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Summer learning loss is a perennial concern for educators and parents alike. However, researchers have recently questioned whether summer learning loss is just a statistical artifact driven by how achievement is measured across the school year. In this study, we empirically investigated a plausible critique of summer learning loss research, namely that students do not put forth their best effort on the fall test compared with the spring test. While we cannot conclude based on our findings that students do in fact lose ground during the summer, we did not find evidence that seasonal differences in test effort are a main driver of summer learning patterns estimated with MAP Growth assessments.

The Equality of Educational Opportunity Study (1966)—the Coleman Report—lodged a key takeaway in the minds of educators, researchers, and parents: Schools do not strongly shape students’ achievement outcomes. This finding has been influential to the field; however, Coleman himself suggested that—had longitudinal data been available to him—decomposing the variance in students’ growth rates rather than their levels of achievement would have provided a clearer insight into school effects. Inspired by an intriguing finding from an earlier study conducted in 1988 by Bryk and Raudenbush, we take up Coleman’s suggestion using data provided by NWEA, which has administered over 200 million vertically scaled assessments across all 50 states since 2008. We replicated Bryk and Raudenbush’s surprising finding that most of the variation in student learning rates lies between rather than within schools. For students moving from Grades 1 through 5, we found 75% (math) to 80% (English language arts) of the variance in achievement rates is at the school level. We find similar results in preliminary analyses of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class 1998-99 (ECLS-K:99). These results are intriguing because they call into question one of the dominant narratives about the extent to which schools shape students’ achievement; however, more research is needed. Our goal is to invite other scholars to conduct similar analyses in other data contexts. We delineate four key dimensions along which results need to be further probed, first and foremost with an eye toward the role of test score scaling practices, which may be of central importance.

Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts may have distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work focuses on these factors. We zoom out to the full spread of differential SLL and its contribution to students’ positions in the eighth-grade achievement distribution. Using a large, longitudinal NWEA data set, we document dramatic variability in SLL. While some students actually maintain their school-year learning rate, others lose nearly all their school-year progress. Moreover, decrements are not randomly distributed—52% of students lose ground in all 5 consecutive years (English language arts).

In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment system that the Wake County Public School System employed throughout the 2000s to provide evidence on this issue. Although our results show that Wake County Public School System’s socioeconomic-based assignment policy had negligible effects on average levels of segregation across the district, it substantially reduced racial segregation for students who would have attended majority-minority schools under a residence-based assignment policy. The policy also exposed these students to peers with different racial/ethnic backgrounds, higher mean achievement levels, and more advantaged neighborhood contexts. We explore how residential context and details of the policy interacted to produce this pattern of effects and close the article by discussing the implications of our results for research and policy.

We utilize state data of nearly 1.7 million students in Ohio to study a specific sector of online education: K–12 schools that deliver most, if not all, education online, lack a brick-and-mortar presence, and enroll students full-time. First, we explore e-school enrollment patterns and how these patterns vary by student subgroups and geography. Second, we evaluate the impact of e-schools on students’ learning, comparing student outcomes in e-schools to outcomes in two other schooling types, traditional charter schools and traditional public schools. Our results show that students and families appear to self-segregate in stark ways where low-income, lower achieving White students are more likely to choose e-schools while low-income, lower achieving minority students are more likely to opt into the traditional charter school sector. Our results also show that students in e-schools are performing worse on standardized assessments than their peers in traditional charter and traditional public schools. We close with policy recommendations and areas for future research.

