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The Speak Up Research Project is a national initiative of Project Tomorrow, an internationally recognized education nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring that all students are prepared to become tomorrow's leaders, innovators, and engaged citizens of the world. Each year, the Speak Up Project polls K-12 students, parents, and educators about the role of technology for learning in and out of school. This year's national briefing paper examines the important topic of the peril versus promise value proposition for digital learning through a three-part analysis of the authentic feedback collected from over 343,500 K-12 students, parents, teachers, and administrators during the 2018-19 school year. Key findings shared in this paper include how students are using technology in school and out of school to support learning and the differences in how students and educators view the value proposition around digital learning. Additionally, three top concerns with digital learning today were examined--parents' worries about too much screen time, teachers' effectiveness with using technology, and the Homework Gap as a representation of technology equity. [For "Digital Learning: Peril or Promise for Our K-12 Students. National Briefing Paper -- Speak Up 2018/19," a special preview release for community review and commentary, see ED605281.]

This paper looks at the popularity of after-school mathematics by focusing on the Kumon and Russian School of Mathematics models. In 1954, Toru Kumon, a high school math teacher in Japan, designed a series of math worksheets to help improve the test scores of his son Takeshi, a second grader. Toru's goal was to teach Takeshi how to learn independently through the worksheets and improve his calculation skills prior to reaching high school. By working every day on the problems, Takeshi was able to reach the level of differential and integral calculus when he was just a few months into the sixth grade. The Kumon model is based on four elements: (1) Individualized instruction; (2) Self-learning; (3) Small-step worksheets; and (4) Kumon instructors. Parents who want to give their children a head start in math before elementary school can enroll them in Kumon as young as age 3. From that age they can stay with the program through high school or until they complete the program. In the U.S. alone, Kumon has grown from more than 182,000 students and nearly 1,300 centers in 2008 to more than 279,000 students and more than 1500 centers in 2018. While the Kumon method involves repeating mathematical processes until students over-learn them to automaticity, the Russian School of Mathematics (RSM) promotes itself as believing in just the opposite. The RSM model was founded by Inessa Rifkin in 1997 with Irina Khavinson, a friend, educator, and fellow Russian immigrant, after concluding that her son Ilya was not receiving the same mathematics education that she received as a student in the Soviet Union. Their goal was to translate their own experiences with specialized Russian math programs into a school that offered the same opportunity to American children. Two decades later about 25,000 students are enrolled with RSM today, in 40 locations in 11 states and Canada. Russian School of Mathematics students attend a classroom once per week for varying lengths of time, depending on grade: 90 minutes for kindergarten through third grade; two hours for grades four through six; and two-and-a-half hours for grades seven and above. Algebra and geometry are on separate tracks starting in the sixth grade, though students may enroll in both. This paper reviews each model's methods, highlights their best practices, and shows how they complement or run parallel with mathematics taught in traditional classrooms.

In low-income countries, private schools are perceived as superior alternatives to the public sector, often improving achievement at a fraction of the cost. It is unclear whether private schools are as effective in middle-income countries where the public sector has relatively more resources. To address this gap, this paper takes advantage of lottery-based admissions in first grade for a Mexico City private school that targets and subsidizes attendance for low-income children. Over three years, selected students via lottery scored 0.21 standard deviation higher than those not selected in literacy tests, corresponding to a normalized gain of one-half of a grade level every two years. Lottery winners also statistically outperformed those not selected in math, but the gains were more modest. Relative to the control group, parents of selected students were more satisfied with their school and had higher educational expectations for their children. Unlike findings from low-income countries, these gains came at increased cost--twice as much on a per pupil basis relative to public schools. Additional analyses indicate gains made by the lowest income students in the sample help explain the school's impact. This suggests private schools could bring down persistent achievement gaps in these countries, but puts into question the validity of implementation at scale. [This paper is a product of the Education Global Practice.]

