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This paper documents the impact of home libraries on academic achievement, economic success, and health. It summarizes research that shows how children without access to reading materials at home are more likely to suffer learning losses when out of school and how home libraries are one of schools' and communities' best tools to combat learning loss. In sum, the paper illustrates the importance of creating a literacy-rich home environment for all children and outlines the essential components of a student home library--a tangible, cost-effective way to afford every child access to a bright, successful future. [This report was prepared by Scholastic Research & Validation.]

Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high-poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge with information produced by its evaluation system to offer large, compensating differentials to highly effective teachers willing to work in its lowest-achievement schools. The Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program resulted in immediate and sustained achievement increases. The improvements were dramatic, bringing average achievement in the previously lowest-performing schools close to the district average. When ACE stipends are largely eliminated, a substantial fraction of highly effective teachers leave, and test scores fall. This highlights the central importance of performance-based incentives.

In this paper we examine academic recovery in 12 mid- to large-sized school districts across 10 states during the 2021-22 school year. Our findings highlight the challenges that recovery efforts faced during the 2021-22 school year. Although, on average, math and reading test score gains during the school year reached the pace of pre-pandemic school years, they were not accelerated beyond that pace. This is not surprising given that we found that districts struggled to implement recovery programs at the scale they had planned. In the districts where we had detailed data on student participation in academic interventions, we found that recovery efforts often fell short of original expectations for program scale, intensity of treatment, and impact. Interviews with a subsample of district leaders revealed several implementation challenges, including difficulty engaging targeted students consistently across schools, issues with staffing and limitations to staff capacity, challenges with scheduling, and limited engagement of parents as partners in recovery initiatives. Our findings on the pace and trajectory of recovery and the challenges of implementing recovery initiatives raise important questions about the scale of district recovery efforts.

Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus D.C.), we investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty. We find that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps. Math gaps did not widen in areas that remained in-person (although there was some widening in reading gaps in those areas). We estimate that high-poverty districts that went remote in 2020-21 will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related achievement losses.

We develop a new framework for identifying at-risk students in public schools. Our framework has two fundamental advantages over "status quo" systems: (1) it is based on a clear definition of what it means for a student to be at risk and (2) it leverages states' rich administrative data systems to produce more informative risk measures. Our framework is more effective than common alternatives at identifying students who are at risk of low academic performance and we use policy simulations to show that it can be used to target resources toward these students more efficiently. It also offers several other benefits relative to "status quo" systems. We provide an alternative approach to risk measurement that states can use to inform funding, accountability, and other policies, rather than continuing to rely on broad categories tied to the nebulous concept of "disadvantage."

This report focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic in the Kalamazoo Public Schools District in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which closed its doors to students from mid-March 2020 to June 2021. During this time, instruction transitioned from face-to-face to virtual, with students having three options for virtual instruction. In addition to individual KPS student data, the study looks at the NWEA national sample as presented in several publications and technical appendices. The study addresses three basic questions, as well as examining students' race/ethnicity and poverty status, summer learning loss to determine the change in achievement gains, and attendance rates as an example of students not receiving face-to-face instruction. The first question asks whether the pandemic, which began in March of 2020, adversely affected student enrollment. The second question examines how achievement gains based on the NWEA math tests during the 2020-2021 pandemic school year compared to prepandemic and post-school-closure trends. The third question examines the variability of NWEA math test scores during the pandemic compared to the school years before and after the 2020-2021 pandemic school year. We find that student enrollment declined during and after the pandemic school year for at least two years, which is more than appears to be the case in all but the first few years of the century. In addressing the second question, we found that achievement gains rebounded after KPS schools opened, although achievement gains are not as high as in the prepandemic school year. It also appears that the lower grades were more resilient than the upper grades during this period. Regarding the third question, we found that test scores were more variable at the low end of the distribution than at the high end and that variability increased in the year following school closure.

Free and reduced-price meal eligibility (FRM) is commonly used in education research and policy applications as an indicator of student poverty. However, using multiple data sources external to the school system, we show that FRM status is a poor proxy for poverty, with eligibility rates far exceeding what would be expected based on stated income thresholds for program participation. This is true even without accounting for community eligibility for free meals, although community eligibility has exacerbated the problem in recent years. Over the course of showing the limitations of using FRM data to measure poverty, we provide promising validity evidence for a new, publicly-available measure of school poverty based on local-area family incomes.

