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.

A startling rise in failing grades during the pandemic was one of the most worrying signs that students were struggling.

Now, high schools in particular have a challenge ahead: figuring out how to help those students recover academically without falling off track for graduation...

As principal Daniel Kramer pored over data tracking whether Roosevelt High School’s freshmen and sophomores were staying on track amid the pandemic, he noticed a troubling trend: While girls had held their own as coronavirus tested the school, boys were falling behind, widening a longstanding gender gap at the predominantly Latino school on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

Parents and educators know that academic excellence depends considerably on students’ holistic development and a strong, positive learning environment. Unfortunately, many schools lack access to the tools needed to support students’ personal growth and to measure and reflect on their climate for learning.