While releasing new standardized test scores Tuesday, Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez celebrated elementary students’ gains in reading and math scores that, according to the district, constitute a partial rebound from learning loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

About six years ago, Lori Zaimi’s daughter told her mom that another longtime friend was leaving their elementary school in Edgewater on the North Side. The friend’s apartment building, she explained, had been sold to someone who was going to renovate it.

Zaimi recognized the familiar story of gentrification, when higher-income families move into a working class neighborhood and drive up property values. She’d seen property demolitions and pricey single family housing go up across Edgewater, the formerly working class neighborhood where she grew up...

Key Findings

• Principals had immediate influence on student learning and school culture, and they also had lasting impacts on students’ outcomes into young adulthood.
• CPS’s principal residency program appeared to increase principal effectiveness at improving achievement in the first two years of the principalship.
• The slow pace at which residency completers became CPS principals dampens the potential benefits of the residency program to the district.
• CPS’s principal merit pay program led to improvements in student achievement, but there were some

JEFFERSON PARISH, La. — The school year ended at Washington Elementary at 2:35 p.m. on a hot Tuesday afternoon in May, but one hour later, 9-year-old Malaysia Robertson lingered outside.

Key Findings

• Students were more likely to be retained if they lived in census tracts with high rates of unaffordable housing, high rates of neighborhood poverty, low rates of home ownership, or limited access to green space.
• Students were more likely to be retained in grade if they attended elementary schools with high poverty rates and high suspension rates, even when comparing students with similar achievement.
• Overage students who attended high schools with a great racial equity climate were twice as likely to graduate high school in four years as overa

Key Findings

• Teacher impacts on Black students varied widely.
• The teachers that were more effective for Black students often were also more effective for non-Black students, but not always.
• Race-specific value-add scores were predictive of teachers’ subsequent effects on students.
• Experienced teachers and teachers with a master’s degree tended to be highly effective overall, but much less effective for Black than non-Black students.
• Incorporating teachers’ revealed comparative advantage into policy decisions has the potential to increas

Key Findings

• Some high schools in Chicago reduced the fear of bullying relative to students’ previous experiences, while others increased it.

Social-Emotional Learning has become yet another point of contention for education activists on the right, who accuse it of being “Trojan horse” for critical race theory. But research suggests that having schools work on social and emotional development is important for future student success.

This is the final post in a series offering advice to private foundations about their education-related funding priorities.

Many of us educators hope they are listening...