This study finds substantial reductions to criminal activity from the introduction of a comprehensive high school support program for disadvantaged youth living in the largest public housing project in Toronto. The program, called Pathways to Education, bundles supports such as regular coaching, tutoring, group activities, free public transportation tickets and bursaries for postsecondary education. In this paper, we use a difference-in-differences approach that compares students living in public housing communities where the program was offered to those living in communities where the program was not offered over time. We find that eligibility for Pathways reduces the likelihood of being charged with a crime by 32 percent at its Regent Park location. This effect is driven by a reduction in charges for breaking and entering, theft, mischief, other traffic offenses and Youth Criminal Justice Act offenses.

This report presents a snapshot of selected features of the condition of education in Wisconsin in 2019. With support from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences, and in collaboration with colleagues at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), the authors set out to measure practices in PK-12 education that they considered especially important for educational equity and success for children in Wisconsin. Public school teachers and administrators in Wisconsin are responsible for educating about 855,000 students between four-year-old kindergarten and twelfth grade. State report cards produced annually by the Wisconsin DPI show how well we are doing as a school system with respect to student outcomes. In this paper, we focus on what principals and teachers in the state are doing. How do kindergarten teachers at both the four-year-old and five-year-old levels engage in play in their classrooms? How do elementary teachers group students for instruction and how frequently do they reconsider these groupings? What sorts of educational opportunities do teachers and schools offer their English language learners and their students with special needs? How supported do teachers feel in their early years in the profession? These are just a few of the questions we asked a representative sample of almost 700 principals and 2,200 teachers in the state. This paper offers a big picture view of instructional practice and educational opportunity in Wisconsin. It makes no claims about what schools and teachers should do to increase equity and success for students in Wisconsin. Instead, it shines a light on the many ways our educators work to support students in the state and, we hope, offers insights into where we might do better.

Low-performing, high-poverty, public schools notoriously struggle to attract and retain good teachers. This paper studies a setting where independent organizations, including charities and businesses, take over the management of under-performing schools, while funding remains public. Exploiting the staggered expansion of English Sponsor-led academies since the early 2000s, we show that the Sponsor-led takeover leads to substantial changes in the teaching body and the school personnel policy. The probability that the Sponsor appoints a new headteacher doubles upon the takeover, with the new headteacher being, on average, better paid, and more likely to come from outstanding schools. The takeover also induces teacher sorting, with older and lower-achieving teachers leaving the school, and new teachers joining the Sponsor-led school from outstanding schools. Lastly, Sponsors substantially restructure teachers' rewarding scheme and abandon a pay scale entirely based on seniority, leading to a 10 percent increase in pay dispersion across equally experienced teachers.

Although policymakers generally appreciate the value of crafting policies that are responsive to teacher and principal voice, doing so in a systematic way is challenging. Educator voices in the room when policies are made are often those of teachers and principals closest to policymakers. In 2019, to broaden the range of educator voices available to policymakers in Wisconsin, we asked more than 2,200 teachers and 700 principals in public schools in Wisconsin how "they" would change policy to improve the academic success of economically disadvantaged students. In total, 1,559 teachers and 601 principals offered suggestions for changing policy across four categories: school level--academic, student level, school level--non-academic, and community level. Though we saw variation in responses based on percent of student body eligible for free and reduced-priced lunch, grade levels served (elementary, middle, high school) and community type (city, suburb, town, rural), many responses appear with similar frequency among practitioners across contexts--indicating promise for making broader changes that impact all schools.

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program that allows schools serving low-income populations to classify all students as eligible for free meals, regardless of individual circumstances. This has implications for the use of free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications, which is a common practice. We document empirically how the CEP has affected the value of FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage. At the individual student level, we show that there is essentially no effect of the CEP. However, the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the share of FRM-eligible students in a school. It is this latter measure that is most relevant for policy uses of FRM data. [Portions of this paper were previously circulated under the title "Using Free Meal and Direct Certification Data to Proxy for Student Disadvantage in the Era of the Community Eligibility Provision" (ED595218). The authors have since split the original paper into two parts. This is the first part.]

