Decentralization, teacher quality, and the education of English learners: Do state education agencies effectively prepare teachers of Els?

English learners are entitled to participate meaningfully and equally in educational programs. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) includes provisions to ensure success for all students, including English learners. However, the federal government does not prescribe specifically how states should meet these provisions; instead, it is the responsibility of states to develop respective plans of action. This decentralization means that states play a primary role in setting policy for teacher credentialing. In this paper, we address the following question: Do state education agencies effectively prepare teachers of ELs? We reviewed the teacher credentialing requirements to teach classified English learners in bilingual education, English language development, and sheltered English immersion settings, as well as the professional teaching standards for reference to culturally and linguistically diverse learners across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. We found inconsistencies across the US with regard to the education of classified English learners and document wide variation in teacher certification for working with English learners. We highlight implications for policy and teacher preparation.

Increasing Identification of Homeless Students: An Experimental Evaluation of Increased Communication Incorporating Behavioral Insights

Over 1.5 million students in the United States experience homelessness. These students are entitled to educational support through the Education for Homeless Children and Youth program. However, many homeless students are not identified and therefore never receive this support. Across 1,732 local education agencies in New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York, we conducted a randomized controlled trial of increased email communication incorporating behavioral insights targeting homeless liaison staff in order to increase the identification of homeless students. The intervention had an impact on the mean number of identified homeless students among the treatment local education agencies (3.62, 90% CI [0.32, 6.92], p = .07). The impact remained when outliers with high leverage were removed (1.51 CI [0.24, 2.79], p = .05). Within this sample, our analysis indicates that more than 3,000 additional homeless students were identified with a low-cost, low-intensity, behavioral intervention during the second semester.

Examining Equity in Remote Learning Plans: A Content Analysis of State Responses to COVID-19

In this technical report, the authors present a content analysis of state guidance on remote learning from the 2019-20 school year. As schools across the country closed in response to COVID-19, state education agencies (SEAs) developed guidance for use by districts on how to ensure the continuation of education during the pandemic. The described analysis applied an equity framework that was developed based on concepts drawn from a literature review to examine the extent to which SEAs addressed issues of equity in their remote learning recommendations. The analysis revealed variation in the extent to which states explicitly focused on equity in their guidance. The analysis also identified exemplar states that encouraged local educators to keep equity at the forefront of their planning.

Opening the black box of data-based school monitoring: Data infrastructures, flows and practices in state education agencies

Contributing to a rising number of Critical Data Studies which seek to understand and critically reflect on the increasing datafication and digitalisation of governance, this paper focuses on the field of school monitoring, in particular on digital data infrastructures, flows and practices in state education agencies. Our goal is to examine selected features of the enactment of datafication and, hence, to open up what has widely remained a black box for most education researchers. Our findings are based on interviews conducted in three state education agencies in two different national contexts (the US and Germany), thus addressing the question of how the datafication and digitalisation of school governance has not only manifested within but also across educational contexts and systems. As our findings illustrate, the implementation of data-based school monitoring and leadership in state education agencies appears as a complex entanglement of very different logics, practices and problems, producing both new capabilities and powers. Nonetheless, by identifying different types of ‘doing data discrepancies’ reported by our interviewees, we suggest an analytical heuristic to better understand at least some features of the multifaceted enactment of data-based, increasingly digitalised governance, within and beyond the field of education.