consistent evidence of an impact of PASL is a reduction of major disciplinary incidents in the innovation schools, although there was still a good deal of variation. Additionally, the schools with the most consistent evidence of a positive impact of PASL had the highest levels of implementation integrity.

This white paper presents a selection of model schools who all have, to some degree, fostered deeper learning. Schools were selected by internet search, or through references in "deeper learning" reports and documents. It should be noted that information in these reviews is based on information from school web-sites, in some cases the web sites of state education agencies, media reports and ratings, such as those published by "US News and World Report" or "Newsweek." It is hoped that this paper will serve as a resource directory of sorts, giving interested parties the opportunity to read more widely about these schools, consult the referenced documents, or to contact the schools directly. [For "Innovation and Deeper Learning: Volume 2," see ED604592.]

This white paper provides a snapshot of available policies and guidance related to online learning and students with disabilities from a small group of states that require online experience as part of high school graduation or report a higher number of online course enrollments. The Appendix allows for a quick scan of the following 12 elements that would be of interest to stakeholders and policymakers: terms, definitions, online learning options, enrollment estimates, approved providers of online learning, eligibility for participation/enrollment, high school graduation requirement, data collection or reporting requirements, eligibility to participate, online learning as high school graduation requirement, provision of special education and related services/implementation of IEP or 504 plan, and data collection or reporting requirements specific to students with disabilities. The following is appended: Selected State Policy on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities.

Private school choice options are being proposed and adopted in numerous states across the country. As of the spring of 2019, 62 private school choice programs were in operation in 29 states and the District of Columbia, serving more than 400,000 children. Although growth in private school choice programs and enrollment has been considerable over the past decade, the percentage of private schools participating in school choice options varies considerably by program. Understanding how program design impacts the supply of private schools participating in these programs will be critical for policymakers as they work to create and expand education choice options for families. This report considers whether certain regulations governing school choice programs reduce specialization and diversity in the supply of private schools that participate. Expanding on the prior analysis of the impact of regulations in three locations, the authors chart how schools self-identify prior to and after switching into private school choice program environments in each of the five locations. The authors found that private school leaders in all five locations are more likely to classify their schools as less specialized than they were prior to entering the programs. The authors also found evidence to suggest that more homogenization occurred in more highly regulated voucher programs. These findings suggest a potential homogenizing effect of regulations on school supply, limiting the diversity of the private school market. These findings also suggest policymakers should carefully weigh the costs of regulating private school choice programs, as overregulation could reduce specialization and diversity of school supply in a given school choice program, limiting the options that are available to families.

We identify externalities in human capital production function arising from sibling spillovers. Using regression discontinuity design generated by school-entry cutoffs and school records from one district in Florida, we find positive spillover effects from an older to a younger child in less affluent families and negative spillover effects from a younger to an older child in more affluent families. These results are consistent with direct spillovers dominating in economically disadvantaged families and with parental reinforcement in more affluent families.

We study the effect of preferences for boys on the performance in mathematics of girls, using evidence from two different data sources. In our first set of results, we identify families with a preference for boys by using fertility stopping rules in a large population of households whose children attend public schools in Florida. Girls growing up in a boy-biased family score on average 3 percentage points lower on math exams when compared to girls raised in other types of families. In our second set of results we find similar strong effects when we study the correlations between girls' performance in mathematics and maternal gender role attitudes, using evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We conclude that socialization at home can explain a non-trivial part of the observed gender disparities in mathematics performance and document that maternal gender attitudes correlate with those of their children. [The Florida Department of Education and Health provided the linked population-level administrative data that permitted this analysis to take place.]

Instructional time is a fundamental educational input, yet we have little causal evidence about the effect of longer school days on student achievement. This paper uses a sharp regression discontinuity design to estimate the effects of lengthening the school day for low-performing schools in Florida by exploiting an administrative cutoff for eligibility. Our results indicate significant positive effects of additional literacy instruction on student reading achievement. In particular, we find effects of 0.05 standard deviations of improvement in reading test scores for program assignment in the first year, though long-run effects are difficult to assess.

Accurate understanding of environmental moderation of genetic influences is vital to advancing the science of cognitive development as well as for designing interventions. One widely-reported idea is increasing genetic influence on cognition for children raised in higher socioeconomic status families, including recent proposals that the pattern is a particularly US phenomenon. We use matched birth and school records from Florida siblings and twins born in 1994-2002 to provide the largest, most population-diverse consideration of this hypothesis to date. We find no evidence of SES moderation of genetic influence on test scores, suggesting that articulating gene-environment interactions for cognition is more complex and elusive than previously supposed.