Food insecurity, defined as a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food, is a substantial threat to public health in the United States. In 2017, nearly 12% of households reported being food insecure, affecting over 40 million persons. Numerous studies have documented that food insecurity is associated with substantive negative health outcomes among children and families, and leads to excessive health care expenditures. In this paper we compare the levels, trends, and determinants of food insecurity in the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to those from the official source of food security statistics in the U.S.--the Food Security Supplement of the Current Population Survey--from 1999-2017. The PSID, which was begun in 1968, is the leading longitudinal household survey on work, welfare, family structure, consumption, health, and wealth. The survey added measures of food security in the 1999-2003 waves, and again in the 2015-2017 waves. This offers the first opportunity to answer key pressing scientific and policy issues such as the persistence of food insecurity within and across generations, and how changes in food security affect and are affected by the level and change in consumption, wealth, and broader measures of health. This paper aims to describe how well levels and trends in food insecurity in the PSID align with the CPS, and the sources of why they might differ. In addition, we examine the robustness of key model predictors of food insecurity--income, race, education, disability status, marital status--across the surveys. We find that, although the estimated food insecurity rates in the PSID are lower than those in the CPS, the trends over time in the two datasets are similar. Food insecurity rates in the PSID and CPS converge from the 1998-2002 period to the 2014-16 period when food insecurity rates closely match those in the CPS. Our findings, taken as a whole, lend credence to the use of the PSID for food insecurity research.

Many developing countries use employment guarantee programs to combat poverty. This paper examines the consequences of such employment guarantee programs for the human capital accumulation of children. It exploits the phased roll-out of India's flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) to study the effects on enrollment in schools and child labor. Introduction of MGNREGA results in lower relative school enrollment in treated districts. The authors find that the drop in enrollment is driven by primary school children. Children in higher grades are just as likely to attend school under MGNREGA, but their school performance deteriorates. Using nationally representative employment data, they find evidence indicating an increase in child labor highlighting the unintentional perverse effects of the employment guarantee schemes for Human capital.

U.S. public schools are highly segregated by both race and class. Prior research shows that the desegregation of Southern schools in the 1960s and 1970s led to significant benefits for black students, including increased educational attainment and higher earnings. We do not know, however, whether segregation today has the same harmful effects as it did 50 years ago, nor do we have clear evidence about the mechanisms through which segregation affects achievement patterns. In this paper we estimate the effects of current-day school segregation on racial achievement gaps. We use 8 years of data from all public school districts in the U.S. We find that racial school segregation is strongly associated with the magnitude of achievement gaps in 3rd grade, and with the rate at which gaps grow from third to eighth grade. The association of racial segregation with achievement gaps is completely accounted for by racial differences in school poverty: racial segregation appears to be harmful because it concentrates minority students in high-poverty schools, which are, on average, less effective than lower-poverty schools. Finally, we conduct exploratory analyses to examine potential mechanisms through which differential enrollment in high-poverty schools leads to inequality. We find that the effects of school poverty do not appear to be explained by differences in the set of measurable teacher or school characteristics available to us.

We use a novel database of student teaching placements in Washington State to investigate teachers' transitions from student teaching classrooms to first job classrooms and the implications for student achievement. We find that first-year teachers are more effective when they are teaching in the same grade, in the same school level, or in a classroom with student demographics similar to their student teaching classroom. We also document that only 27% of first-year teachers are teaching the same grade they student taught, and that first-year teachers tend to begin their careers in higher-poverty classrooms than their student teaching placements. This suggests that better aligning student teacher placements with first-year teacher hiring could be a policy lever for improving early-career teacher effectiveness.

A data set from an urban Midwestern school district was mined to explore how the technology-based reading enrichment known as Mindplay Virtual Reading Coach (MVRC) affects children's performance on the English Language Arts (ELA) Standards state-wide assessment (N = 6098 students from Grades 3 to 9). ELA data from two times points were available, approximately one year apart. ELA data were correlated with various data points obtained from MVRC, including the benchmark assessment administered at the beginning and at the end of the year. Results revealed large correlations across grade levels for the MVRC Composite score obtained from the MVRC Universal Screener, 0.40 < r < 0.74. Results also revealed that the amount of MVRC exposure was linearly related to an increase in ELA performance at the end of the year, largely independent of grade level and students' initial reading competence. Girls and boys benefited equally from MVRC exposure, as did children from different ethnicities. The most prevalent factor in predicting the ELA-MVRC relation was the type of school, with MVRC exposure having the highest benefits in non-failing elementary schools, compared to high schools.