In this paper we compare two approaches to measuring the average rate at which students learn in a given school or district. One type of measure--longitudinal growth measures--relies on student-level longitudinal data. A second type--cohort growth measures--relies only on repeated aggregated, cross-sectional data. Because student-level data is often not readily available, cohort growth measures are sometimes the only type available. The estimated school and district learning rates reported in the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), for example, are cohort growth measures based on aggregated data. Understanding how much researchers and policymakers can rely on these cohort growth estimates requires one to know how well, and under what conditions, the estimates obtained from this approach align with those based on longitudinal data. In this report we address these questions. We do so by using longitudinal student data from three states (Massachusetts, Michigan, and Tennessee) to construct both average gain score measures (longitudinal growth) and change-in-average measures (cohort growth) for each public school district and school serving students in any of grades 3-8 in the three states. We then compare the two sets of estimates in order to assess how well the latter replicates the former. We do this separately for districts and schools. We find that the longitudinal and cohort growth measures are generally highly correlated in these three states. On average, the cohort growth measures largely rank schools and districts similarly to longitudinal growth measures. The correlations at the district-level (r=0.87) are somewhat higher than the school-level correlations (r=0.80), which reflects the fact that there is less student mobility among districts than among schools. Additionally, in cases where student mobility in and out of schools or districts is high, the measures are less well aligned. Mobility rates are higher, on average, in small schools and districts, schools with long grade spans, and in charter schools. As a result the alignment of the two measures is weaker in these cases. We conclude that the cohort growth measures are useful proxies for longitudinal growth measures in most, but not all cases. [This work was completed in collaboration with Michigan's Center for Educational Performance and Information (CEPI) and the Tennessee Education Research Alliance (TERA).]

Over the past 50 years, homeschooling has grown from a fringe act to a widely accepted education model reflective of a diverse American population. Many parents choose homeschooling to avoid the constraints of the conventional classroom and to embrace education in a broader, often more pluralistic way. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. homeschooling population more than doubled between 1999 and 2012, from 850,000 to 1.8 million children, or 3.4 percent of the K-12 student population. Federal data show that the homeschooling population dipped slightly between 2012 and 2016, but state-level data reveal that some states with robust education choice programs saw rising numbers of homeschoolers during that time. This paper offers an overview of homeschooling trends and a glimpse at the current homeschooling population while arguing that educational freedom creates momentum for families to seek alternatives to conventional mass schooling.

In 2010, the Massachusetts Legislature lifted the cap on the number of charter schools that the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) can authorize in low-performing school districts. The "smart cap" requires the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) to rank district performance (based on student outcomes) annually. Districts that fall into the lowest 10 percent of those rankings are eligible for an increase in the amount of tuition that they can pay to charter schools. Whereas the law limits district tuition payments to charter schools at 9 percent of net school spending, the smart cap raises that limit to 18 percent of net school spending in the Commonwealth's lowest performing districts. Until 2015, the Commonwealth ranked district performance solely according to the number of students scoring proficient in core subject areas on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests. In 2015, BESE amended the smart cap regulations and began using an additional measure, the student growth percentile (SGP), as 25 percent of the formula for determining district rankings. This paper presents data on the relationship between enrollment and SGP and its impact on determining the lowest performing districts in Massachusetts. Based on these data, the authors recommend that the Commonwealth stop using SGP as a factor in determining eligibility for an increase in the charter school cap and revert to a formula that uses absolute proficiency as the sole measure. The Commonwealth should also separate determinations about increases in the net school spending cap from its overall accountability system. Other recommendations include mitigating the negative impacts of the current formula for existing and prospective charter operators and increasing transparency around the purpose and use of SGP more broadly. [This report was written with Bruce Bean & Rebekah Paxton.]

