Suspension bans have become a popular policy response to address excessive and inequitable use of suspension in schools. However, there is little research that examines what strategies school staff employ when suspension is no longer permitted. I examine the effect of New York City’s suspension ban on the use of a potential unintended substitute for suspension: special education classification. I find that the ban induced an increase in disability classifications, especially those with higher social stigma. I show that, on average, students with these classifications experienced large declines in test scores.
Teacher coaching programs have shown promising effects on student achievement, but these effects vary substantially across programs and seem susceptible to scaling problems. Additionally, the effect of coaching on teacher retention is not known. In this paper, we evaluate a program in which current teachers are released from the classroom part-time to coach and evaluate other teachers. This program was rolled out in five cohorts of schools and eventually reached over 6,000 mentee teachers, presenting a unique opportunity to study the effect of large-scale coaching on teachers and students. We use a difference-in-differences approach with modified estimators to account for the staggered roll-out and find no effects on teacher retention or student test scores.
High-achieving low-income students are less likely than high-income peers to enroll in selective colleges. Financial certainty interventions can address administrative burdens that stifle these students’ enrollment, even when colleges are tuition-free for them. However, it is unknown whether these interventions are effective when students enjoy admissions certainty (e.g., with percent plans) or how financial certainty interventions interact with automatic admissions. We tested the efficacy of a direct-to-student intervention that guaranteed low-income students free tuition, on-campus housing, and a housing scholarship at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). The intervention significantly increased students’ likelihood of application (59% vs. 40%) and enrollment (19% vs. 6%) for UT Austin. Among students eligible for automatic admission, the intervention almost tripled enrollment (30% vs. 11%).
This instrumental phenomenological case study examines the socio-legal and organizational influences of Titles III/IV/V of the Higher Education Act on Texas Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) transitioning toward Hispanic-serving institution status. Drawing on interviews, policy texts, and institutional artifacts, the study explores the tensions between historic missions of racial uplift and contemporary demands for inclusive excellence within a politically regressive policy context. Using a critical organizational lens grounded in anti-colonial theory and isomorphism, findings reveal how educators resist and reinterpret coercive and memetic pressures shaping institutional identity. Despite exclusion from Title V funding under Special Rule 505, Hispanic-serving HBCUs demonstrate Afro-centric servingness aligned with Title III and V priorities, exposing racialized inequities while highlighting agency in advancing anti-colonial practices.
We present one of the first Generalizability studies of non-test measures of teaching effectiveness administered by practitioners in a middle-income country. The reliability of observations varies widely (from 0 to 0.75 on a 0–1 scale) and depends upon their context (whether they are conducted during training or on the job) and rater assignment configurations. The reliability of surveys varies substantially, coinciding with a change in the students sampled across occasions. Our estimates of reliabilty are comparable to those from research in high-income countries, but the variation within our estimates and between them and those from individual studies suggests that practitioners should conduct their own reliability analyses. We offer guidance on leveraging such analyses to improve the reliability of their measures.