We present evidence of a positive relationship between school starting age and children's cognitive development from age 6 to 18 using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and large-scale population-level birth and school data from the state of Florida. We estimate effects of being old for grade (being born in September versus August) that are remarkably stable -- always around 0.2 SD difference in test scores -- across a wide range of heterogeneous groups, based on maternal education, poverty at birth, race/ethnicity, birth weight, gestational age, and school quality. While the September-August difference in kindergarten readiness is dramatically different by subgroup, by the time students take their first exams, the heterogeneity in estimated effects on test scores effectively disappears. We do, however, find significant heterogeneity in other outcome measures such as disability status and middle and high school course selections. We also document substantial variation in compensatory behaviors targeted towards young for grade children. While the more affluent families tend to redshirt their children, young for grade children from less affluent families are more likely to be retained in grades prior to testing. School district practices regarding retention and redshirting are correlated with improved out- comes for the groups less likely to use those remediation approaches (i.e., retention in the case of more-affluent families and redshirting in the case of less-affluent families.) Finally, we find that very few school policies or practices mitigate the test score advantage of September born children.

In this study, we compare the teacher quality distributions in charter schools and traditional public schools, and examine mechanisms that might explain cross-sector differences in teacher effectiveness as measured by teacher value-added scores using school and teacher level data from Florida. We have three main findings. First, we find that teachers working in above-average poverty charter schools have significantly higher value-added scores compared to traditional public school teachers working in similar settings, which is mainly driven by the right tail of the value-added score distribution, yet we find no such differences in below-average poverty settings. Second, we find that cross-sector differences in observed teacher characteristics such as experience and educational attainment fail to explain any of the observed gaps in teacher effectiveness in higher-poverty settings. Instead, we find that differences in returns to experience on teacher productivity, which is significantly higher in the charter sector, explains most of the observed cross-sector effectiveness gaps. Third, we find considerable differences in teacher support and teacher influence on instructional policies and practices between charter schools and traditional public schools, which might help explain the higher returns to experience on teacher effectiveness as well as the observed effectiveness gaps between charter schools and traditional public schools serving disadvantaged students.

As postsecondary institutions increasingly integrate technology into developmental education, it becomes important to understand how technology is used in these programs, what challenges institutions have encountered relating to the technology, and what considerations institutional leaders take into account when deciding whether and how to integrate technology in developmental education. This study explores these questions drawing from semi-structured interviews with key personnel from 31 open-access two-year public colleges, 11 broad-access four-year public colleges, and 41 state-level organizations overseeing such colleges. We find that institutions are integrating a variety of instructional, course management, and student support technologies into developmental education. In doing so, institutions have encountered a number of challenges, particularly with regard to end-user difficulties with technology. We also find that evidence of effectiveness of technology for improving educational outcomes was considered by a number of organizations in our sample when making decisions about technology use in developmental education; however, other considerations--particularly those based on costs and resources--were also quite influential. Indeed, such economic considerations were described to us more often than evidence of effectiveness by respondents discussing reasons for using technology in developmental education.

Higher levels of civic and community engagement in higher education are positively associated with students' academic performance and they also build upon citizenship skills such as informed voting. Yet, while these are worthy and important outcomes of higher education, students from disadvantaged backgrounds can have more difficulty navigating civic engagement. Focusing on students at thirteen major public universities in the United States, and utilizing survey data generated by the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium, this study suggest social perspective-taking has a significant positive effect on all students' probability of voting and participating in community service. Students who were asked to identify challenge/solutions to social problems and reflect/act on community issues in the classroom were also more likely to participate in community service. Additionally, Hispanic students and students from lower-income households are significantly less likely to vote and perform community service--findings corroborated by previous research. Females are more likely to vote and participate in community service--findings also corroborated by prior research. Hispanic students and students from low-income backgrounds were more likely to participate in voting and community service if they had increased rates of social perspective-taking. These results suggest that increased opportunities to connect with classmates in the classroom and develop perspective-taking skills (e.g. appreciating the world from someone else's perspective, acknowledging personal differences, interacting with someone with views that are different from your own, and discussing and navigating controversial issues) are potentially quite powerful ways to foster civic engagement among students who traditionally have the lowest civic engagement rates compared to their peers.