How can we see education research as a coherent body of inquiry? The naturally occurring diversity of epistemologies and methods give education research the appearance of discord. In this paper, we propose that all of these various methods, questions, and interpretive frameworks of education research share a common commitment to the idea that "education is design for learning." We begin with a discussion of how recent efforts at the global and national policy levels have sought to position scientific inquiry as the premiere version of education research based on the model of social sciences. We then discuss the role of practical inquiry as a necessary complement to both receive and generate positivist knowledge. The iteration between scientific and practical inquiry describes a path for how scientific and practical work can be naturally linked in an iterative inquiry for improving education processes and outcomes. However, without a critical perspective, this iterative process can become detached from valued social concerns and become an exercise in optimization, rather than improvement. We propose that critical inquiry should be systemically integrated into the design process for researchers and educators to reflect on both the intentions and consequences of the scientific-practical cycle. We then describe how integrating these approaches can show the way toward to a coherent model of education research.

Education Leadership Data Analytics (ELDA) is an emerging domain that is centered at the intersection of education leadership, the use of evidence-based improvement cycles in schools to promote instructional improvement, and education data science. ELDA practitioners work collaboratively with school and district leaders and teachers to analyze, pattern, and visualize previously unknown patterns and information from the vast sets of data collected by schooling organizations, and then integrate findings in easy to understand language and digital tools into collaborative and community-building evidence-based improvement cycles with stakeholders. In June of 2018, over 100 participants gathered for the Education Leadership Data Analytics Summit at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City, including researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and funders. This report provides a summary of the central issues, themes, and recommendations for the future of the field that emerged from the discussions at the ELDA Summit event. These issues include building capacity in the field through incentivizing researcher practitioner partnerships, and providing conference and networking opportunities, professional development, certification, and ultimately degree programs to train ELDA researchers and practitioners. Additionally, a central focus of the ELDA field is equity, data security and privacy, in concert with open and FAIR data standards to develop and share de-identified data and tools across contexts. We conclude the report with a blueprint of possible skills and competencies needed for ELDA practitioner training and professional development and provide recommendations for next steps to help grow the field.

During the 2015-2016 school year, 1.3 million students nationwide experienced homelessness. Yet hardships like homelessness represent dynamic rather than static states, and so annual figures understate the cumulative risk that students face over time. Moreover, despite recent efforts to understand eviction and foreclosure as exploitative and racialized processes, there have been few efforts to connect homelessness to these and other structural conditions. Using administrative data on the population of public school students in Michigan, we found that close to one in ten students experienced homelessness while in school. Moreover, black students were over three times more likely to experience literal homelessness than white students. County-year fixed effects models indicate that rental costs, forced housing moves, and the opioid epidemic were associated with greater student homelessness. These findings have implications for our understanding of racial inequalities and the ways in which disadvantage and inequality are products of exploitative relationships.

Traditionally, teacher salaries have been determined solely by experience and educational attainment. This has led to chronic shortages of teachers in particular subject areas, such as math, science and special education. We study the first long-running statewide program to differentiate teacher pay based on subject area, Georgia's bonus system for math and science teachers. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find the bonuses reduce teacher attrition by 18 to 28 percent. However, we find no evidence the program increases the probability that education majors become secondary math or science teachers upon graduation or alters specific major choices within the education field.

Charter schools enroll a growing share of public school students, leading to concerns about the financial implications of charter schools for traditional public schools (TPSs). Using detailed expenditure data for school districts in California, I exploit variation in charter school enrollment across time and between districts to evaluate how district spending and overall financial health change as nearby charter sectors expand. I find that larger charter enrollment shares are associated with lower levels of per-pupil spending and reduced fiscal health in TPSs. However, these relationships in some cases exhibit significant nonlinearities and are much smaller in magnitude than what has been observed in other states. Consequently, larger charter enrollment shares are not associated with differences in the proportion of expenditures allocated to various activities, goods, or services. Differences between these results and those from similar analyses in other states may be explicable in terms of California's economic and policy context, providing lessons for policymakers.

The authors illustrate models and procedures that can be applied to calculate overall composite scores in order to identify an indicator of English language proficiency, based on composite scores for English learners with 504 or individualized education plans who are missing one or more domain scores on the Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State-to-State for English Language Learners assessment for state monitoring, achievement, and accountability determinations. As a technical reference, the appendix includes tables and statistical programming code used to compute the different methods. The analyses and results provide clear and concise frameworks for approaching accountability criteria and decisions.

