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The focus of this report is on mental health interventions delivered in K-12 neighborhood public schools. A vast array of commercially available programs, conceptual frameworks, and approaches to school-based mental health are not unanimously recommended, applied, or agreed upon. This poses a challenge to any comprehensive description or evaluation of school-based mental health. Key findings include: (1) There is a lack of high-quality evidence to support school-based mental health initiatives. Rigorous evaluations of universal programs on mental health literacy, awareness, prevention, and screening--and of many social-emotional learning programs--find neither reduced rates of mental health conditions nor improved academic outcomes; (2) The concept of school-based mental health, as currently delivered in typical neighborhood public schools, is incoherent because it primarily serves youth who are not specifically in need of mental health treatment, while insufficiently serving those with mental disorders; (3) While some youth can benefit from high-quality mental health services, universal mental health programs carry underestimated potential harms: directly, through poor-quality care, overdiagnosis, and misallocated spending; and indirectly, through wasted class time and reduced accountability in the mental health and education systems; and (4) Federal agencies responsible for school-based mental health programs provide no meaningful or coordinated guidance on essential questions such as what it means for a program to be effective, what expectations exist in "mental health deserts," and how schools should sort through numerous overlapping initiatives.

Since the peak of the pandemic in 2020, enrollment in virtual schools has steadily increased, with virtual schools now accounting for approximately 1.4% of the nation's public school students. While the effects of the pandemic on student achievement and mental health have been extensively studied, research has yet to thoroughly examine the impact of the pandemic on state policies and local organizational practices related to virtual schooling. Although some believed the onset of the pandemic would fundamentally reshape virtual schooling options in K-12 education, others were more skeptical, believing expanded virtual learning options were merely a temporary fix. This study examines whether the pandemic shaped virtual schooling at both the local and state levels, and if the changes made are likely to last and/or improve equity. The authors interviewed state and local education leaders and advocates, analyzed policy documents, websites, and media, observed legislative proceedings, and examined organizational practices in a sample of schools between 2019 and 2022 in Oregon. This state had an extensive history of virtual schooling before the pandemic, and enrollment continues to grow. The findings offer important lessons for policymakers and leaders to consider as the availability of virtual schools remains widespread across the country.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the implementation and impact of the IDEA Public Schools' Mathematics Curriculum Redesign (MCR) effort, funded by an Innovation and Research (EIR) grant. Methods: The study used a quasi-experimental matching design to examine the effect of MCR on student achievement outcomes. The study compared outcomes between the two cohorts of students at IDEA Public Schools that piloted the MCR and matched cohorts of students in IDEA schools that had delayed implementation of MCR. Results:?The study found statistically significant differences in IDEA Geometry test scores (ES = 0.39) between treatment and comparison group students in Grade 9 and on AP Calculus exam scores between treatment and comparison group students in Grade 12 (ES = 0.57). The study also found that the MCR program met the evaluation threshold for fidelity of implementation for the two out of three key program components (development of redesigned math curriculum and teacher use of math curriculum) in some years. The program did not meet the evaluation threshold for fidelity of implementation for the third key program components (teacher training and professional development to use redesigned math curriculum) in any of the years. Implications:?Because curriculum development and implementation are ongoing and iterative, realizing all of the benefits is not immediate and may take more time to achieve desired results. Continuous improvement of the curriculum and consistent supports to teachers will contribute to continued benefits for teachers and students while moving toward reaching anticipated student outcomes.

Specialized high schools are an increasingly popular way to prepare young adults for postsecondary experiences and expand school choice. While much literature ex- amines charter school spillover effects and the effects of specialized schools on the students who attend them, little is known about the spillover effects of specialized high schools on traditional public schools (TPS). Using an event study design, we show that one type of specialized high school, North Carolina's Cooperative Innovative High Schools, initially attracted students who were higher achieving and more likely to be white than TPS students, but these specialized schools became more representative of the district population over time. On average, the opening of specialized schools had a mix of null and positive spillover effects on TPS student achievement. While there is some evidence of negative spillovers from the first schools that opened, the effects become more positive over time.

Catholic schools have seen more than a 30% decline in enrollment over the past 20 years. While some of the decline in enrollment may have been spurred by secular trends or the Church abuse scandal, the increase in schools of choice, principally public charter schools, may explain at least some of this decline. In this paper we estimate the effect of the opening of charter schools in proximity to Catholic schools across the entire U.S. We find that the opening of a nearby charter school has a negative impact on Catholic school enrollment and increases the likelihood that the school will close. We also find that charter openings induce greater racial isolation. Findings are especially pronounced in K8 schools, rather than high schools.

