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The rapid rise of online enrollments in public universities has been fueled by a reliance on for-profit, third-party providers--especially online program managers. However, scholars know very little about the potential problems with this arrangement. We conduct a mixed methods analysis of 229 contracts between third-party providers and 117 two-year and four-year public universities in the US, data on the financing structure of third-party providers, and university online education webpages. We ask: What are the mechanisms through which third-party relationships with universities may be exploitative of students or the public universities that serve them? To what extent are potentially predatory processes linked to the private equity and venture capital financing structure of third-party providers? We highlight specific mechanisms that lead to five predatory processes: the targeting of marginalized students, extraction of revenue, privatization by obfuscation, for-profit creep, and university captivity. We demonstrate that contracts with private equity and venture capital financed third-party providers are more likely to include potentially problematic contract stipulations. We ground our findings in a growing body of work on "platform capitalism" and include recommendations for state universities, accreditors, and federal policy.

The research featured in this paper is part of the CORE-PACE Research Partnership, which is focused on producing research that informs continuous improvement in the CORE districts as well as policy and practice in California and beyond. In this report, the authors used data from multiple interim assessments to examine how the rate of student learning from fall 2019 through winter 2020-21 differs from that of student learning before COVID-19. Specifically, the authors assessed the degree to which approximately 100,000 students across 19 local education agencies (LEAs) in California experienced slower academic growth compared to previous school years (i.e., a learning lag) by the time they completed winter 2021 interim assessments (NWEA MAP Growth, Renaissance Learning Star, and Curriculum Associates i-Ready) in Grades 4-8. To understand equity gaps in the degree to which students have experienced lost instructional opportunities, the authors disaggregated these results for students who were economically disadvantaged, students who were English learners, students with disabilities, students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, students with low prior achievement, and students who were experiencing homelessness. The results show that by the time students completed winter interim assessments in the 2020-21 school year, they had experienced a learning lag of approximately 2.6 months in English language arts (ELA) and 2.5 months in math. It was further found that students who were economically disadvantaged, English learners, and Latinx experienced greater learning lag than students who were not in these groups. The authors position these findings in the context of other recent studies that have estimated COVID-19 impacts on student learning, discuss caveats of using interim assessments (including those administered remotely), and highlight the importance of examining differences in the effects for students in different groups. These findings can be useful for guiding decision-making and resource allocation at the state and local levels.

Recent work has broadened the scope of school effectiveness research to consider not only academic achievement but also other outcomes, especially college attendance. This literature has argued that high schools are an important determinant of college attendance, with some contending that high schools matter more for college attendance than for academic achievement. A separate branch of research has illustrated how place-based opportunities facilitate college attendance. We merge these two literatures by asking if schools' geographic context can explain apparent variation in effectiveness among Wisconsin high schools. We find that geographic context explains more than a quarter of the variance in traditional estimates of school effectiveness on college attendance, because factors like proximity to colleges are strongly associated with college attendance. Accounting for geography is therefore important in order not to overstate high schools' role in higher education outcomes. Results are based on multilevel models applied to rich administrative data on every Wisconsin public high school entrant between 2006 and 2011. [This is the online version of an article published in "Research in Higher Education" May 2020.]

Past research finds that the effect of socioeconomic origin on the probability of making educational transitions decreases over the educational career from primary to graduate school. Some have argued that this pattern of waning is the result of selective attrition, since those of modest social origins who make a given transition may have exceptional cognitive or noncognitive skills while more advantaged individuals may rely less heavily on these skills to continue their education. We study a sample of American 10th graders from 1980 to assess how much the pattern of waning effects is due to selective attrition along noncognitive skills for this cohort. We find that controlling for noncognitive skills does not make the effect of socioeconomic origin more stable across transitions. Still, socioeconomic advantage does not decline uniformly across transitions, and it appears most pronounced at the transition into college, whether accounting for noncognitive skills or not. Our results suggest that origins continue to drive educational attainment even among those who make it to postsecondary transitions. [This paper was published in "Research in Social Stratification and Mobility" v63 Article 100424 2019.]

Measures of school-level growth in student outcomes are common tools used to assess the impacts of schools. The vast majority of these measures are based on standardized tests, even though emerging evidence demonstrates the importance of social-emotional skills (SEL). This paper uses the first large-scale panel surveys of students on SEL to produce and evaluate school-level value-added measures by grade for growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness. We find substantive differences across schools in SEL growth, of magnitudes similar to those for academic achievement. This result suggests that schools might contribute to students' SEL. However, we also find that the models are not as well specified for SEL as they are for achievement gains, raising the possibility that the estimated school effects include school-level measurement error and potential omitted variables bias. In addition, the across-school variance in the average level of the SEL measures is proportionally much smaller than for academic measures, which would not be expected if substantial impacts of schools on SEL outcomes persisted over time. These findings recommend caution in interpreting measures as the causal impacts of schools on SEL, though they also do not rule out important school effects.

In Wisconsin, racial disparities in K-12 achievement have taken center stage, and justifiably so: the black-white and Hispanic-white test score gap is wider in Wisconsin than in any other state (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 2014). However, Wisconsin also sees inequality along economic lines and disparities in postsecondary outcomes, both of which warrant attention. If Wisconsin is like the rest of the nation, closing its gaps in academic achievement is not sufficient to equalize educational attainment. Nationally and in Wisconsin, economically disadvantaged high school graduates attend college, especially baccalaureate colleges, at much lower rates than their more advantaged peers. Schools play an important role in helping economically disadvantaged students go to college. In this report, the authors describe Wisconsin's economic disparities by postsecondary outcomes, assess the magnitude of between-school variation in school effects on economically disadvantaged students' baccalaureate college attendance, and show which school characteristics explain this variation. To determine which types of schools are more successful in sending economically disadvantaged students to baccalaureate colleges, this study uses a relatively dense set of student-level and school-level characteristics. The authors draw these data from the population of Wisconsin public school students who entered ninth grade for the first time between the 2006-07 and 2011-12 school years. Three principal questions guide this study: (1) How large are economic disparities in college attendance in Wisconsin?; (2) How much variation is there among high schools in the share of their low-income students who attend college, controlling for student characteristics?; and (3) Which high school characteristics explain this between-school variation? The questions are approached using the Wisconsin State Longitudinal Data System, the National Student Clearinghouse, and the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data. This report proceeds in six sections. First, the authors describe their data sources and measurement strategies. Second, they show the magnitude of economic disparities in postsecondary outcomes in Wisconsin. Third, they demonstrate that school effects vary widely. Fourth, they present estimates of how specific school-level characteristics influence low-income students' postsecondary outcomes, highlighting the importance of geographic characteristics such as location in a suburb, proximity to a University of Wisconsin (UW) 4-year campus, and the education level of adults in the district. Fifth, they examine facets of school organization. Finally, the authors offer concluding comments.