Click below to view a webinar from the Latino Policy Forum and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation (October 26, 2021).

Key Findings

Factors Associated with Stronger Outcomes for English Learners

It is back-to-school season, and millions of students across the country are returning to classrooms to embark on a new academic year. While some children braved in-person learning armed with masks and social distancing this past school year, others haven’t been in a physical classroom in well over a year.

What happens when a school district improves and hardly anyone notices?

I ask because for the past couple of decades, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has improved. A lot. And yet, that probably comes as news, even to many who pay attention to education...

When the New York Times in a student opinion piece asked “How do you think American education could be improved?”, Skye Williams from Sarasota, Florida wrote, ”I think that the American education system can be improved by allowing students to choose the classes that they wish to take or classes that are beneficial for their future.

Key Findings

• Principals who just exceeded the threshold for a merit award are over twice as likely to exit their school the year after winning compared to principals who fell just short of the award threshold, consistent with the notion that the labor market views the award as a signal of principal effectiveness.
• Difference-in-differences estimates show that the award program incentives increased achievement.
• The findings highlight the importance of program modifications that reduce the loss of more effective school leaders.

People affected by news stories should find the reporting insightful. So it’s been disappointing that I’ve struggled to find insight or meaning or value in many news stories about how the pandemic affected teenagers in public high schools – especially in pieces written by white journalists.

Key Findings

When researching and applying to high schools, students considered:

Even to a casual observer, the research-practice partnerships “tent” has expanded considerably since the seminal 2013 paper by Coburn et al., Research-Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts. Whereas RPPs today operate at multiple levels of policy and practice and may comprise a wider range of partners than in the past, Coburn et al.’s scan of the relatively nascent landscape of partnerships was intended to focus on RPPs between researchers and school districts.

Rebecca Hinze-Pifer is an Affiliated Researcher at the UChicago Consortium and an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign. Her research agenda focuses on understanding school-based structures and practices that support adolescent academic and social-emotional development among students living in high-violence contexts.