Are private schools safer than public schools? Do they use the same security procedures? Do they suspend or expel students at a higher rate? Do private schools that participate in school choice programs report the same safety issues as private schools that do not participate in school choice programs? How does charter school safety compare to traditional public school safety? This report seeks to rigorously address these questions--and more--by collecting data from 618 school leaders across Indiana. We used their responses to empirically examine the relationship between private schooling and the presence of safety-related practices such as building access, security cameras, wearing of badges or picture IDs and more.

This study develops, validates, and applies a typology of teachers using labor market data. We construct our typology by applying a correlated topic model to 17,000 personal statements teachers submitted as part of their applications to open positions in Wisconsin public schools. We identify seven types of teachers active on the labor market: Inclusivists, Idealists, Nurturers, Generalists, Classroom Experts, Guides, and External Experts. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we explore trends within and among types as well as demographic relationships and labor market behaviors. This research provides novel insights into the philosophies, mission, vision, and values of teachers; links these characteristics to teachers' job market preferences; and provides a sound psychometric foundation for these measures of teacher type to be applied in subsequent research.

Sixty-seven school finance reforms (SFRs) in 26 states have taken place since 1990; however, there is little empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of SFR effects. We provide a comprehensive description of how individual reforms affected resource allocation to low- and high-income districts within states, including both financial and non-financial outcomes. After summarizing the heterogeneity of individual SFR impacts, we then examine its correlates, identifying both policy and legislative/political factors. Taken together, this research aims to provide a rich description of variation in states' responses to SFRs, as well as explanation of this heterogeneity as it relates to contextual factors.

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.]

In-depth studies in the field of K-12 education confirm that investments in high-quality, research-based leadership development for school systems can directly impact student success--in the classroom and beyond. This results in the need to learn beyond content mastery and develop deeper learning skills. Students need to be able to adapt quickly, be continuous learners, and able to collaborate across many social boundaries. Success in the 21st Century depends on critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. Building students' capacity for this new era requires investments in teacher and administrator professional development to create the educational ecosystems that foster students' mastery of these skills. A growing body of work by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®), a global nonprofit with a 50-year track record of innovation in developing leaders, shows that investments in leadership development for principals, teachers, staff, and students play an essential role in creating the transformational change needed in education today. That's because leadership development focuses on the single most important part of any school system, public or private--its people. And now more than ever, meeting the complex challenges of a rapidly changing world requires schools to equip young people with the skills they need to become productive workers, engaged citizens, entrepreneurs, and lifelong learners.

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.

In spite of advances in recognising that girls and boys, and women and men, do not have to be bounded by traditional roles, gender stereotypes persist in education and beyond. Children and youth are affected by gender stereotypes from the early ages, with parental, school, teacher and peer factors influencing the way students internalise their gender identities. As such, not only is intervening in pre-primary education necessary, but also measures at the primary and secondary levels are key to eradicate gender stereotypes and promote gender equality. Based on the analytical framework developed by the OECD Strength through Diversity project, this paper provides an overview of gender stereotyping in education, with some illustrations of policies and practices in place across OECD countries, with a focus on curriculum arrangements, capacity-building strategies and school-level interventions in primary and secondary education.

The OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 (E2030) project's overall goal is that of looking to the future in terms of how school curricula should evolve given the technological advances and other changes that societies are now facing. Towards that end, the E2030 project centres on the idea that education needs to equip students with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values they need to become active, responsible and engaged citizens. Mathematics is considered a highly relevant subject for achieving the above stated goals, as such it requires further and more detailed analysis. As a result, it has been chosen as one of the E2030 project's subject-specific analyses. The project has been named the Mathematics Curriculum Document Analysis (MCDA) study as per the request of participating countries. This working paper presents the findings of the MCDA study, which involves participants from 19 countries and jurisdictions.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) strengthens students' abilities to regulate their emotions, thoughts, and behaviours and to interact successfully with others. There are an array of important social and emotional skills (SES): goal-setting, working to one's potential, resilience, creativity, perseverance, problem solving, and caring about the welfare of others, among them. All students need SEL, but newcomer and refugee students may have particular challenges requiring SES. The beginning of this paper examines the current situation of refugee and newcomer students in OECD countries, SEL, its frameworks and skills and how they apply to newcomer and refugee students. The paper concludes with an examination of SEL policies and practices for newcomer and refugee students in OECD countries.