Despite well-designed curriculum materials, teachers often face challenges in their implementation due to diverse classroom needs. This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can support middle-school math teachers by helping create high-quality curriculum scaffolds, which we define as the adaptations and supplements teachers employ to ensure all students can access and engage with the curriculum. Through Cognitive Task Analysis with expert teachers, we identify a three-stage process for curriculum scaffolding: observation, strategy formulation, and implementation. We incorporate these insights into three LLM approaches to create warmup tasks that activate background knowledge. The best-performing approach, which provides the model with the original curriculum materials and an expert-informed prompt, generates warmups that are rated significantly higher than warmups created by expert teachers in terms of alignment to learning objectives, accessibility to students working below grade level, and teacher preference. This research demonstrates the potential of LLMs to support teachers in creating effective scaffolds and provides a methodology for developing AI-driven educational tools. [This report was funded by Stanford's Center for Human-Centered AI and the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.]

Teachers of color often work in schools with few colleagues from the same racial or ethnic background. This "racial isolation" may affect their work experiences and important job outcomes, including retention. Using longitudinal administrative and survey data, we investigate the degree to which Tennessee teachers who are more racially isolated are more likely to turn over. Accounting for other factors, we find that racially isolated Black teachers are more likely to leave their schools than less isolated teachers. This turnover is driven by transfers to a different district and exiting the profession altogether. Consistent with an explanation that isolated teachers' work experiences differ, they also report less collaboration with colleagues and receive lower observation scores.

This research uses the implementation of a school suspension ban in Maryland to test whether a top-down state-initiated ban on suspensions in early primary grades can influence school behavior regarding school discipline. Beginning in the fall of 2017, the State of Maryland banned the use of out-of-school suspensions for grades PK-2, unless a student posed an "imminent threat" to staff or students. This research investigates (1) what was the effect of the ban on discipline outcomes for students in both treated grades and upper elementary grades not subject to the ban? (2) did schools bypass the ban by coding more events as threatening or increasing the use of in-school suspensions? and (3) were there differential effects for students in groups that are historically suspended more often? Using a comparative interrupted time series strategy, we find that the ban is associated with a substantial reduction in, but not a total elimination of, out-of-school suspensions for targeted grades without substitution of in-school suspensions. Disproportionalities by race and other characteristics remain after the ban. Grades not subject to the ban experienced few effects, suggesting the ban did not trigger a schoolwide response that reduced exclusionary discipline.

As women increasingly entered the labor force throughout the late 20th century, the challenges of balancing work and family came to the forefront. We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children--through duration expansions to the kindergarten day--to better understand mothers' and families' constraints. We first show that mothers of children in full-day kindergarten spend significantly more time at work, less time with their children, less time performing household duties, and less time commuting with their children in the middle of the day relative to mothers with half-day kindergarteners. Exploiting full-day kindergarten variation across place and time from 1992 through 2022, combined with the narrow age targeting of kindergarten, we document the impact of full-day kindergarten access on parental labor supply, family childcare costs, and children's subsequent academic outcomes. Our estimates of the maternal employment effects imply that full-day kindergarten expansions were responsible for as much as 24 percent of the growth in employment of mothers with kindergarten-aged children in this time frame.

In the face of financial, political, and capacity constraints, leaders within the Baltimore City Public School System and Chicago Public Schools are making progress toward closing post-pandemic gaps in student learning. The executive leadership teams serving Baltimore City Public School System and Chicago Public Schools are using several strategies to help their systems build back after the pandemic including: (1) standardizing key elements of instructional cores and adding instructional staff across their systems, while maintaining some school-level flexibility; (2) supporting existing staff to become teachers and "building the bench" of new principals, while also promoting school leaders and administrators from within; (3) spending federal pandemic-relief money Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) and other supplements, while hoping to avoid cutting into funding for instruction; (4) insulating schools as much as possible by taking the political hits themselves and making concessions to demanding stakeholders; and (5) confronting continued enrollment declines, limited central office capacity, constrained teacher labor markets, changes in school boards, shifting local interests, and uncertain state-level financial support. The strong leadership modeled in both districts remains at the heart of moving forward, despite the fact they are straining against their capacities. While there may be nuanced differences, all leaders in maxed-out districts will have to search for new options and forge alliances with new partners within school boards, unions, and state-level governments. This project is part of the American School District Panel (ASDP), a research partnership between the RAND Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.

