The Cobb Teaching & Learning System (CTLS) is a digital learning initiative developed for and by the Cobb County School District (CCSD) in Georgia. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, this case study by Professor Kenneth Wong and UEP alum Spencer Davis '22 AM seeks to analyze CTLS’s design and implementation, focusing on digital transformation and professional collaboration within CCSD.

What does Deion Sanders' decision to leave HBCU coaching have to do with K-12 education policy reform? Professor Jonathan Collins ties the two together in his latest column for Kappan Magazine.

Enrolling in and completing college is the most reliable pathway to economic mobility in the United States, but access to post-secondary opportunities is not equal for youth from all family backgrounds. In an event held by the Brookings Center on Children and Families, Professor Lindsay Page participated in a panel discussion centered on this issue and recent research findings. (Video)

Carl F. Kaestle, University Professor and Professor of Education, History, and Public Policy emeritus, passed away on January 5, 2023, in Bloomington, IN. Carl was a towering figure in the history of American education whose scholarship, service, and leadership helped to build and shape the field.

Meet Ally Wright, '13 MAT, who specialized in Secondary English Education while at Brown. She began her teaching career as an English instructor before transitioning into her new role as a Founding Principal of South LA College Prep, a public charter school in Los Angeles, CA.

A recent study by John Papay of Brown University and Heather Hill of Harvard University on successful professional development strategies offers a promising path forward for teachers to avoid burnout.

Professor Kenneth Wong, an authority in governance redesign of school systems, and other leading education professionals comment on the crisis of confidence in the North Kingstown, RI school system operations and offer suggestions to kick off recovery efforts.

Public discourse at school board meetings has grown more heated and more politicized, leading some boards to limit sometimes lengthy public comment time in favor of expediency. This choice breeds distrust amongst constituents and closes opportunities for accountability and transparency. Professor Jonathan Collins offers ideas for how boards can change routines to build trust with parents.

School boards around the country have sought to limit public comment at their meetings in recent months, many in response to overheated debates on issues like COVID-19 precautions and equity for LGBTQ students. “If they don’t have conversations with the public, they might be making decisions more efficiently, but they are also opening themselves up to a lot of distrust,” says Professor Jonathan Collins.

Professors Matthew Kraft, Lindsay Page, Jonathan Collins, and faculty affiliate Susanna Loeb have been recognized by Education Week as being among the nation's 200 most impactful university-based scholars in education policy in 2022.

Between the 1970s and 1980s, a bipartisan group of philanthropists, educational researchers, and eventually the Ronald Reagan administration politicized the image of the strict Black school disciplinarian as the key to urban school turnaround. In this article, Professor Mahasan Chaney writes about this image became a substitute for (more expensive) structural urban school reforms and how this idea demonstrates that discipline became a dominant focus of school reform after 1970.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Professor Andrea Flores demonstrates how DACAmented and undocumented youth struggle with the hidden personal costs of educational access and the upward mobility it promises.

Professor John Papay is an Associate Professor of Education and Economics at Brown University. His research focuses primarily on two major areas: policies that affect teachers and the equitable distribution of effective teachers across schools, and how educational institutions affect student success from K-12 to college and beyond.

Meet Roosevelt Saifa Brown '23 A.M., Urban Education Policy! After nearly a decade of working in urban school districts, Roosevelt joined UEP to learn how to improve structural and systemic issues in urban public education.

“High-impact tutoring is a relationship-based tutoring,” said Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which produces research on effective education practices. “It relies on an adult to understand a student, understand their needs, be there to celebrate successes with them, be there to support them.”

Mahasan Chaney is an Assistant Professor of Education. Her research and teaching focus on education policy and the history of education, and center on three related policy areas: the racial politics of education, the politics of school punishment, and the ideologies and discourses of education reform.

Professor David Rangel contributes to a multi-part discussion about the growing needs of low-income families as well as the extent to which public policy effectively serves them and how it can be improved.

In a study co-authored by Professor Matthew Kraft, Danielle Sanderson Edwards, and others, researchers show that teacher vacancy levels vary drastically between schools in the same communities.

Meet Celenah Watson '23, a Brown undergraduate concentrating in Education Studies. Celenah is also a co-leader of our Departmental Undergraduate Group (DUG), which plans events and activities to build a sense of community within the concentration.

Alums of Brown University's Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program and former Urban Teacher Education Program (UTEP) answer the question: what keeps you coming back to the classroom each year to teach?

It's clear that school policing needs to change. In his latest column for Kappan Magazine, Professor Jonathan Collins lays out an idea of what community policing in schools should look like.

Over the past decade, “nudging” has gone from a novel concept to standard practice across many higher education institutions. Professor Lindsay Page weighs in on whether–and when–nudging works and should be deployed to improve student outcomes.

Professor Matthew Kraft and co-authors partnered with Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s fourth largest district, to design an approach that would bring more substitute teachers into hard-to-staff schools and keep them coming back consistently. They found that incentive pay led to a drop in classrooms without a teacher to cover — and a rise in student reading.

Tutoring can come in many forms. But no matter what form it takes, tutoring will be the most important factor in helping students catch up academically after the pandemic, a panel of experts, including Professor Susanna Loeb, told an EdSource roundtable.

