Educational Researcher

Policy and practice communities increasingly are emphasizing conceptual, cognitively demanding, and “ambitious” instruction. Within this context, we examine whether such practices serve the needs of students with specialized academic needs. Across upper-elementary classrooms in four districts, we find that exposure to “ambitious” mathematics practices is more strongly associated with test score gains of English language learners (ELs) compared to those of their peers in general education classrooms; furthermore, this teaching practice is associated with the math self-efficacy of students with individualized education programs (IEP), and the self-reported behavior of general education students. We also find links between teachers’ emotional support and students’ self-efficacy and engagement, with the strongest relationships for students identified both as an EL and with an IEP.

This article investigates trends in the relative wealth of the richest school districts in the United States between 2000 and 2015. For the purposes of discussion, I focus on the top 1% of districts. I argue that trends in school funding for the richest districts deserve greater attention from education researchers. Districts in the top 1% of the cost-adjusted, national school funding distribution are disproportionately suburban, affluent, and White. The relative wealth of these districts increased sharply (31.59%) between 2000 and 2015. Disaggregating these trends reveals large variation between states. Nevertheless, resource concentration in the top percentile of school districts increased in a large majority of states. These findings cannot be explained by efforts to provide additional educational resources to students with the greatest needs, and they suggest the ways in which the concentration of affluence accompanying growing economic inequality may be changing school funding.

Efforts to improve college-completion rates have dominated higher education policy agendas. Performance-based funding (PBF) intends to improve college completion and links state funding for public colleges and universities to performance measures. One critique of PBF policies is that institutions might restrict student access. This study uses a difference-in-differences design and institution-level data from 2001 to 2014 to examine whether 4-year, public institutions become more selective or enroll fewer underrepresented students under PBF. Our findings, supported by various robustness checks, suggest that institutions subject to PBF enroll students with higher standardized test scores and enroll fewer first-generation students. PBF models tied to institutions’ base funding are more strongly associated with increased standardized test scores and enrollment of Pell students.

Papay (2011) noticed that teacher value-added measures (VAMs) from a statistical model using the most common pre/post testing timeframe–current-year spring relative to previous spring (SS)–are essentially unrelated to those same teachers’ VAMs when instead using next-fall relative to current-fall (FF). This is concerning since this choice–made solely as an artifact of the timing of statewide testing–produces an entirely different ranking of teachers’ effectiveness. Since subsequent studies (grades K/1) have not replicated these findings, we revisit and extend Papay’s analyses in another Grade 3–8 setting. We find similarly low correlations (.13–.15) that persist across value-added specifications. We delineate and apply a literature-based framework for considering the role of summer learning loss in producing these low correlations.

Until recently, legal challenges to the use of value-added models (VAMs) in evaluation and teacher employment decisions in federal court had been unsuccessful. However, in May 2017 a federal court in Texas ruled that plaintiff-teachers established a viable federal constitutional claim to challenge the use of VAMs as a means for their termination in Houston Federation of Teachers v. Houston Independent School District. Houston represents a significant departure from prior federal court rulings that upheld the constitutionality of VAMs to terminate teachers on the basis of poor performance. The Houston court found that the districts’ refusals to release the underlying data of VAM ratings used to terminate those teachers violated the teachers’ procedural due process rights. By denying access to the code, teachers could not protect against the government’s making a mistaken deprivation of their property right to continued right to employment. The authors discuss Houston and its potential impact, limitations, and significance.

Most research and practice in teacher in-service learning focuses on formal professional development activities. This article calls for paying greater attention to the informal conversations that are embedded in teachers’ day-to-day work and through which they learn from one another what it means to be a teacher and how to perform their duties. The authors build on theory and research in teacher on-the-job discourse and learning in order to (a) argue that, as a field, we need to pay more focused and systematic attention to teacher on-the-job discourse; (b) offer a coherent conceptual framework for “pedagogically productive” teacher talk; and (c) highlight key research directions and challenges in investigating this and related phenomena.

This conceptual article aims to clarify the important relationship between the fields of social foundations of education (SFE) and urban education (UE). We argue that SFE (a) enables more precise understandings of urban in one’s preparation to practice in or conduct research with implications for urban schooling contexts and (b) strengthens one’s capacity to identify the questions and pedagogical and methodological approaches central to enacting justice-oriented education research and practice. This article calls attention to three specific SFE subdisciplines—history, philosophy, and sociology of education—as necessary complements to any education program of study, building our argument from an examination of SFE’s relationship to UE specifically. Accessing multidisciplinary perspectives to deeply understand and address vexing challenges posed by (urban) space and place is a central feature of this article.

One ethnoracial reporting category perplexes higher education researchers: “race and ethnicity unknown.” Using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), we constructed a 28-year panel of 4,401 institutions. We find that the for-profit sector ranges from 5% to 18% “race unknown” students. In addition, almost 10% of students attending the most selective institutions were reported as “race unknown” in 2009 before dropping off precipitously. The size of the “race unknown” category can be attributed to some combination of student responses and data collection practices. We suggest researchers refrain from dropping “race unknown” from their studies as doing so may bias findings for the other ethnoracial categories, especially when comparing rates of student enrollment across institutional types.

Racial disparities in school discipline remain central to policy discussions around school discipline. Recent research points to the importance of how discipline disparities are measured for the conclusions that are drawn about the extent of the problem or whether such disparities are improving. This brief uses data from Maryland to demonstrate how the choice of metric of the Black-White discipline gap can drastically change conclusions about whether the gap is closing or widening as well as conclusions about whether particular districts or schools have high or low racial disparities in discipline. This brief shows how interpretations of the Black-White discipline gap can be drastically different when using different metrics. Implications for educational researchers and practitioners studying school discipline are given.