This article analyzes how the Obama administration used executive power to grant waivers from federal education policies and assesses whether they used this power differently than previous administrations and in other sectors (e.g., health or welfare). The executive use of waivers to shape state policy is not a new trend. However, we find that recent education waivers differ in purpose and specificity from past education waivers, as well as waivers in other social policy arenas, and that the Obama administration is using this executive power to further its policy objectives in ways that often circumvent congressional intent. As the executive branch continues to utilize waivers as a policy lever, this research has important implications for the future of federal involvement in educational policy and provides critical background for Congress’s reaction to waivers in the recently reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Between 2003 and 2013, the proportion of California eighth graders enrolled in algebra or a more advanced course nearly doubled to 65%. In this article, we consider the organizational processes that accompanied this curricular intensification. Facing a complex set of accountability, institutional, technical/functional, and internal political pressures, California schools responded to the algebra-for-all effort in diverse ways. While some schools detracked by enrolling all eighth graders in algebra, others “tracked up,” creating more advanced geometry opportunities while increasing algebra enrollments. These responses created a new differentiated course structure that is likely to benefit advantaged students. Consistent with the effectively maintained inequality hypothesis, we find that detracking occurred primarily in disadvantaged schools while “tracking up” occurred primarily in advantaged schools.

The United States is in the midst of an effort to intensify middle school mathematics curricula by enrolling more 8th graders in Algebra. California is at the forefront of this effort, and in 2008, the state moved to make Algebra the accountability benchmark test for 8th-grade mathematics. This article takes advantage of this unevenly implemented policy to understand the effects of curricular intensification in middle school mathematics. Using district-level panel data from all California K–12 public school districts, we estimate the effects of increasing 8th-grade Algebra enrollment rates on a 10th-grade mathematics achievement measure. We find that enrolling more students in advanced courses has negative average effects on students’ achievement, driven by negative effects in large districts.

The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, a number of federal, state, and local teacher accountability policies have been implemented toward improving teacher quality over the objections of some who argue the policies will decrease quality. In this article, we analyze 25 years of data on the academic ability of teachers in New York State and document that since 1999 the academic ability of both individuals certified and those entering teaching has steadily increased. These gains are widespread and have resulted in a substantial narrowing of the differences in teacher academic ability between high- and low-poverty schools and between White and minority teachers. We interpret these gains as evidence that the status of teaching is improving.

One of the enduring problems in education is the persistence of achievement gaps between White, wealthy, native English-speaking students and their counterparts who are minority, lower-income, or English language learners. This study shows that one intensive technical assistance (TA) intervention—California’s District Assistance and Intervention Teams (DAITs)—implemented in conjunction with a high-stakes accountability policy improves the math and English performance of traditionally underserved students. Using a 6-year panel of student-level data from California, we find that the DAIT intervention significantly reduces achievement gaps between Black, Hispanic, and poor students and their White and wealthier peers. These results indicate that capacity-building TA helps to close achievement gaps in California’s lowest performing districts.

Forty-two states and the District of Columbia have recently received waivers to the school accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). As the prospects for reauthorizing the Act in the near term are dim, these new accountability systems will be law for at least several years. Drawing on a four-part framework from the measurement literature, we describe and critique the approved waiver accountability plans, comparing them to the NCLB accountability rules. We find a mixed bag—some states have made large improvements and others have not. Overall we conclude that states missed opportunities to design more effective school accountability systems that might minimize negative unintended consequences of these policies. The article concludes with suggestions for state and federal policy in light of the available literature.

This article uses data from California to analyze the results of the proposed accountability system in the Senate’s Harkin-Enzi draft Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization. The authors analyze existing statewide school-level data from California, applying the accountability criteria proposed in the draft law. Comparing the proposed system to the No Child Left Behind Act’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions, they draw conclusions about the stability of the proposed identification schemes and the types of schools likely to be identified. They conclude with several policy recommendations that could be easily incorporated into the law, based on their analysis and the existing literature.

The authors examine how the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) negotiated between teachers’ unions and districts is associated with schools’ and districts’ performance under accountability pressures in California. They find that CBA restrictiveness is associated with the increased likelihood that districts will be in Program Improvement (PI) and at higher levels of PI, and with lower school- and district-level proficiency and graduation rates. They also show that strong contract schools and districts that have higher proportions of minority, low-income, and low-achieving student are even less likely to meet performance targets and have even lower proficiency rates.