Education is one of the most important fields to promote the integration of refugee and newcomer children and youths in host countries. However, holistic education for refugee and newcomers has so far not been established into mainstream education systems in European countries. Projects and pilot programmes have developed across Europe to test holistic approaches. Some of them have started very recently as a response to the arrival of high numbers of refugees and newcomers, while others have been established for a longer period and have started to expand. This paper first provides an overview of key research gaps in refugee education. It then provides a mapping of promising holistic education practices in Europe, with a focus on Germany, Greece and the Netherlands. Based on this, the paper explores key conditions to upscale and institutionalise promising practices of holistic refugee and newcomer education.

This research was undertaken by teachers and students from 5 countries who were all working together on a Zero Waste project. The schools were in Borneo in Malaysia, Taiwan, the Punjab district of India, Jordan and the Southeast of the UK. It looks at how schools from such diverse areas of the world can work together successfully on a collaborative project and discusses the challenges and benefits of this partnership. The study aimed to show how working collaboratively with several countries can help to develop pupils' values of empathy and respect and make them aware of their responsibilities as global citizens. This report will give schools and teachers current information about work linked to climate change and the SDGs in the 5 participating countries, all of which fall into areas of the British Council's work. The data, which was collected through questionnaires and evaluations, showed surprising similarities between the schools. The enthusiasm for this work on Zero Waste and detailed answers from the students and teachers provided interesting information for this paper. The project was conducted during COVID-19, yet despite the many restrictions and home-learning taking place, the results have been very rewarding. [This paper was published by Connecting Classrooms through Global Learning in collaboration with the Development Education Research Centre (DERC). The Connecting Classrooms through Global Learning (CCGL) programme is funded by the British Council and UK aid.]

Serious history instruction in K-12 U.S. schools has been in decline for decades. History education in Massachusetts has, until now, fared somewhat better than in the nation at large. In 1993 the commonwealth enacted the Massachusetts Education Reform Act--a bipartisan plan to improve education--which mandated core standards and assessments in history and social science, among other disciplines. The Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework (the 2003 Framework) produced under this mandate contained strong, flexible grade-by-grade standards for core essential knowledge. In 2009, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (the State Board) suspended the 2003 Framework, and it never went into effect. In 2016, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) instead launched a rewrite of the 2003 Framework, in good measure to realign Massachusetts history education around service-learning and civic engagement. In 2017 the DESE presented the revisions to the State Board, which approved them to be posted for public comment in January 2018. This paper contends that the January 2018 Public Comment Draft of the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework (2018 Revision) eviscerates the 2003 Framework. Among other things, the 2018 Revision eliminates the standards-based and curricular linkage to the already developed Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test for U.S. history, while substituting meaningless expectations for each grade. This paper recommends that the Massachusetts State Board reject the 2018 Revision in its entirety and immediately put into effect both the 2003 Framework and its accompanying MCAS test. [Preface By Paul Reid, co-author with William Manchester.]

