From the Field

New Evidence Highlights Potential Long-Term Costs of Grade Inflation

For more than three decades, grades in American schools and colleges have been going up, up, up. A’s are more common. Failure is rarer than it once was.

Research Notes: State-Mandated Retention Alone is Unlikely to Improve Literacy

A new study from Sakib Mahmud of Florida State University finds that compulsory retention of underperforming third-grade students does not, on its own…

Research Notes: Increased Immigration Enforcement Reduces Student Test Scores, Disciplinary Incidences

Immigration enforcement has been a central priority for the Trump Administration. As immigration arrests have surged, both test scores and disciplinary…

Q&A: Jenny Anderson on Student Disengagement and What to Do About It

“The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better” by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop examines why many students are disengaged…

Research Notes: Standardized Tests Results Hold Valuable Information that Schools Waste

Student achievement is typically reported as an aggregate test score, obscuring how students perform across individual concepts and skills. A new study by Jesse…

Research Notes: Helping Teachers Help Students, Inexpensively

Research Notes: Helping Teachers Help Students, Inexpensively A new study led by behavior psychologist David Yeager at the University of Texas at Austin…

Why the Language of Math is Important to Student Learning

Students, parents and school principals all instinctively know that some teachers are better than others. Education researchers have spent decades trying — with…

Research Notes: Teacher Application Trends in District and Charter Schools

New research from the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) yields insights into the supply side of the teacher labor market…