Text-message based parenting programs have proven successful in improving parental engagement and preschoolers’ literacy development. The tested programs have provided a combination of (a) general information about important literacy skills, (b) actionable advice (i.e., specific examples of such activities), and (c) encouragement. The regularity of the texts – each week throughout the school year – also provided nudges to focus parents’ attention on their children. This study seeks to identify mechanisms of the overall effect of such programs. It investigates whether the actionable advice alone drives previous study’s results and whether additional texts of actionable advice improve program effectiveness. The findings provide evidence that text messaging programs can supply too little or too much information. A single text per week is not as effective at improving parenting practices as a set of three texts that also include information and encouragement, but a set of five texts with additional actionable advice is also not as effective as the three-text approach. The results on children’s literacy development depend strongly on the child’s pre-intervention literacy skills. For children in the lowest quarter of the pre-treatment literacy assessments, only providing one example of an activity decreases literacy scores by 0.15 standard deviations relative to the original intervention. Literacy scores of children in higher quarters are marginally higher with only one tip per week. We find no positive effects of increasing to five texts per week.

Decisions about who is in charge of school systems often make the news. High-profile cases such as the recent takeover of the Houston Independent School District by the State of Texas – where one of the first steps by state leaders was to replace the superintendent – highlight the central importance of district leadership as well as the public perception of superintendents as critical contributors to the quality of a school system.

Yet decision-makers who want to rely on research-based evidence about who to select or even how to conceptualize the characteristics required to be successful as superintendents have relatively little to draw on in the education research literature. In the spring of 2023, The Broad Center at the Yale School of Management partnered with the Annenberg Institute at Brown University to bring together a group of scholars who have made recent contributions to research on superintendency and to educational leadership more broadly.

These conversations resulted in a strong consensus on the need for a renewed push to build knowledge around specific aspects of the superintendency, anchored in new data that broaden the research that is possible in the field. Future research, in particular, could inform the field by investigating superintendents’ roles, including their time use, decision-making, priorities, management styles, and behaviors; the routes to the superintendency and factors associated with retention; how and why superintendents improve; and the causal impact of superintendents on key outcomes.

High school exit exams are meant to standardize the quality of public high schools and to ensure that students graduate with a set of basic skills and knowledge. Evidence suggests that a common perverse effect of exit exams is an increase in dropout for students who have difficulty passing tests, with a larger effect on minority students. To mitigate this, some states offer alternative, non-tested pathways to graduation for students who have failed their exit exams. This study investigates the post-secondary effects of an alternative high school graduation program. Compared to similar students who fail to complete high school, those students who take the alternative pathway have better post-secondary outcomes in both education and employment. Compared to similar students who retake exit exams to graduate, those who eventually graduate through an alternative project-based pathway have lower college enrollment, but similar employment outcomes.

In 2021 Massachusetts launched the Supporting Urgent Community College Equity through Student Services (SUCCESS) initiative, a first-of-its-kind, state-funded investment to provide wraparound student support services across all 15 of the state’s independently governed community colleges. With continued funding from the state legislature, including a $14 million appropriation in FY2026, SUCCESS aims to increase retention, persistence, and completion rates for historically underserved students by providing funding for each college to design or expand nonfinancial support programs that reflect its institutional context and student needs. Most SUCCESS programs include proactive advising, coaching, peer mentoring, and academic skills workshops.This report documents the early conceptualization and implementation of SUCCESS. Drawing on qualitative interviews with state leaders, college administrators, and SUCCESS staff as well as foundational program documents, it traces how the initiative moved from initial budget allocation to practice within a system of community colleges that vary widely in size, location, and student demographics.