In a multicultural country like Peru, specific and disaggregated data on ethnic and racial minorities are a key resource to inform public policies about neglected populations. For decades, data on Afro-Peruvians has been both limited and inaccurate. Although there are 106 Afro-Peruvian communities, the most recent national census in October 2017 revealed that the Afro-Peruvian population consists of only 828,841 inhabitants, or 3.57 percent of the country's total. For decades, indigenous populations were considered the poorest and most vulnerable minority ethnic group in Peru. That is not always the case. Afro-Peruvian girls are either equally or more disadvantaged than their indigenous counterparts. Peru could benefit from its demographics, because 34.6 percent of its population is aged 0 to 19. However, competitiveness would require a dramatic improvement in the quality of the country's public education. Despite Peru's commitments to the Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 4 and 5, the poorest Afro-Peruvian women still have fewer years of schooling than men, which makes them less competitive in the labor market and forces them to take unskilled jobs with lower salaries and few or no benefits. This policy paper relies on a desk review and fieldwork conducted in May 2018 in the community of Yapatera, in the Piura region along the northern coast. Yapatera is a poor community with a high concentration of the Afro-descendant population, located 846 kilometers from the capital city of Lima. The fieldwork included individual interviews and small group conversations. Interview subjects were administrators, teachers, and students (girls and boys in the 4th and 5th grades) at the local public secondary school, as well as community leaders, staff at the Health Center, the Women's Emergency Center, and the police station.

Early childhood is a time of extensive development in the brain and many of the body's biological systems that are critical for health. Learning and development during these early years can have a critical impact on future educational attainment, which is an important determinant of health. There are also other important aspects of early childhood that can influence health, school readiness and future educational attainment, including experiences, relationships and the environment in which a child grows up. Poverty is often a considerable barrier to healthy development. Recent advances in the science of brain development offer us an unprecedented opportunity to solve some of society's most challenging problems, from widening disparities in school achievement and economic productivity to costly health problems across the lifespan. Understanding how the experiences children have starting at birth, even prenatally, affect lifelong outcomes -- combined with new knowledge about the core capabilities adults need to thrive as parents and in the workplace -- provides a strong foundation upon which policymakers and civic leaders can design a shared and more effective agenda. Despite research demonstrating that high-quality early childhood care and education can be beneficial to children, research has also demonstrated that the majority of children in the United States are placed in low-quality care, some of which may be detrimental to the longterm development of children. This paper will look at traditional preschools and discuss three of the emergent philosophical and value-laden approaches to early childhood care and education that allow districts, teachers, parents, and students greater flexibility in meeting the needs of their children. These are: Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and Waldorf.

Estimates of school voucher impacts on educational attainment have yet to explore heterogeneities in socioeconomic status among disadvantaged minority students. We theorize reasons for these heterogeneities and then estimate experimentally the differential impacts of voucher offers on college enrollment and graduation rates for minority and non-immigrant students from moderately and severely disadvantaged backgrounds. The findings are obtained from a privately sponsored, lottery-based voucher intervention in New York City that began in 1997. College enrollment and degree attainment as of the fall of 2017 were obtained from the National Student Clearinghouse. We find no significant effects of offers on minority students from severely disadvantaged backgrounds but significant effects of six to eight percentage points on those from moderately disadvantaged households. Similar results are obtained for students born of non-immigrant mothers. Some policy implications are discussed. [Additional support for this research was provided by the Hubbard Family Foundation.]

Free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data are used ubiquitously to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP)--a recently-implemented policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program--allows schools serving low-income populations to identify all students as FRM-eligible regardless of individual circumstances. We study the CEP's effect on FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage, and relatedly, we examine the viability of direct certification (DC) status as an alternative disadvantage measure. Our findings on whether the CEP degrades the informational content of FRM data are mixed. At the individual level there is essentially no effect, but the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the FRM-eligible share of students in a school. Our comparison of FRM and DC data in the post-CEP era shows that these measures are similarly informative as proxies for disadvantage, despite the CEP-induced information loss in FRM data. Using both measures together can improve the identification of disadvantaged students, but only marginally.