This First Look report presents data on public elementary and secondary education revenues and expenditures at the local education agency (LEA) or school district level for fiscal year (FY) 2022. Specifically, this report includes the following types of school district finance data: (1) revenue, current expenditure, and capital outlay expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) current expenditures by function and object; (4) revenues and current expenditures per pupil; and (5) revenues and expenditures from COVID-19 Federal Assistance Funds. This First Look report focuses on education revenues and expenditures at the school district level. The finance data used in this report are from the School District Finance Survey (F-33), 2F 3 a component of the Common Core of Data (CCD). The CCD is a group of annual public elementary/secondary data collections administered by NCES. The F-33 survey consists of LEA-level finance data submitted annually to the U.S. Census Bureau (Census Bureau) by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. SEAs report financial data covering services that provide or support prekindergarten through high school for public education for a variety of types of LEAs. These LEAs include regular school districts, independent charter school districts, as well as a substantial number of administrative and operating LEAs that are unlike typical school districts (e.g., education service agencies that provide specialized education services for school districts, such as vocational and other specialized education services for school districts). The purpose of this First Look report is to introduce new data through the presentation of tables containing descriptive information. The selected findings chosen for this report demonstrate the range of information available when using F-33 data files and are not intended to emphasize any particular issue(s).

In many parts of the country, enrollment in traditional public schools has fallen to its lowest point in decades. However, states, cities, and school districts have been slow to respond to the reality of empty desks. This report examines trends in school enrollment, focusing on several of America's most populous cities, as well as the budgetary and staffing responses to those trends. It also examines the states where these large cities are located. Key findings include: (1) New York, Illinois, and California experienced the largest declines in enrollment between 2013 and 2022, while Texas and Arizona had the largest increase in enrollment; (2) Texas will soon surpass California with the most public school students; (3) In California's two biggest cities, Los Angeles and San Diego, enrollments fell between 2013 and 2022; (4) Philadelphia experienced a decline in enrollment that mirrored overall statewide trends; (5) Although Texas experienced a strong uptick in student enrollment statewide, its four biggest cities--Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and Austin--all experienced slight declines over the last decade; (6) Costs per student rose between 2013 and 2022 in New York City, Houston, San Diego, Dallas, Austin, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Antonio, and Los Angeles; and (7) Total staff increased in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dallas over the 2013-22 period.

Students, families, and communities across Chicago are affected by gun violence, but the levels and experiences differ greatly by location and by the racial composition of communities. In Chicago, recent rates of violence rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then declined to pre-pandemic levels in 2022. Still, there were more than 4,000 gun-related injuries reported to the Chicago Police Department in 2020 and in 2021, and homicides in the city rose in tandem. While overall rates of violence have fallen from peaks in the late 1990s in predominantly White and Latinx communities, rates of violence in Chicago's predominantly Black communities have exceeded 1990s levels in recent years. Of the 725 homicides reported in Chicago in 2022, 541 victims were Black, more than 18 times as many as were White. Proximity to violence and homicide remain profoundly racialized in Chicago. This mixed-methods study explores four interconnected research questions, specifically examining the particular role schools may play in the lives of students living in proximity to violence in Chicago: (1) What is the extent, distribution, and impact of living in close geographical proximity to violence on CPS students' performance in schools? (2) To what extent is there evidence that CPS schools can insulate or protect students from the negative consequences on academic and behavioral outcomes of living in close proximity to violence, so as to support students' health and wellness? (3) What elements of school climate and organization are characteristic of schools that appear to protect students against the negative impacts of proximity to violence on academic and behavioral outcomes? and (4) How do adults working in schools that insulate students from the impact of living in close proximity to violence understand and describe their work?

This manuscript explores the argument for lower student-to-school counselor ratios in U.S. public education. Drawing upon a comprehensive historical review and existing research, we establish the integral role of school counselors and the notable benefits of reduced student-to-counselor ratios. Our analysis of national data exposes marked disparities across states and districts, with the most underfunded often serving higher percentages of low-income students and students of color. This situation raises significant ethical concerns, prompting a call for conscientious policy reform and targeted investment. Informed by emerging best practices, we propose recommendations for enhancing counselor staffing and ultimately student outcomes. This ethical argument underscores the need for proactive actions and provides a basis for future research to further delineate the impact of school counselor ratios on educational equity and student success.