Professor Emily Kalejs Qazilbash is a Professor of Practice in Education at Brown University. Before coming to Brown, she served as Chief Human Capital Officer in the Boston Public Schools but began her career as a teacher in Baltimore and Boston. Her research and teaching focus on how to create policies that help to diversify the teacher workforce, address issues of teacher quality, and ensure that students have an effective teacher in every classroom.

Recent research co-authored by Matthew Kraft suggests that expanding instructional time, particularly for schools with shorter days and years, can play an important role in ongoing efforts to accelerate student learning following disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wolfgang Breves '20 MAT, a science teacher at Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School in Providence, RI, reflects on his time as an MAT student at Brown, being a part of the Providence community, and why he finds fulfillment in teaching.

HON Gilbert Cisneros Jr., a U.S. Navy veteran, urban education policy A.M. alum, and the nation's Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, delivered the keynote speech at Brown's Veterans Day ceremony.

In this episode of Subtraction in Action, Professor Matt Kraft discusses his paper, “Instructional Time in U.S. Public Schools: Wide Variation, Causal Effects, and Lost Hours.”

In this research, Lindsay Page and co-authors assess the impact of Achieve Atlanta place-based scholarship and support services on college enrollment, persistence, and completion for students graduating from a school district in metro Atlanta.

The Brown Department of Education's Faculty Flash Talk Series highlights the research and teaching practices of our faculty, with a particular focus on how their work addresses educational inequality and makes a positive impact on society.

Meet Thomas Reid '23 MAT, a member of the social studies cohort!

Professor Kenneth Wong weighs in on how a shift in control of either or both houses of Congress during the 2022 midterm elections would mean changes for the Biden administration's education policy.

A new research paper co-authored by Professor John Papay shows that Massachusetts state policies aimed at making the community college transfer process easier have coincided with an increase in transfers to four-year colleges and universities among those from relatively higher-income households, but no change in the share of students from lower-income families making that transition.

Meet Elise Cole, a Boston native who plans to leverage her UEP degree to start a career in public school administration.

Students who are struggling academically may be less likely to participate in tutoring programs. As states and districts make opt-in, on-demand tutoring available to more and more students, Professor Susanna Loeb and Carly D. Robinson, Annenberg Postdoctoral Research Associate, discuss whether these optional programs reach the students who could benefit the most from them.

For Stephanie Sowin, Brown's MAT program was the pathway to a fulfilling career as a teacher, mentor, and track and field coach at Central Falls High School.

Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the decision to reopen schools for in-person instruction has become a pressing policy issue. A study by Professor Jonathan Collins examines what overall factors drive public support for schools re-opening in person and whether members of the public are willing to comply with school re-opening decisions based on their own preferences and/or the level of government from which the order comes.

Produced by the research–practice partnership, Educational Opportunity in Massachusetts, a study co-authored by Professor John Papay explores transfer patterns for 10 cohorts of students entering community colleges soon after high school.

When done right, professional development can improve teacher practice and student experiences. A new paper, published by the Research Partnership for Professional Learning and co-authored by Professor John Papay, examines the literature to understand what works in the field of professional development—and, just as importantly, what doesn’t.

Patricia Shiebler and Sarosha Hemani were chosen by the Knowles Teacher Initiative to participate in a five-year program that supports early-career, high school mathematics and science teachers.

Despite growing recognition of diverse forms of parental involvement, scarce research exists on the critical influence of sociocultural contexts on parental involvement in their children’s education. Building on and modifying Hoover-Dempsey’s parental involvement model, Yoko Yamamoto, Jin Li (Brown University), and Janine Bempechat (Boston University) propose a new sociocultural model to explain Chinese immigrant parents’ motivations for school-based and home-based involvement.

A new study and working paper co-authored by Professor Susanna Loeb synthesizes existing research on the implementation of tutoring programs, defined as one-to-one or small-group instruction in which a human tutor supports students in grades K-12 in an academic subject area.

Ayana Bass is a lifelong Rhode Island resident and a certified Elementary, Special Educator. At Equity Institute, she focuses on developing alternative educator pathway programs for school support professionals to address teacher shortages and diversity within the teacher workforce.

Meet Grace King '23 MAT, a future social studies teacher with a passion for spotlighting Rhode Island’s diverse history! 

Using a series of original survey experiments, this study by Jonathan Collins shows that Americans maintain strong support for antiracist teaching, but that support is drastically weakened when curriculum features the term "critical race theory."

Preparing K-12 students for careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields is an ongoing challenge confronting state policymakers. Examining the implementation of a science graduation testing requirement for high-school students in Massachusetts, findings by John Papay and others demonstrate the importance of equity considerations in designing and evaluating ambitious new policy initiatives.

Policymakers have renewed calls for expanding instructional time in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Matthew Kraft and Sarah Novicoff establish a set of empirical facts about time in school, synthesize the literature on the causal effects of instructional time, and conduct a case study of time use in an urban district.

In this column, Jonathan Collins discusses participatory budgeting in the U.S., the impact of democratic innovation strategies, and what democratic urban school reform means in practice.