Selective higher education institutions around the world are increasingly adopting holistic admissions practices—making it crucial to understand how admissions personnel make decisions, with what consequences for access and equity. Based on 51 interviews with admissions officers and faculty at Korea’s most selective universities, we examine competing definitions of who is worthy of admission and how these in turn influence evaluations. We demonstrate that admissions decisions are profoundly shaped not only by formal policy but also by values and interests stemming from evaluator’s own personal and professional backgrounds, as well as power dynamics among evaluators. Our findings suggest that microprocesses of discretion among admissions officers and faculty undermine government policy efforts to increase equity in admissions outcomes.

Prior to the current wave of widespread and coordinated attacks on equity and anti-racism in public education, an increasing number of school districts throughout the United States had passed equity-oriented policies and anti-racism resolutions. These efforts play a critical role in districts’ attempts to acknowledge and address their own anti-Black racism and white supremacy. However, we empirically know very little about the components and content that comprise these policies and resolutions. To address this gap in the literature, this study critically examines the components and content of 100 school-board approved equity-focused policies and resolutions. As such, we ask: (a) How present are components of race and racism consciousness, effectiveness, and critical policy elements in equity-focused policies and resolutions? (b) How and in what ways does the presence of these components vary across different types of equity-oriented policies and resolutions? Our findings indicate that equity-focused policies and resolutions primarily include race and racism consciousness, assign institutional responsibility, and state intended actions for change. However, policy components that focus on shifting existing power dynamics and resource distribution are overwhelmingly absent. This study concludes with implications for policy, future research, and school districts.

Budget constraints and limited tutor supply have caused many K–12 school districts to pivot from individual tutoring toward small-group tutoring to expand access to personalized instruction. We conduct a pilot experiment to contrast the effects of student–tutor ratios on middle school students’ math achievement and growth during an online tutoring program. We leverage a novel feature of the program where tutors often taught individual and small-group tutoring sessions, allowing them to directly compare their experiences across these settings. Both experimental estimates and tutor survey responses provide suggestive evidence that 1:1 tutoring is more effective than 3:1 tutoring in an online setting. Tutoring small groups online presents additional challenges for personalizing instruction, developing relationships, fostering participation, and managing student behavior.

Empirically, research has shown that students from racial or ethnically minoritized backgrounds have higher educational outcomes when they have a teacher of the same demographic background. While numerous explanations for these results have been posited, few mechanisms have been explored. In this study, we address this important gap by examining when teachers share the same race and ethnicity as their students, as well as when English learner students have teachers with state-certified bilingual teaching authorization. To explore this, we use administrative data from a California school district largely composed of Hispanic and White students and teachers. Our findings suggest that Hispanic students have higher math scores (0.14 SD) and higher English language arts scores (0.07 SD). In math, we find that the effects are largest when Hispanic students have Hispanic teachers who also hold a bilingual teaching authorization from the state (0.37 SD). Implications for policy are discussed.

School principals faced unprecedented pressure during the COVID-19 period and an increase in workload due to transitions to and from distance learning. Increased educator turnover has great consequence for students and schools and important implications for policymakers moving into the postpandemic era. In this brief, we describe principal turnover within the broader context by showing how recent increases compare to historical trends, how the nature of turnover has changed with the composition of the workforce, and whether particular student groups are disproportionately impacted. We offer recommendations for improving principal retention and equitable access to stable school leadership.

The importance of teacher–student ethnoracial matching has been established as influential for students of color, with small but consistent impacts observed on a variety of outcomes including achievement, attendance, graduation, and college enrollment. Yet, little attention has been paid to the role of ethnoracial matching for students with disabilities. We ask if teacher–student ethnoracial matching is associated with a student’s referral for an initial special education evaluation. To address this, we rely on student-level longitudinal data for all Massachusetts public school students from kindergarten through Grade 12 between 2011 and 2018. Using a model that features school, grade, and year fixed effects, we report a 5% reduction in the likelihood of referral for special education evaluation when students share ethnoracial characteristics with their teachers. This is especially true in large schools (6% reduction) and appears to be driven by boys (7% reduction). We discuss implications as they pertain to the special education context.

Although research has investigated teacher labor markets over decades, there remains a notable gap in our understanding of staffing challenges in rural schools. Using longitudinal vacancy and application data in Wisconsin, we explore teachers’ job application and hiring patterns between rural and non-rural schools and within rural locales. Our investigation revealed that as the proximity to urban areas decreases, the applicant pool for rural positions diminishes, with applicants originating from more distant locations. Female applicants, candidates of Color, and individuals with elevated qualifications demonstrated a reduced inclination to seek employment in rural schools. Conversely, individuals with prior rural teaching experience and graduates of rural-based teacher preparation programs exhibited substantial proclivities toward both applying for and securing positions within rural educational settings. Our findings have significant implications for policymakers endeavoring to design and implement targeted programs for addressing the persistent staffing challenges confronting rural schools.

High school course failure rates have increased since the COVID-19 outbreak. As school districts adjust to a “new normal,” district leaders are increasingly looking to online credit recovery as a flexible and cost-effective strategy for getting students back on track. However, some researchers and policymakers have raised concerns that online credit recovery is a tool to boost grades and graduation rates without boosting learning. This brief presents findings from a multisite randomized study of an online credit recovery model implemented in a large, urban district. Comparing the online credit recovery courses to more traditional teacher-directed credit recovery courses, we find no statistically significant effect of the online credit recovery model on graduation rates or credit accumulation. However, we cannot rule out differences between the online and teacher-directed courses, given imprecision in the estimates. We discuss how the findings add to the current debate on the promise of online credit recovery.

The past several decades have seen drastic changes in school policing and disciplinary policies across the United States with disproportionate impacts on students of color. Focusing on a school policing program that strictly enforced minor disciplinary matters and increased police presence in selected schools, we examine both differential exposure across groups and the effect of the program on grade point average (GPA). Using a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that the program had a negative effect on student GPA and did so for students of different races and genders, though students exposed to the program were more likely to be Black. We suggest that decreased school attendance may be one potential mechanism behind these results.

In this study, I examine partnerships between districts and school improvement organizations (SIOs) focused on instructional reform, investigating how these partnerships conceptualize and negotiate equity in practice. Using a qualitative comparative case study design of nine district–SIO partnerships across the country, I find that partnerships’ equity approaches in practice were related to how critically reflective they were as a partnership. Partnerships represented a spectrum of criticality that ranged from an emphasis on equality and standardization with limited interrogation of equity to an emphasis on oppression-combating approaches to equity and prioritization of critical reflection. The findings signal that in district–SIO partnerships, both ideas and individuals are powerful in shaping equity sensemaking and often impede more expansive ways of conceptualizing equity.