We use longitudinal data from North Carolina and Washington to study the extent to which four processes--teacher attrition from each state workforce, teacher mobility within districts, teacher mobility across districts, and teacher hiring--contribute to "teacher quality gaps" (TQGs) between advantaged and disadvantaged schools. We first replicate prior findings documenting inequities in each of these processes using different measures of student disadvantage (race and poverty) and teacher quality (experience, licensure test scores, and value added) and then develop and implement a simulation to assess the extent to which each process contributes to observed TQGs in each state. We find that all four processes contribute to TQGs but also document considerable heterogeneity in the extent to which each process contributes to the different TQG measures. For example, patterns in teacher attrition and mobility contribute more to TQGs measured by teacher experience, while patterns in teacher hiring explain the majority of TQGs measured by teacher licensure test scores and value added.

High teacher turnover imposes numerous costs on the schools and districts from which teachers depart. This study asks how schools respond to spells of high teacher turnover, and assesses organizational and human capital losses in terms of the changing composition of the teacher pool. Our analysis uses more than two decades of linked administrative data on math and ELA [English language arts] teachers at middle schools in North Carolina to determine the impacts of turnover across different policy environments and macroeconomic climates. We find that, even after accounting for school contexts and trends, turnover has marked, and lasting, negative consequences for teacher quality. Our results highlight the need for heightened policy attention to issues of teacher retention and working conditions.

This working paper will share the experience of Ashta No Kai (ANK), a grassroots nonprofit the author founded in 1998 in 10 villages in Shirur County, Maharashtra state, India, to promote the empowerment and education of women and girls in rural areas. The paper will, at first, examine the state of education in India including the Indian government's policies and programs that are attempting to address the gender gap in girls' education. Next, the barriers that girls in rural areas face to access their right to an education will be discussed followed by an introduction of various holistic, need-based, and low-cost educational interventions that ANK has initiated to address some of these impediments. Findings will then be reported from quantitative and qualitative surveys conducted, as well as case studies to gauge the impact of these interventions. Finally, the paper will propose evidence-based recommendations of integrated and sustainable strategies and approaches as guidance to policy practitioners to help promote educational outcomes and enhanced agency for adolescent girls to better navigate their world.

This working paper summarizes the results of a study of leadership in elementary and secondary schools. The study focused in particular on instructional leadership -- the extent to which school leaders focus on the core activities of teaching and learning -- and teacher leadership -- the extent to which teachers have input into school decision-making. This paper is drawn from the full report of the study, entitled "School Leadership Counts" (Ingersoll, Dougherty and Sirinides 2017), available at www.newteachercenter.org. [This research was supported by a grant to the New Teacher Center from the Carnegie Corporation.]

This paper examines the U.S. social insurance system, which we define broadly to include both programs supported by dedicated taxes and other federal programs that provide income support, assistance in meeting basic needs, or services to improve economic opportunity. The paper considers the social insurance system as a whole as well as its component parts, providing an overview of major federal programs in the areas of education and workforce development, health, income support, nutrition, and housing. The paper covers how the social insurance system is organized, how eligibility is determined and who benefits, how the benefits and services are delivered, and how the system affects poverty and inequality. We focus primarily on the system as it operated prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also look at how various programs respond to economic downturns. Coming at a time when policymakers will start shifting their focus from using the social insurance system to provide relief from the pandemic and recession to considering what changes should be made in the system on an ongoing basis, the paper also reprises an array of proposals to strengthen the system in various ways that The Hamilton Project has commissioned in recent years.

In the first systematic study of gender achievement gaps in U.S. school districts, we estimate male-female test score gaps in math and English Language Arts (ELA) for nearly 10,000 school districts in the U.S. We use state accountability test data from third through eighth grade students in the 2008-09 through 2014-15 school years. The average school district in our sample has no gender achievement gap in math, but a gap of roughly 0.23 standard deviations in ELA that favors girls. Both math and ELA gender achievement gaps vary among school districts and are positively correlated -- some districts have more male-favoring gaps and some more female-favoring gaps. We find that math gaps tend to favor males more in socioeconomically advantaged school districts and in districts with larger gender disparities in adult socioeconomic status. These two variables explain about one fifth of the variation in the math gaps. However, we find little or no association between the ELA gender gap and either socioeconomic variable, and we explain virtually none of the geographic variation in ELA gaps.

We study a teacher incentive policy in Washington State that awards a financial bonus to National Board certified teachers in high poverty schools. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the bonus policy increased the proportion of certified teachers in bonus-eligible schools by improving hiring, increasing certification rates of incumbent teachers, and reducing turnover. Depending on the method, we estimate that the proportion of NBCTs in treated schools increased by about four to eight percentage points over the first five years of eligibility. However, the improvement in certification rates corresponds to a change of about 0.2 to 0.3 percent of a standard deviation in teacher quality per year and we do not find evidence that the bonus resulted in detectable effects on student test achievement.

