Search

Teaching deeper learning involves cultivating the critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills that students need to be successful in their college, career, and civic life. It also involves encouraging students to be active participants in their learning. Public schools across the United States often work to help students develop these skills. This report focuses on several elements of students' deeper learning based on fall 2023 and spring 2024 surveys administered to American School District Panel member district leaders. It summarizes how district leaders believe middle and high schoolers' critical thinking skills are best developed in their schools, whether students' input about teaching and learning is collected in these schools, district leaders' examples of their schools' most effective forms of project-based learning, and districts' theories of action for teaching and learning.

In spring 2024, the authors surveyed 156 American School District Panel member districts about principal pipeline activities across seven domains -- leader standards, principal preparation, selective hiring and placement, on-the-job support and evaluation, principal supervision, leader tracking systems, and systems of support -- to estimate the share of U.S. public school districts engaged in such activities. Researchers also examined those activities by district enrollment size to investigate the hypothesis that the infrastructure to support the principal pipeline is mostly confined to large districts. This report is intended to support administrators of principal preparation programs, school district leaders, state department of education staff who oversee principal certification and leadership development, and education researchers who study school leadership.

Violent incidents, such as shootings, and threats of such violence, have become relatively common occurrences in kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) schools across the United States. One common way that schools help their staff and students train for the possibility of an active shooter or other threats is by conducting practice drills. The prevalence of these drills -- combined with the mixed results of how these drills affect staff and students' feelings of preparedness, safety, fear, and stress -- highlights the need for more research. To better understand what teachers across the United States think about school safety generally and active shooter drills in particular, RAND researchers administered a survey to a randomly selected sample of 1,020 K-12 teachers using the American Teacher Panel. The survey focused on teachers' perceptions of school safety, including their main safety concerns and their experiences with incidents of gun violence and with drills designed to prepare students and staff for school shootings and other violent incidents. The survey specifically asked whether such drills made teachers feel more or less safe and prepared to respond to active assailant events and teachers' perceptions of their students' feelings about such drills, as well as whether supports were available to students and staff during and following drills. Survey results indicate that more work is needed to understand the impact of drills on staff and students and what schools can do to better support the well-being of students and staff who are required to participate in these activities.

A large body of evidence indicates that well-implemented social and emotional learning (SEL) programs improve academic, social, and emotional outcomes for students and educators. Education policy has the potential to influence the high-quality implementation of SEL, from the school district, to the school, to the classroom. Before and during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, U.S. states enacted supportive policies and conditions to promote SEL in schools. However, curricula that foster the development of social and emotional competences have been one of many controversies about the instructional content and instructional practices schools should use to teach students. Thus, legislators in nine states have proposed bills to prohibit or inhibit SEL instruction in kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) schools. In this report, the authors investigate whether states' SEL policies (for and against) are associated with the implementation of SEL by K-12 schools, as reported by teachers and principals. In their approach, the authors merge the survey data they collected from educators with the results of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning's (CASEL's) nationwide scan of each state's and the District of Columbia's SEL-relevant policies and conditions. The authors also study whether SEL implementation is correlated with two teacher-reported indicators of positive student experience: supportive climate and student interest in learning. The authors' findings show whether state policymakers' SEL-related policies (including legislation and guidance) connect to schools' on-the-ground decisions and implementation, as reported by principals and teachers.

This is the latest report in the State of the Superintendent series, an annual report intended to provide a reliable, recurring snapshot of the U.S. public school superintendency. Since the American School District Panel began in fall 2020, researchers have periodically surveyed superintendents about their job, focusing on job-related stressors, job satisfaction, and intentions to remain in the profession. New for this year was a question about which activities take up the largest share of superintendents' time. The survey revealed a divide between superintendents of small districts (those with fewer than 3,000 students) and large districts (those serving 10,000 or more students). For example, in spring 2024, district budgets topped small-district superintendents' list of stressors, but the intrusion of political issues and opinions into schooling was the most common stressor among large-district superintendents. Meanwhile, superintendents of large districts stated that their most time-consuming activities were external and internal communications, whereas those in small districts spent more time on budgets and on school facility maintenance and operations. The differences are so large as to suggest that the very job of the superintendent--and, therefore, likely the skills needed most to succeed in the job--is substantially different in large (urban) versus small (mostly rural) districts.