National context: Schools across the United States have long grappled with the role and impact of school-based police officers, often referred to as school resource officers (SROs). Proponents for school-based policing believe that SROs contribute to school safety by preventing or addressing crime and violence in schools. Opponents of SROs in schools argue that the presence of SROs criminalizes students and increases the likelihood of school-based arrest, particularly for students of color. Policies around SROs vary in districts across the country. Chicago context: In the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020, the Chicago Board of Education (CBOE) asked the district to develop a plan to phase-out the SRO program, which assigned two SROs to most Chicago Public Schools (CPS) high schools. In February 2024, the CBOE voted to remove all remaining SROs from schools starting in 2024-25. In May 2024, CPS proposed a Whole School Safety Policy that did not include SROs and focused on supports for physical safety, emotional safety, and relational trust in schools. The research: This brief examines what happened when Chicago Public Schools (CPS) began the process of removing School Resource Officers (SROs) from its high schools during the 2020-21 school year. These findings can inform conversations in Chicago, and across the country, about SROs and whole school safety practices and policies--while recognizing that questions about the presence of police and the experience of safety in schools are complex and reflect differences in lived experiences and perspectives across policymakers, practitioners, young people, families, and communities. The findings are part of a larger, ongoing study by researchers from the UChicago Consortium; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Lurie Children's Hospital's Center for Childhood Resilience. [This research brief received additional support from the Pritzker-Pucker Family Foundation and the Consortium Investor Council.]

The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction (NDDPI) uses a three-pillar approach to school renewal efforts: build relationships, cultivate opportunity, and inspire growth. A key product of this approach is the North Dakota School Renewal Guide, which includes practitioner-friendly school improvement strategies grounded in evidence-based improvement practices for schools identified as Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) or Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI). The guide, now in its third edition, is updated annually based on feedback from the NDDPI, the North Dakota Regional Education Association (REA), and the TSI and CSI schools and districts using the guide. This report tells the story of how the NDDPI project team created and tested a calibration activity to increase inter-rater reliability ratings among REA staff, NDDPI representatives, and schools. By using procedures for consistent and accurate ratings, REA liaisons can provide schools with tailored coaching to support their improvement journeys, help schools track progress on goals and initiatives, and help schools collect the evidence required for them to exit TSI and CSI status. The report is intended as a resource for school leaders working to implement short-cycle school improvement goals.

Each year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation, I explore the impact of school closures on students' educational and labor market outcomes. The findings indicate that experiencing school closures results in disruptions in both test scores and behavior. While the drop in test scores is recovered within three years, behavioral issues persist. This study further finds decreases in post-secondary education attainment, employment, and earnings at ages 25-27. These impacts are particularly pronounced among students in secondary education, Hispanic students, and those from originally low-performing schools and economically disadvantaged families.

We investigate the beginning of the school discipline pipeline using a reform in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools that limited the use of out-of-school suspension for students in grades K-2. We find that the reform reduced the likelihood of out-of-school suspension by 1.4 percentage points (56%) and had precise null effects on test scores and disciplinary infractions. This leads us to reject a key argument in favor of early-grade suspensions: namely, that early-grade suspensions improve classroom-level outcomes. For high-risk students, we find short-run increases in test scores that persist into third grade. The reform reduced the Black-white out-of-school suspension gap by 79%. [Author Sarah Komisarow received funding from the Duke University Office of the Provost for this work.]

Among the many inequalities associated with racial segregation in schools, one notable disparity is the unequal access to experienced teachers. Schools with high proportions of Black or Latinx students have a disproportionate share of inexperienced teachers, both throughout the nation and in California specifically (Clotfelter, Ladd, & Clifton, 2023; Darling-Hammond, 2004; Goldhaber, Lavery, & Theobald, 2015; Knight, 2019; Learning Policy Institute, 2023; Shields et al., 1999). State-level policies and analyses in California have addressed the racial distribution of teacher experience, including the State's release of three annual reports in 2015, 2016, and 2017 titled, "California State Plan to Ensure Equitable Access to Excellent Educators." This study analyzes seven years of the most recent publicly available data from California's public schools, focusing on the relationship between student race and teacher experience. The authors categorized teacher experience in various ways: identifying teachers as "novices" based on 1, 2, or 3 years of teaching experience, and calculating the average and median years of experience at each school. Segregation was assessed from multiple angles by grouping schools based on their racial composition in six different ways, including categories such as "majority non-white" and "90% or more underrepresented minorities" that measure varying degrees of racial concentration. It also presents a regression model to investigate whether the relationship between teacher experience and racial composition holds when taking into account other variables, such as poverty status. The multiple ways of assessing the relationship all point to a discouraging conclusion: California continues to maintain a system of segregated schools that are separate and unequal in terms of teacher experience. The remainder of this report details and provides context for these findings. It concludes with a discussion of several possible ways to address the inequitable distribution of teacher experience in California.