Young adults face enormous economic, social and psychological challenges when they transition into adulthood. This transition can be especially overwhelming and daunting for young adults with disabilities. Among the challenges young adults with disabilities are faced with are greater risk of low food security and barriers to healthcare. This study examines how the transition to adulthood may affect food security, health, and access to healthcare for youth with disabilities, and estimates the effects that SNAP has on this group in those turbulent years. The study used five years of data (2011-2015) from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). We combined the public and restricted NHIS data with the state SNAP policy variables. The sample included low-income individuals ages 13-25 (and their families) to reflect the life stage from pre-transition, to transition, and then to post-transition. Analyses were conducted at the Census Research Data Center in Columbia, MO. A difference-in-difference (DID) approach in linear models was applied to compare individuals with and without disabilities regarding changes in food security status and their health-related outcomes in the transition to adulthood. State SNAP policy variables were used as exogenous instruments to estimate the effects of SNAP participation on food security and health/healthcare use for youth and young adults with disabilities in the models of instrumental variables. Below is a summary of the main findings in which youth are referred to as individuals under 18, and young adults are referred to as individuals ages 18 to 25. (1) Compared to those without disabilities, individuals with disabilities have a greater risk of low food security in both childhood and young adulthood; (2) Transition into adulthood results in greater food security for individuals without disabilities but an increased risk of low food security for individuals with disabilities. The increased risk for young adults with disabilities may well put them at very low food security, the most severe category on the food security scale; (3) Food security status is associated with health and access to healthcare for all the four groups, youth and young adults, with or without disabilities. However, the associations between low food security and health-related outcomes do not seem to vary by disability status for young adults, indicating the additional risk of low food security that young adults with disabilities experience does not correlate with their health-related outcomes; (4) Contrary to our expectation, SNAP participation does not seem to have statistically significant effects on food security and health-related outcomes for individuals with disabilities. These impacts, although insignificant, show expected directions (i.e., improving food security and health) that are different from those often found in the OLS estimation that does not address the selection bias; and (5) SNAP participation is a statistically significant predictor of youth's food security status measured by the food security raw score only, but not the other three food security measures. SNAP participation appears to have greater impacts for youth than for young adults. In other words, the protective effects of SNAP decrease for young adults perhaps because they encounter greater barriers accessing SNAP than when they were young. The study's limitations are closely examined with a focus on the constraints that we had in the DID analysis and the IV analysis. We also suggested directions for future research. Since food security likely has a profound impact on the long-term development, economic independence, and self-sufficiency, we discussed a few policy strategies that may help individuals with disabilities in their transition to adulthood. These include special outreach services to improve SNAP accessibility, an embedded alert system that serves to bring awareness of a SNAP participant's upcoming transition to adulthood, incorporation of nutrition assistance in transition planning for youth, and better coordination of multiple public programs.

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.

Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge by using information produced by its evaluation and compensation reforms as the basis for effectiveness-adjusted payments that provided large compensating differentials to attract and retain effective teachers in its lowest achievement schools. The Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program offers salary supplements to educators with records of high performance who are willing to work in the most educationally disadvantaged schools. We document that ACE resulted in immediate and sustained increases in student achievement, providing strong evidence that the multi-measure evaluation system identifies effective educators who foster the development of cognitive skills. The improvements at ACE schools were dramatic, bringing average achievement in the previously lowest performing schools close to the district average. When ACE stipends are largely eliminated, a substantial fraction of highly effective teachers leaves, and test scores fall. This highlights the central importance of the performance-based incentives to attract and retain effective educators in previously low-achievement schools.

"Changing the Course of Family Literacy" re-examines the importance and value of family literacy programming and offers several policy recommendations to focus attention on the four-component model used in Even Start. This paper explores the current status of Family literacy and, after gathering information from 47 states, found that 11 states and the District of Columbia funded family literacy programs in 2015-16. These states and local programs have fostered partnerships and braided funding to preserve and support family literacy programs and services. This paper poses a rationale and recommendations to support family literacy programs as an essential strategy for assisting low-income families in improving their education and employment prospects.