In the year following the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic-related school closures in March 2020, educators began to sound the alarm about increasing chronic absenteeism. Chronic absenteeism is defined as a student missing at least 10 percent of school days (i.e., 18 days in a typical 180-day school year) for any reason, whether excused or unexcused. Data suggest that chronic absenteeism skyrocketed in the aftermath of pandemic-induced school closures. But despite rates improving modestly in the 2022-2023 school year, persistently high chronic absenteeism rates have left educators and policymakers across the United States wondering what they can do to get students back in school. To get the latest information on the ongoing problem of chronic absenteeism, the authors conducted a survey of school districts and interviewed leaders of districts who are members of the American School District Panel (ASDP). The ASDP is a research partnership between RAND and the Center on Reinventing Public Education. The findings estimate the proportion of districts with elevated levels of chronic absenteeism during the most recent school year (2023-2024), provide national prevalence estimates of the approaches that districts are employing to reduce absenteeism, and highlight perspectives from district leaders about why a greater share of children are missing school now than in the past. This report is intended for school district leaders, organizations focused on school attendance, and state policymakers.

The American School District Panel (ASDP) is a nationally representative set of more than 1,000 school district leaders who agree to take surveys over time. RAND recruits ASDP members using probabilistic sampling methods, which allow researchers to weight survey results to generalize to the national population of school districts and charter management organizations. This report provides technical information about the spring 2024 ASDP survey of district leaders. The authors describe the survey administration and weighting processes they used to produce nationally representative estimates.

In spring 2024, the authors surveyed 190 American School District Panel member districts about what interventions (e.g., tutoring, additional staff, additional instruction time) they were still using during the 2023-2024 school year to assist with students' learning recovery from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic-related setbacks. Districts were also asked about their expected revenues in future school years and what cuts, if any, they plan to make because of the expiration of federal stimulus funds. This series is intended to provide brief analyses of educator survey results of immediate interest to policymakers, practitioners, and researchers.

Summer programming is one of the main ways school districts have sought to help students recover academically from COVID-19 pandemic-related setbacks. Authors use a survey administered to a nationally representative sample of kindergarten through grade 12 public school districts to investigate the prevalence and structure of districts' programming in summer 2023. Authors use these results to describe the prevalence of district-offered summer programming in 2023; examine details about elementary and secondary programs, in terms of their eligibility criteria, length, and academic and nonacademic offerings; discuss how districts approached their summer academic instruction; and look at districts' expectations about funding for summer 2024. Because experiences with summer learning programming can vary by district context, the authors examine differences in districts' survey responses by locale (urban, suburban, rural), poverty status (low poverty, high poverty), student racial/ethnic composition (majority white students, majority students of color), and enrollment size (small, medium, large). This research is part of a series intended to provide brief analyses of educator survey results of immediate interest to policymakers, practitioners, and researchers.

The release of such generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools as ChatGPT in 2022 was a major advancement in the field of AI. Two burning questions for kindergarten through grade 12 (K--12) educators are to what extent new generative AI tools will change teaching and whether they will improve learning. The answers to these questions are not yet clear and likely will not be for some time. But to learn firsthand from educators the ways in which AI is beginning to affect teaching and learning in K-12 public schools, the authors surveyed and interviewed educators across the United States. Specifically, the authors surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,020 teachers using RAND's American Teacher Panel in fall 2023. They also surveyed a nationally representative sample of 231 districts in fall 2023 and interviewed 11 leaders from these districts in December 2023 and January 2024. The districts the authors surveyed and the leaders they interviewed are members of the American School District Panel (ASDP). The ASDP is a research partnership between RAND and the Center on Reinventing Public Education. The authors combine the perspectives of K-12 teachers and district leaders in this report to construct the most comprehensive picture to date of how educators are engaging with AI products and tools for teaching. Teachers reported how they actually use AI tools in their practices, and district leaders reported whether and how they are providing policies, guidance, and training on the use of AI tools.