May 17, 2024 marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools were "inherently unequal." At the time, North Carolina was one of 17 states that enforced de jure segregation, that is, segregation by law. The state of North Carolina and the school districts within the state have played prominent roles in our nation's history of school desegregation. North Carolina's public school enrollment is increasingly multiracial, and the expansion of school choice means that a growing share of students attends charters and private schools, both of which tend to be more segregated than traditional public schools. On the cusp of this important anniversary, the authors assess where North Carolina schools are now in terms of school desegregation, as segregated schools are systematically linked to unequal educational opportunities and outcomes, while desegregated schools are associated with numerous short-term, long-term, academic, and nonacademic outcomes for individuals and society.

At their best, K-12 public school systems can be engines of social and economic mobility. Unfortunately, schools in lower-income districts -- whose students have the greatest academic needs -- often receive less funding than their counterparts in more affluent districts. Discussions about closing these funding gaps usually zoom all the way out to the state level or all the way down to the district level. But a big part of the problem lies in how funding is distributed across districts in the same metro area -- and in state policies that allow wealthy communities to raise and keep large amounts of local revenue exclusively for their own schools. "Leveling the Landscape: An Analysis of K-12 Funding Inequities Within Metro Areas" takes a closer look at the scale and sources of education funding within 123 large metro areas in 38 states, focusing on funding disparities among districts serving the same region. Key takeaways include: (1) a majority of public school students (62%) live in large metro areas with more than five districts -- a level of fragmentation that makes funding disparities more likely; (2) within fragmented metro areas, wealthy districts often generate much more local funding per student than less affluent districts; (3) state policies, despite their progressive tilt, rarely bridge this gap -- and often don't even come close; (4) in 49 of the 123 large metro areas we examined, school districts in affluent areas receive the most funding per pupil; (5) closing the state and local funding gap between districts within the metro areas we examined would cost $26 billion in additional state funding per year; and (6) more ambitious policies can greatly reduce or even eliminate funding disparities. The report also explores policy tools state leaders can use to ensure all districts within the same metro area at the very least receive similar funding per student and ideally, set the stage for even greater levels of per-pupil funding to flow to higher-needs districts.

There is limited empirical evidence about educational interventions for students experiencing homelessness, who experience distinct disadvantages compared to their low-income peers. We explore how two school staffing interventions in New York City shaped the attendance outcomes of students experiencing homelessness using administrative records from 2013-2022 and a difference-in-differences design. We find suggestive evidence that one intervention, which placed social workers in schools, increased the average attendance rates of students in shelter by 1-3 percentage points after 3-5 years. We discuss implications for the importance of non-instructional school staff and strategies to serve homeless students.

Concerns about the state of the teacher workforce are ever-increasing: the proportion of teachers who would recommend teaching continues to fall, as does interest in the profession among current students. Given these stark realities, many school systems are fundamentally redesigning teachers' roles in an attempt to make the job more attractive and sustainable, both to early-career teachers and seasoned veterans. These "strategic school staffing" solutions aim to improve both educator and student outcomes, based on convincing evidence that improved working conditions are critical both for teacher retention and for student success. This brief details early outcomes for educators in one specific strategic school staffing initiative: Next Education Workforce™ (NEW) team-based models. NEW models overhaul the standard "one teacher, one classroom" approach, which requires one teacher to be all things to all of their students. Instead, teachers in NEW models share a roster of students with a team of other educators with complementary skills and expertise. This brief contributes timely early-stage findings on Next Education Workforce team-based models as implemented in Mesa, Arizona. This study identifies several significant differences between teamed and non-teamed teachers in Mesa Public Schools (MPS), suggesting that NEW models are associated with improved educator outcomes.

In this paper, the authors draw on evolutionary theories of change and qualitative data from 2019-2022, to explore the impact of the pandemic on K-12 virtual education in a state with a long history of virtual schooling by asking: "How has the ongoing COVID pandemic influenced virtual schooling in Oregon?" A virtual school in this study is a public charter school -- affiliated with either a nonprofit or for-profit education management organization, or a non-profit or district board and approved by the district, state or governing body -- or a district-run school, that offers instruction only via technology, in which students and teachers are physically separated, and interact synchronously or asynchronously (Barbour & Reeves, 2009; Keaton, 2021; Nowicki, 2022). In particular, the authors examine how the health crisis affected state-level virtual schooling policies and local organizational practices, whether there is evidence of deep and lasting changes, why, and the implications for equity.