The role of public education has never been more important--it is the bedrock of democracy. The failure to provide an equitable public education that enables equal access to opportunity unravels the American dream. Competency-based education holds promise as a uniquely powerful model for fostering equity, but only if equity is an intentional design feature embedded in the culture, structure and pedagogy. Across the country, educators and policymakers are coming to the same conclusion: the structure of the traditional system is a barrier to equity. The premise of competency education is that the culture, structure and pedagogy of the traditional education system, having been designed to sort students, must be and can be replaced with culture, structure and pedagogy that are designed to ensure every student can succeed. Still, the question remains: How should equity be thought of in a personalized, competency-based system to ensure that every student is indeed successful? This paper seeks to explore the potential pitfalls and strategies to ensure a more equitable education system. The driving questions include: (1) How should equity be defined to be meaningful in a personalized, competency-based system?; (2) Why does the traditional education system need to change and how will competency-based systems offer more equitable learning environments?; (3) What principles or elements need to be in place to ensure that competency-based education fulfills its promise to offer a more equitable education system?; and (4) How can educators work together as a field to ensure that competency-based systems take full advantage of what is known about equity strategies to benefit all students, especially those who have been historically underserved? This paper begins with a vision and definition of educational equity. It then explains how the traditional system was designed to promote inequitable outcomes and how competency-based education differs from the traditional system. In section III, the authors introduce an equity framework for personalized, competency-based education. The authors include a discussion of each principle, examples of policies and practices that will help to create an equitable environment and examples of red flags of shallow or weak implementation. The last section provides recommendations for future action. A glossary is provided in the appendix to clarify the terms used in the paper.

This discussion paper explores the possibilities and risks that data linkage presents for the vocational education and training (VET) sector. Along with a broad overview of the nature of data linkage, it highlights possible applications for data linkage in the VET sector and examines the key challenges associated with its use. A number of case studies are reviewed to illustrate the advantages data linkage can offer, as well as the challenges that may arise. In order to better understand the options for data linkage from an education and employment perspective, a 'map' of relevant Australian datasets is presented, along with a list of data sources that may be of use to VET research. As well as selected Australian datasets, the paper reviews some international datasets of potential interest for VET research in Australia. Using the insights gained from past data-linkage projects and taking into account the privacy and ethics concerns, the paper presents a set of six principles for data linkage. These principles provide researchers with basic steps for guidance when embarking upon a data-linkage project. Finally, future directions for data linkage in VET research are explored.

The fiscal and educational consequences of charter expansion for non-charter students are central issues in the debate over charter schools. Do charter schools drain resources and high-achieving peers from non-charter schools? This paper answers these questions using an empirical strategy that exploits a 2011 reform that lifted caps on charter schools for underperforming districts in Massachusetts. We use complementary synthetic control instrumental variables (IV-SC) and differences-in-differences instrumental variables (IV-DiD) estimators. The results suggest greater charter attendance increases per-pupil expenditures in traditional public schools and induces them to shift expenditure from support services to instruction and salaries. At the same time, charter expansion has a small positive effect on non-charter students' achievement.

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.

For awhile thousands of children in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have been denied in fact (de facto) the special education services to which they, according to Federal Civil Rights Law (de jure), are entitled. According to the Massachusetts' Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), private schools are not entitled to federal funds for their special needs students. Should a private school student need services, they are to receive them at their local public school. As a result, they would have to travel to receive services, meaning a student would miss considerable school time and parents would have to take significant time off from work to transport the student. The authors of the white paper: (1) present how and why this state of affairs has persisted for so long; and (2) offer recommendations which, if implemented, would correct these wrongs that so negatively impact in Massachusetts thousands of private school students.

This paper explores and reflects on the issues state policy needs to address in the long-term to support a transformation of K-12 education systems. Personalized learning and competency-based education systems, designed to ensure equity, hold promise to prepare all students for success in college, career and civic life. This report shares strategies for policy to support systems change over the long haul toward competency-based systems that ensure mastery and success for all students. This publication intends to spark conversation around core concepts that policy needs to address to achieve sustainable systems transformation toward personalized, competency-based education systems. It introduces four 'threshold concepts' to help us think differently about what is possible in an equitable future education system where all students succeed, and how to address deep-seated systems design flaws across K-12 education.

