In the wake of moves by states to assert growing authority over struggling school districts, Beth Schueler, an assistant professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia, and Joshua Bleiberg, a researcher at the Annenberg Institute for Education Reform at Brown University, recently set out to examine the impact of state takeovers of districts. They looked at the effect of state takeovers in the 35 districts, spanning 14 states, that were taken over by state authorities between 2011 and 2016. These included Lawrence and Holyoke, but not Southbridge, where 2016-17 was the first full school year under state control. 

Today, Results for America and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University released two new EdResearch for Recovery briefs by leading national experts highlighting evidence-based strategies to reduce student absenteeism and help students make more informed choices about college.

• District Strategies to Reduce Student Absenteeism - Michael Gottfried (University of Pennsylvania), Lindsay Page and Danielle Edwards (Annenberg Institute at Brown University)
• Helping Students Make Informed Choices About College - Celeste K. Carruthers (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Oded Gurantz (Truman School of Public Affairs, University of Missouri) and Lindsay Page (Annenberg Institute at Brown University)

Over the last decade, nearly every state in the U.S. implemented major reforms to its teacher evaluation systems. These reforms sought to use evaluation for two purposes: 1) to inform personnel decisions, such as rewarding highly effective teachers and removing ineffective ones, and 2) to provide feedback to teachers to help them improve their practice. The idea was appealing—two birds, one stone.

But new evidence undermines that idea. A recent  study by Alvin Christian and me suggests that new evaluation systems have not been able to produce high-quality evaluation feedback at scale. Providing feedback to teachers is a worthy investment, but we suspect it would be more effective to focus the evaluation system on career decisions and provide the most formative feedback outside of the evaluation process.

Share your department's work while engaging high school students during College Day at Brown, on Thursday, April 14, 2022!

This immersive one-day program will bring about 200 local high school students to campus to introduce or further expose them to the world of higher education.

During the two years that COVID-19 has upended school for millions of families, education leaders have increasingly touted one tool as a means of compensating for lost learning: personalized tutors. As a growing number of state and federal authorities pledge to make high-quality tutoring available to struggling students, a new study demonstrates positive, if modest, results from an experimental pilot that launched last spring. 

In early January 2022, six faculty members from Brown were among 200 American scholars recognized by Education Week for their highly influential educational research. The annual Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings seek to spotlight United States researchers who did the most to shape educational practice and policy in the last year. Among those listed were Professor of Economics Emily Oster; Director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform Susanna Loeb; Associate Professor of Education Matthew Kraft; Professor of Sociology Prudence Carter; Associate Professor of Education Policy Lindsay Page; and Associate Professor of Education John Papay. 

The online tutoring field is fairly new, and many companies said they either did not have data proving their program’s effectiveness, or were still collecting it. Several pointed to small studies from Britain and Italy showing promising results.

But critics say online tutoring rarely matches up to in-person tutoring, and that only a few such services replicate strategies that research has shown to be most effective: a paid, trained tutor who has a consistent personal relationship with a student; sessions during the school day, so that students do not skip lessons; and at least three sessions per week.

By John Papay

Ensuring that research crosses the divide to practice has been a long-standing challenge in the academy. There is tremendous value in disseminating research broadly, as highlighted by the Edu-Scholar Rankings. To “move ideas from the pages of barely read journals,” as rankings creator Rick Hess writes, “into the real world of policy and practice” should be a goal of both scholars and educators.