This memorandum provides information pertinent to the participation and performance of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examinations for 2023 graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). In 2023, 59.3% of MCPS graduates took one or more AP exams; 17.3 percentage points more than graduates in Maryland and 24.6 percentage points more than graduates in the nation. Additionally, 46.1 % of the 2023 MCPS graduates earned a score of 3 or higher on at least one AP exam, while 27.4% of graduates in the State of Maryland and 21.7% of graduates in the nation earned an AP score of 3 or higher.

When a student enrolls in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) for the first time, the student's parents/guardians complete a Home Language Survey. This survey inquires whether a student's first language is a language other than English, whether a student's primary language is one other than English, and whether a language other than English is used at home. If at least one of the answers is yes, the student is tested to determine his/her English proficiency. Based on the results of this assessment, the student is either classified as an English Language Learner (ELL) or deemed proficient in English. Depending on the English proficiency levels, ELL students are enrolled in specific ESOL courses tailored to meet students' language needs. English proficiency levels for ELL students in M-DCPS range from ESOL 1 (lowest) to ESOL 4 (highest). The English proficiency levels of students are reassessed annually, and the appropriate ESOL placement is determined based on the testing results. ACCESS for ELLs is currently used as the State-mandated English Language Proficiency test. ACCESS for ELLs stands for Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State-to-State for English Language Learners. Once it is ascertained that a student has acquired English proficiency and satisfied the State requirements for exit from the ESOL program, the student exits the program and is re-classified as formerly ELL (ESOL level 5). In this report, students' achievement in the ESOL program is disaggregated by grade and ESOL level. The academic achievement results of former ELL students disaggregated by the number of years since ESOL exit are included in this report. For comparison purposes, the performance of students who have never been classified as ELL is also included in the report.

"Brown v. Board of Education" held that the educational systems of seventeen states that mandated segregated schools violated the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The decision helped set off the civil rights revolution. However, after so many years of backlash, schools of the South are dramatically less segregated than what existed before "Brown." "Brown" brought to a head the conflict between the professed belief in equal opportunity and the reality of clearly inferior schools for Black and Latino children. Many whites saw the desegregation changes that the courts and federal agencies ordered as a threat. From a civil rights perspective, the battle was for connecting young people of color to transformative educational opportunities. Opponents mobilized and they attacked the courts and the law. This report examines the changing patterns of segregation and diversity in U.S. public schools, updating earlier work with contemporary and historical data. At a time when U.S. social and political polarization are severe and race relations are dangerously strained, schools matter even more.

The data presented in this report provide facts about the extent to which local, state, and national governments commit resources to public education. The level of commitment to education varies on a state-by-state basis. National Education Association (NEA) Research offers this report to its state and local affiliates as well as to researchers, policymakers, and the public as a tool to examine public education programs and services. Part I of this report -- Rankings 2023 -- provides state-level data on an array of topics relevant to the complex enterprise of public education. Part II of this report -- Estimates 2024 -- is in its 80th year of production. Estimates provides data tables projecting public school enrollment, employment and compensation of personnel, and finances, as reported by individual state departments of education. Part III of this report -- National Trends 2015-24 -- presents summary data of national trends in student enrollment and attendance, staff salaries, sources of school funding, and levels of educational expenditures in the previous 10 years. [For "Rankings of the States 2022 and Estimates of School Statistics 2023. NEA Research," see ED628838.]

The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) was the largest onetime federal investment in K-12 schools in history, funneling almost $200 billion to states and school districts. We use novel data from Washington State to investigate the extent to which ESSER funding causally influenced spending on school personnel. We argue one cannot infer this directly from ESSER claims data because of the fungibility of school budgets. Thus, we rely on a more direct signal of district hiring decisions: public education job postings scraped from district hiring websites. To address endogeneity concerns, our preferred approach employs an instrumental variables strategy that exploits a formula mechanism used to determine Title I funding for 2020-21 (and thus ESSER allocations in 2022) based on the number of Title I formula-eligible children. We find strong, arguably causal, evidence that public school hiring increased in response to the availability of ESSER funding. Specifically, we estimate that each $1,000 in ESSER allocations caused districts to seek to hire $206 in additional staff, disproportionately teachers. These estimates suggest that roughly 12,000 new staff (including 5,100 teachers) were hired in Washington because of ESSER. In the absence of new funding, school staffing budgets will likely need to contract substantially following the sunset of ESSER.