We describe the extent and predictors of staffing challenges faced by school districts in Washington state throughout the 2021-22 school year using data collected from job posting websites for districts representing more than 98% of students in the state. These data suggest that school districts in the state faced considerable challenges filling paraeducator and, to a lesser extent, teaching positions at the beginning of the school year. When we focus specifically on teachers, we find that teacher staffing challenges were far more pronounced for special education positions and in schools serving more students of color, less pronounced for elementary positions, and highly correlated with teacher attrition from these types of positions after the prior school year. Accounting for these relationships, districts posted more teaching positions later in the school year when they had increasing student enrollments and received more Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds than nearby districts.

While spring of 2020 introduced virtual instruction to all public schools, virtual schooling had already been growing in most states. We focus on pre-COVID-19 changes to fulltime virtual school enrollment in public schools, and provide evidence on the relationship between virtual school enrollment, internet speed, community demographics, and traditional K-12 school achievement levels. We find negative associations between online enrollment and test achievement in brick-and-mortar schools, and low internet speeds. There is some evidence that students are less likely to enroll in virtual schools as the share of students of their own demographic in brick-and-mortar schools increases.

Learning for Sustainability (LfS) is a key component of Scottish Education. However, policy interpretation and enactment is a complicated process and there can often be a difference between policy intentions and implementation. The following research explores how one campus (for pupils aged 2-18) in Scotland undertook a year-long all staff career long professional learning programme (CLPL) to develop a whole campus approach to Learning for Sustainability. The aim of this research project was to better understand the implications (opportunities and challenges) at a whole school / campus and teacher level when developing a whole school / campus approach to Learning for Sustainability. Three semi-structured interviews were carried out, with focus groups made up of a small group of teaching staff, members of the senior management team, as well as a follow up interview with the head teacher. A theoretical thematic analysis was used to identify themes from the data and applied to further explore the emergence of these elements from the CLPL discussion forums including contributions from all participating staff members. The three main themes identified were: collaboration and collegiality; processes of change; and attitudes to learning and to change. The study revealed a tension between the need for both teachers and management to have an identified person 'leading' the agenda, and the need for that agenda to develop in a culture of collegiately and shared responsibility. There was also an interesting contrast between deep and shallow learning for both teachers and managers. The study also provided useful learning for other organisations leading the agenda for change, which can be summarised into three key recommendations: (1) Organisational leaders should engage with suitable learning prior to developing a leadership of change model for their organisation, which includes a distributed model of leadership; (2) Methods of professional learning for all practitioners should include an engagement with reflective activities, which enables them to access deeper and more transformational learning; and (3) Large organisations should work with community-led groups and be sensitive to local contexts to establish a vision, which clearly articulates the imperative is the responsibility of all.

The aim of this research was to assess how the COVID-19 global pandemic impacted overseas school partnerships in 2020, through to January 2021. It was undertaken with teachers involved in the British Council Connecting Classrooms through Global Learning (CCGL) programme to provide insight into how and why partnerships have been impacted. It also looks at what these teachers perceive to be the challenges that make it difficult for schools to maintain partnerships in a time of global crisis and provides examples of how schools have overcome these challenges. Online questionnaires were used to collect both qualitative and quantitative data and were distributed to teachers in UK using a network of British Council Local Advisors. 52 questionnaire responses were collected and analysed to explore the impact of the global pandemic on overseas school partnerships.

The aim of this study was to research whether teachers see global school partnerships as an effective tool to support anti-racist and inclusive approaches and deliver practice that reflects, is representative of, and engages all pupils. Over the last year, events have led to increasing debates around Black Lives Matter, the urgent need to de-colonise and re-design the curriculum and develop teaching and learning practice that responds to our diverse school communities and contexts. Although there are many schools involved in the Connecting Classrooms Through Global Learning programme it is unclear how many are actively using this work to address and respond to this need. This study aims to assess whether links can be made between the two agendas so that teachers can understand, embed within the rationale for and use their global learning work and global school partnerships as a vehicle to develop and evidence anti-racist approaches. Research data was gathered from both teachers and senior leaders via a simple online questionnaire for schools involved in Connecting Classrooms Through Global Learning school partnerships and used to gauge whether they are addressing the agenda and to what degree they can see these links as a tool to enable and evidence impact. This was followed by more qualitative data collected via virtual interviews with three teachers identified from their responses to the initial questionnaire. What is clear from the findings is that teachers acknowledge that a global learning approach and global school partnerships specifically have real relevance when developing anti-racist practice.