We estimate the effect of welfare reform on the intergenerational transmission of welfare participation and related economic outcomes using a long panel of mother-daughter pairs over the survey period 1968-2013 in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Because states implemented welfare reform at different times starting in 1992, the cross-state variation over time permits us to quasi-experimentally separate out the effect of mothers' welfare participation during childhood on daughters' economic outcomes in adulthood in the pre- and post-welfare reform periods. We find that a mother's welfare participation increased her daughter's odds of participation as an adult by roughly 30 percentage points, but that welfare reform attenuated this transmission by at least 50 percent, or at least 30 percent over the baseline odds of participation. While we find comparable-sized transmission patterns in daughters' adult use of the broader safety net and other outcomes such as educational attainment and income, there is no diminution of transmission after welfare reform. These results are obtained by addressing nonrandom selection into welfare and are robust to other potential threats to identification from misclassification error, life-cycle age effects, and cross-state mobility. [Originally published in September 2016.]

Prior research on trends in educational inequality has focused chiefly on changing gaps in educational attainment by family income or parental occupation. In contrast, this contribution provides the first assessment of trends in educational attainment by family wealth and suggests that we should be at least as much concerned about growing wealth gaps in education. Despite overall growth in educational attainment and some signs of decreasing wealth gaps in high school attainment and college access, I find a large and rapidly increasing wealth gap in college attainment between cohorts born in the 1970 and 1980s, respectively. This growing wealth gap in higher educational attainment co-occurred with a rise in inequality in children's wealth backgrounds, though the analyses also suggest that the latter does not fully account for the former. Nevertheless, the results reported here raise concerns about the distribution of educational opportunity among today's children who grow up in a context of particularly extreme wealth inequality. An appendix provides data on descriptive statistics, wealth gaps in education, and cohort changes in wealth gaps in education.

I provide a new, systematic profile of more than 18,000 homeless students in Michigan, utilizing rich administrative data from all test-taking students in grades 3-9 during the 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years. These data are part of a larger study of school choice and student mobility in that state. Homelessness is a condition found disproportionately away from suburban school districts. African American and Hispanic students are more frequently homeless and homeless students are almost universally impoverished. They are far more mobile between districts and zip codes than their non-homeless peers and are more likely to participate in inter-district school choice and charter schools. Finally, homeless students score far lower on state math and reading tests.

Survey tools are used in education to direct policy, drive leadership decisions, and inform research. Increasingly survey measures of school climate and perspectives of leadership are incorporated into measures of school and principal quality. This study examines the role of temporal variations in survey response patterns using the data from the 2007-08 Schools and Staffing Survey. Our findings show that if survey responses are not collected over a fairly small window of time, the systematic differences may manifest owing to the survey timing rather than the differences between schools or teachers. For example, teachers responding to survey on Sunday are more likely to perceive leadership support to be positive, and Monday responders tend to see student behavior problems to be more detrimental to classroom instruction. In addition, notable changes in teachers' perceptions of leadership support and student behavior problems are observed across the school year, which generally become more negative over time. Lastly, teachers tend to report aspects of classroom control and student behavior in a more positive light prior to the state exam as compared to the period following. These findings suggest that the timing of surveys matters and can be a complicating factor when making comparisons among schools and examining change over time.

Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus D.C.), we investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty. We find that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps. Math gaps did not widen in areas that remained in-person (although there was some widening in reading gaps in those areas). We estimate that high-poverty districts that went remote in 2020-21 will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related achievement losses.

How do poor entrepreneurs trade off investments in business enterprises versus children's human capital, and how do these choices influence intergenerational socio-economic mobility? To examine this, we exploit experimental variation in household income resulting from a one-time relaxation of household liquidity constraints (Field et al., 2013), and track schooling and business outcomes over the subsequent 11 years. On average, treatment households, who were made wealthier through the experiment, increase human capital investment such that their children are 35% more likely to attend college. However, schooling gains only accrue to children with literate parents, among whom college attendance nearly doubles. In contrast, treatment effects on investment among the illiterate accrue only on the business margin and are accompanied by adverse educational outcomes for children. As a result, treatment lowers relative educational mobility. In a forecasting exercise, we find that earnings gains for literate households are four times larger than the earnings gains for illiterate households, raising earnings inequality. Our findings highlight how parental investment choices can contribute to a growth in intergenerational earnings inequality despite reductions in urban poverty. [Additional funding was provided by PEDL, IPA SME, and WAPP Harvard.]