Shooting events and threats of shootings have come to shape the educational environment of many schools across the United States in recent years. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of threats alone rose by 60 percent, and most of these threats were made anonymously on various social media platforms commonly used by youth. While the overwhelming majority of these threats are meant to be jokes or to create havoc across a school or district, the resources that schools and law enforcement partners must devote to investigating and tracking down the source of each threat are significant. The resulting lockouts, lockdowns, and school cancelations that schools are often forced to implement have a severe emotional toll on students, teachers, and school staff. Seeking to shed additional light on how K-12 schools in the United States are being targeted by social media-based threats, the authors of this report examine what schools are doing to investigate each threat's credibility, ensure the safety of their communities, and work with local and other partners in these areas. To this end, they conducted a literature review to identify existing practices for assessing and responding to such threats, analyzed over 1,000 news reports about threats from 2012 to 2022 to identify trends, and interviewed more than 60 K-12 stakeholders representing 17 school districts in 12 U.S. states about the challenges these threats pose and the decision-making processes and active steps they take to respond to them.

In April 2021, Idaho became the first state to pass a policy restricting teachers' discussion of race- or gender-related topics. Over the next two years, 17 more states followed suit and passed similar restrictions through state legislatures, state boards of education, state attorneys general, and executive orders. Using nationally representative survey data from more than 8,000 kindergarten through grade 12 public school teachers across the United States in spring 2023, the authors take stock of how classroom limitations on addressing race- or gender-related topics are influencing teachers' instruction and students' learning two years after the first state enacted such a restriction. The authors examine how teachers' awareness of state restrictions and their perceptions of the influence of limitations on their instruction have shifted since spring 2022. Drawing on open-ended survey responses from thousands of teachers, the authors further examine teachers' reports of how limitations are impacting student learning. The authors explore how teachers' awareness and reports of the influence of limitations on their instruction and student learning vary by teachers' state policy context and local political climate.

The American School District Panel (ASDP) is the newest addition to RAND's American Educator Panels (AEP) and was designed to survey district leaders two times each school year. RAND recruits ASDP members using probabilistic sampling methods, which allow researchers to weight survey results to generalize to the national population of school districts. This report provides technical information about the fall 2023 ASDP survey of district leaders. The authors describe the survey administration and weighting processes that they used to produce nationally representative estimates.

Public debates around whether and how teachers should discuss topics related to race and gender in the classroom have turned classrooms into political battlegrounds. Between April 2021 and January 2023, 18 states passed policies restricting teachers' instruction. Many of these state policies restrict teachers' instruction on topics related to race and gender; some also address how teachers can discuss current events or controversial topics. In the 2023 State of the American Teacher survey, 65 percent of teachers nationally reported deciding to limit discussions about political and social issues in class. This is nearly double the share of teachers who are located in states that have enacted restrictions. This finding raises the question of why the share of teachers who have decided to limit their instruction exceeds the share of teachers who teach in states where they have been explicitly directed to do so. In this report, the authors explore how the impact of state policies restricting teachers' instruction is spilling over into places where no such restrictions exist, and why teachers who are not subject to state-level restrictions are choosing on their own to limit their classroom discussions of political and social issues. The authors also examine how teachers' instructional decisions are associated with their state and local policy contexts and local political climate.

Since its launch in the midst of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the American School District Panel (ASDP) has been used to monitor timely topics in kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) public education. Over time, ASDP surveys have coalesced around four key challenges that U.S. public school districts face today: school staffing, budgeting, the politicization of schooling, and academic recovery efforts. In this Data Note, authors provide a brief update on these four challenges using data from the fall 2023 ASDP survey. The survey included seven questions on these topics, and the findings of each question are briefly discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous upheaval in schooling. In addition to its devasting effects on students' academic development, the disruptions to schooling had important consequences for researchers conducting effectiveness studies on educational programs during this era. Given the likelihood of future large-scale disruptions, it is important for researchers to plan resilient studies and think critically about possible adaptations when such turbulence arises. In this article, we utilize qualitative case study analysis to examine how researchers evaluating educational programs in the pandemic period adjusted to turbulent conditions through design pivots to ensure the feasibility of research. We find that researchers struggled to strike a balance between the evaluations that were intended and those that could realistically be accomplished. We identify how the challenges of the pandemic period and design pivots raised potential threats to validity, illuminate some promising practices that arose during the pandemic period, and provide recommendations for future research and evaluation programs focused on studying the effectiveness of educational programs during times of profound disruption.