Classrooms have become increasingly diverse places where students from various backgrounds share their learning experiences. To promote inclusive school settings for all, building teacher capacity for inclusive teaching represents a key policy area. Education systems need to ensure that teachers are adequately prepared for inclusive teaching and supported throughout their career. Mechanisms to attract and retain a more diverse teaching body as well as to monitor and evaluate teacher preparation and work with respect to diversity and inclusion should also be developed. While teacher policies have increasingly addressed some of these areas, most education systems lack comprehensive capacity-building frameworks for inclusive teaching. This paper maps policies and practices to build teacher capacity for inclusive teaching across OECD countries. It then presents core elements and competences to design and implement inclusive teaching strategies. Finally, the paper reviews some of the evidence available on teacher diversity and interventions for inclusive teaching.

The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction "Guidelines for Serving Students with Specific Learning Disabilities in the Education Setting" (ED591017) recognizes that dyslexia is associated with a specific learning disability in the area of basic reading skills. Students with dyslexia may have difficulty not only with reading, but also with spelling and performing other skills related to the use of printed language. Many students with dyslexia have difficulties identifying separate speech sounds within a word and learning how individual letters represent sounds. A student with dyslexia does not lack intelligence or the desire to learn. This purpose of this document is to provide parents, educators, administrators and others with a resource that may assist in learning more about dyslexia. Additional resources that may increase in understanding dyslexia are listed the end of this document.

We use comprehensive data on student teaching placements from 14 teacher education programs (TEPs) in Washington State to explore the sorting of teacher candidates to the teachers who supervise their student teaching ("cooperating teachers") and the schools in which student teaching occurs. We find that, all else equal, teachers with more experience, higher degree levels, and higher value added in math are more likely to serve as cooperating teachers, as are schools with lower levels of historical teacher turnover but with more open positions the following year. We also find that teacher candidates are more likely to be placed with cooperating teachers of the same gender and race/ethnicity, and are more likely to work with cooperating teachers and in schools with administrators who graduated from the candidate's TEP.

The issuing of badges for achievement is not necessarily a new concept for adults (consider the military), nor for children (look at scouting). Yet, except for sports trophies and award days, the concept is alien to education where letter grades and scores on standardized tests remain the primary means of recognition. This document shares alternative means to measure growth and learning in education, with an emphasis on "soft skills." The document discusses Open Badges--visual tokens of achievement, affiliation, authorization, or other trust relationship sharable across the web--as one way to recognize learning beyond formal credentialing systems. A parallel effort exists in Ohio. While not an open badging system, per se, students in the Class of 2018 may earn the "Ohio Means Jobs Readiness Seal," which also serves as one of the qualifiers under Option One of the 2018 Ohio Graduation Requirements. The document also discusses Credly, a thought leader in the digital credentials movement. Credly is committed to "access and equity by making the Credly platform universally available to anyone looking to be part of the Digital Credentials movement."

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.

With an increased appreciation of students' social-emotional skills among researchers and policy makers, many states and school districts are moving toward a systematic process to measure Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). In this study, we examine the measurement properties of California's CORE Districts' SEL survey administered to over 400,000 students in grades 3 to 12 during the 2015-16 school year. We conduct analyses through both classical test theory and item response theory frameworks, applying three different polytomous IRT models on both the full student sample and on separate samples from each grade. From these analyses, we summarize the psychometric properties of items at each grade level, compare items' functionality across grades, compare student outcomes from IRT models and the classical approach, make suggestions on approaches to modeling and scaling the SEL survey data, and identify items, by grade, that do not contribute positively to measurement of each outcome. Finally, we discuss policy implications in using SEL measures among educators, administrators, policy makers, and other stakeholders.