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Food insecurity is widespread among college students in the United States. CalFresh food benefits, known federally as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, can help students in California pay for food, but may not reach all eligible students. CalFresh enrollment rates among students have been difficult to estimate due to incomplete data on California students’ eligibility for and enrollment in the CalFresh program.1 To overcome these issues, the California Policy Lab (CPL) partnered with the California Community College system (CCC), the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), the California Department of Social Services (CDSS), and the California Student Aid Commission (CSAC) to build a linked database of student-level administrative data on college enrollment, financial aid, and CalFresh participation. This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grants MRP-19-600774 and M21PR3278.

States that receive federal waivers to the No Child Left Behind Act were required to implement reforms in designated "Focus Schools" that contribute to achievement gaps. We examine the performance effects of such "differentiated accountability" reforms in Louisiana. These Focus School reforms emphasized school-needs assessments and aligned technical assistance. These reforms may have also been uniquely high-powered because they were linked to a letter-based school-rating system. We examine the impact of these reforms in a sharp regression-discontinuity (RD) design. We find that, over each of 3 years, Louisiana's Focus School reforms had no measurable impact on school performance. We discuss evidence that these findings reflect policy reform fatigue and poor quality of implementation at the state and local level.

Many California college students face food and housing insecurity.1 CalFresh food benefits, known federally as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, can help students pay for food, but most students eligible for this support are not receiving it. To address the gap between eligibility and participation, the California Policy Lab (CPL) is building a new data system — in partnership with higher education and safety-net agencies in California — to examine the extent to which college students use safety-net benefits to help meet their basic needs, to estimate how benefit receipt affects educational outcomes, and to evaluate strategies designed to increase participation. As part of this portfolio of work, and to better understand the factors that may limit student participation in CalFresh, CPL collaborated with Jesus Chavarin-Rivas, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, to conduct 29 interviews with a selection of students, basic needs specialists, and local and state government representatives in California. While this work2 was not a representative study of college student experiences statewide, it provided an initial picture of common barriers that may warrant further investigation by researchers and program administrators. This preliminary work suggests that some college students may lack awareness about CalFresh, be deterred by stigma and fear of adverse consequences, and face both misinformation about the complicated eligibility criteria for students and complex administrative processes when applying for food benefits. This work has been supported, in part, by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives grants MRP-19-600774 and M21PR3278.

Despite growing concern over teachers' ability to live comfortably where they work, we know little about the systematic relationship between affordability and teachers' well-being, particularly in high-cost urban areas. We use novel survey data from San Francisco Unified School District to identify the patterns and prevalence of economic anxiety among teachers and assess how this anxiety predicts teachers' attitudes, behaviors, and turnover. We find that San Francisco teachers have far higher levels of economic anxiety on average than a national sample of employed adults, and that younger teachers are particularly financially anxious. Furthermore, such anxiety predicts measures of job performance and teacher retention--economically anxious teachers tend to have more negative attitudes about their jobs, have worse attendance, and are 50% more likely to depart the district within 2 years after the survey.

Purpose: The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) requires districts to deliver "evidence-based interventions" to students impacted by the pandemic. The policy has created a unique opportunity for researchers and practitioners to engage with evidence to learn how recovery interventions work and under what conditions. Design/methodology/approach: This study is part of a research-practice partnership (RPP) between Guilford County Schools, AIR-CALDER, Harvard University and NWEA to understand the impacts and implementation of ESSER-funded recovery programs. We use a case analysis approach and frameworks of evidence-use and RPPs to explain how researchers and Guilford leaders engage with evidence to improve and evaluate programs. Findings: The RPP used evidence to inform Guilford leaders' recovery approaches and strengthened researchers' evaluations of programs. Conditions that enabled evidence engagement included the RPP's goals, research activities and collaborative conditions such as boundary spanning activities, team meetings, relationships and trust. We also observed factors that hindered evidence engagement, including the RPP's nascent stage, structure and breadth of goals, rapid policy timelines and other organizational conditions in Guilford. Originality/value: Given the complexities of pandemic recovery, RPPs can help researchers evaluate programs in their local context, and present evidence in ways that are actionable to guide decision-making. District leaders can play a valuable role in co-designing research studies attuned to local priorities and context and facilitating research participation among internal stakeholders. However, newly formed RPPs with broad goals for impact will need more time and resources to build an improvement infrastructure for sustaining pandemic recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]