This article describes a randomized field trial conducted to estimate the impact of modest monetary incentives on performance on a version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 12th-grade reading assessment. Monetary incentives have a statistically significant and substantively important impact on both student engagement/effort and achievement.

The authors used cross-classified hierarchical generalized linear modeling to examine predictors of enrolling in college due to being admitted through an early decision or early action program in a national dataset of 88,086 students. Although research has investigated the types of institutions that tend to offer early action and early decision programs, the types of students who apply to these programs, and the types of high schools that they come from, no prior study has examined these three contexts simultaneously.

High-quality empirical research can guide policy. However, due to the disconnect between the research base and policymaking, that potential is often squandered. The mere existence of careful, rigorous research makes little impact if policymakers remain oblivious or if lesser-quality work is more effectively communicated and advocated. This article offers an important case study of this phenomenon, focused on popular understandings of the effects of school finance reforms that are prompted by litigation.

Whereas collective learning has mostly been approached from a deficit-based orientation (finding/solving problems and overcoming failures), this qualitative, topic-oriented study examines principals’ perceptions (mindscapes) about the notion and strategy of collective learning from faculty members’ successful practices.

In cities across the country, market principles are having a major impact on education policy and practices. This article uses an examination of marketization in Philadelphia over a six-year period to explore its implications for public engagement in education, or the ability of individuals and groups to work with and influence the school district and hold officials accountable.

This article examines conditions that support or challenge Latina teachers’ efforts to perform cultural/professional roles as role models, culturally/linguistically responsive teachers, and agents of change for students of color. Findings reveal the following: (a) the teachers’ ability to perform these roles is shaped by the capital and power relations present in the schools where the teachers work, exposing a form of “subtractive schooling” (Valenzuela, 1999) for Latina teachers, and (b) the intersection of the teachers’ personal backgrounds and school contexts resulted in these new teachers of color being change(d) agents—both agents of change and subjected to change by the system in which the teachers work.

This research examined the effects of classroom peer absences on student-level standardized test performance in urban elementary schools. The effects of missing school were proved to be harmful to the individual and his or her peers.

We tested the hypothesis that first-year teachers could take up forms of ambitious pedagogy under the following conditions: 1) that reform-based practices introduced in teacher preparation would be the focus of collaborative inquiry throughout the first year of teaching, 2) that participants use analyses of their students’ work as the basis of critique and change in practice, and 3) that special tools be employed that help participants hypothesize about relationships between instruction and student performance.

This article examines the collective use of social, intellectual and material resources by teachers in a school as a framework for understanding how teaching toward ambitious learning goals is consistently maintained across classrooms, time, and varieties of students.

The study examined the relationship between the “form” (i.e., conventions, organization, and style/voice) and “content” (i.e., specific knowledge and understanding of science) of expository science writing among third grade English language learners in the beginning and at the end of each year during the three-year implementation of an instructional intervention.

The purpose of this study was to identify specific strategies that schools employ to raise college application and attendance rates for low-income students.

Drawing on data from a qualitative, longitudinal study, this article explores how former adult literacy participants in rural El Salvador conceptualized the cultural model of educación, a model encompassing academic knowledge and social competence. The article identifies how adults understood the meanings of and pathways to educación, its relationship with schooling and print literacy, and implications for research and practice.

This article explicates differences in the curricular, instructional, and role expectations experienced by beginning special and general education elementary teachers. It also documents variations in how novices from both groups addressed expectations they encountered.

This study uses high-quality data from Project STAR to examine whether teacher effects predict student achievement in early grades. Teacher effects are defined as teacher-specific residuals adjusted for student background and class size effects. Findings indicate that teacher effects in early grades are useful predictors of mathematics and reading achievement through the third grade.

By comparing and contrasting the civic functions adopted by and ascribed to Bowdoin College and Stanford University during their founding decades, this study contends that the social ethos guiding colleges and universities’ institutional priorities, as well as students’ reasons for engaging in higher learning, changed between 1794 (the year of Bowdoin’s founding) and 1885 (the year Stanford was established), resulting in a modification of what we might today call higher education’s institutional mission.

This article describes the results of an observational study conducted with 4 high school teachers identified by their students as providing supportive motivational and instructional contexts in their classes.

A rich ethnographic analysis of a classroom event that shows the emotional complexities encountered by Palestinian and Jewish teachers and students in Israel when dealing with conflicting historical narratives.

Focusing on students aged 19 and 20 who lived with their parents and commuted from home, this study examines the shifting patterns of college access from 1960 and 1980, when commuters became the largest category of beginning college students. Using various sources of information, including data from IPUMS and NCES, this study finds that for most American youth, going to college appears to have remained a solidly middle- and upper-class phenomenon, even in commuter institutions.

This study qualitatively examined how issues of social capital were perceived to influence the education of homeless students in an urban context.

This article examines the strategies that new elementary school teachers develop to stay true to and implement their visions of teaching for social justice in the neoliberal context of urban schools.

Although the historical and contemporary contributions of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to educating college-going African American students are well documented, such analysis often neglects to highlight the male student role or perspective. This article presents a review and critique of past and contemporary HBCU research focusing explicitly on African American men, with the hope of recentering the gendered dialogue.

Teach For America (TFA) graduate students evaluated their method course instructors significantly lower than did traditional students on an end-of-semester student evaluation instrument. This prompted faculty researchers to investigate how to best meet the needs of these alternatively certified teachers. Implications include suggestions for restructuring teacher preparation programs to best meet the needs of TFA first-year teachers, whose work impacts some of the highest needs students in the country.

This article uses data from descriptive case studies of 15 high schools in five states to explore students’ perceptions and expectations of student financial aid and the contextual forces that influence these perceptions and expectations.

This article employs critical race theory to examine the conditions of two adjacent school districts. In addition, the author explores the relationship between the conditions of the two districts and the Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS), arguing that the districts and the PICS decision are tied together through common collective definitions of segregation.

This article takes a closer look at choice and charter school reforms as a means to addressed unresolved issues of racial segregation in urban school districts. Using the lens of critical race theory, the authors examine the outcomes of market theory reforms as solutions to inequitable schooling practices.