This summer, MAT alums Cuauhtemoc Arizpe and Elliana Reynolds served as the principals for Brown Summer High School, guiding the high school enrichment program and a new cohort of MAT students.

Professor Matthew Kraft will serve a one-year term on the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The CEA advises the President on economic policy based on data, research, and evidence.

Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) contain detailed information about students’ experiences receiving special education services in schools. Using rigorous quantitative methods, Christopher Cleveland and co-author Jessica Markham (Boston University) are using digital IEPs from Indiana to identify statewide patterns in evaluations, goals, services, and placements.

Christopher Cleveland is an Assistant Professor of Education and Education Policy, holding a joint appointment in the Education Department and Annenberg Institute. His research and teaching focus on quantitative policy analysis in school finance, gifted and special education, and human capital.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Education, Jacques P. Lesure, shares about his recently-defended dissertation research on nonprofit leadership programs for “high-achieving” Black men, plans for future research projects, and courses he will teach at Brown.

The Brown Department of Education is happy to announce that faculty members Tracy L. Steffes and Diane Silva Pimentel have received promotions. Effective July 1, 2024, Professor Steffes has been promoted to Professor of Education and History and Professor Silva Pimentel has been promoted to Distinguished Senior Lecturer.

For her Urban Education Policy master's capstone project, Ramona Santos Torres AM'24 created a decision-making matrix for community-based organizations to assess the impacts of becoming the plaintiff in class-action lawsuits.

Namibia is a linguistically diverse country that attained independence in 1990. One of the most significant policy decisions at the time was to remove Afrikaans as one of the official languages, recognizing English only. In this paper, Kristof Iipinge (University of Namibia) and Pierre de Galbert (Brown University) critically review the criteria used to justify this decision and argue that the choice of these criteria, and the “value” attributed to European languages, compared with that of Namibian languages, were biased in a way to support the monolingual English policy.

Kelvin Roldán, Ed.L.D. is currently Deputy Commissioner for System Transformation within the Rhode Island Department of Education and will teach "Urban Education Policy: System and Governance" this summer, a foundational course for Brown's Urban Education Policy graduate students.

Kiana Harriel MAT'24 incorporated her passion for arts education into her social studies classroom at East Providence High School by utilizing Visual Thinking Strategies.

Budget constraints and limited supplies of local tutors have caused many K-12 school districts to pivot from individual tutoring in-person toward small-group tutoring online to expand access to personalized instruction. Professor Matthew Kraft and co-author Virginia Lovinson, Ph.D., conducted a field experiment to explore the effect of increasing student-tutor ratios on middle school students’ math achievement and growth during an online tutoring program.

Alea Rubin Evens, MAT'24 utilized the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning framework to help develop biology students at Central Falls High School develop scientific reasoning and writing skills.

Kraft was motivated to run for an open seat on the School Committee to help strengthen public education, and will serve in this volunteer, non-partisan position in Belmont, Massachusetts for three years.

For her Urban Education Policy master’s capstone project, Abby McClain AM'24 utilized new quantitative data science skills to analyze the PPSD school lottery and suggest changes to increase placement equity.

For her Urban Education Policy master’s capstone project, Michaela Andreozzi AM'24 used a controlled study to examine the impacts of Providence Promise, a College Savings Account (CSA) program promoting educational equity in Providence.

Introducing Hannah Stoch, the Department of Education's new Social Media and Communications Assistant! Hannah is a rising junior concentrating in Education Studies and Science, Technology, & Society.

The capstone research project integrates all elements of the graduate learning experience and offers an opportunity to demonstrate the ability to apply the tools of education policy research by analyzing a contemporary policy issue.

The graduate students enrolled in Brown's Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program, class of 2024, delivered their capstone projects in a roundtable format to faculty members, fellow students, mentors, and local educators.

Leo Tamagawa Gordon is a Master of Arts in Teaching candidate and Education Studies A.B. alum from Berkeley, CA. In this spotlight, he shares his journey from being inspired by a high school teacher to pursuing a MAT in Secondary English, and discusses the program's impact on his approach to teaching and connecting with students.

Three Education Studies concentrators were awarded Honors after completing a senior thesis and presenting their work to faculty, peers, family, and other members of the campus community in a conference-style event hosted by the Department of Education.

As part of the program, faculty members from the Brown Department of Education hosted various learning experiences, including an Urban Teach Conference and a session on multilingualism.

Cat Liao graduated from Brown University's MAT program in 2021 and is currently a Schoolwide Substitute Teacher at Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts in Providence, RI.

Teacher strikes are tactics that unions use to influence contract negotiations and high-profile actions that have the potential to signal the need for policy change. Professor Matthew Kraft (Brown University) and co-author Melissa Arnold Lyon (UAlbany) studied the political economy of strikes by collecting original data on U.S. teacher strikes from 2007-2018.

A three-year study focused on the evaluation and improvement of teacher preparation programs aims to identify best practices among existing models of evaluation tools and provide recommendations for developing new models. Under the direction of an interdisciplinary steering committee that included Professor John Papay, the project outcomes will be made applicable and accessible to different stakeholders, including state and federal agencies, teacher preparation programs, practitioners, and researchers.

Professor Li was one of five recipients recognized by President Christina Paxson at the monthly faculty meeting on April 2. This annual award celebrates contributions to University committees and governance.

Melannie Munera-Goez is a Rhode Island native who joined Brown's Urban Education Policy master's program to impact local education and give back to the communities that built her.

In examining the state of the U.S. K-12 teaching profession over the last half century, Matthew A. Kraft (Brown University) and Melissa Arnold Lyon (University at Albany) find that the current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years. Kraft and Lyon identify and explore a range of hypotheses that might explain these historical patterns including economic and sociopolitical factors, education policies, and school environments.

In this study, Professor Matthew Kraft and his co-authors develop a conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. Their findings illustrate why viewpoints about, and solutions to, shortages depend critically on whether one takes an aggregate or local perspective.

In this paper, Professor Lindsay Page and her co-authors study the identification of causal effects in clustered observational studies (COS) designs. They focus on the prospect of differential selection of units to clusters, which occurs when the units’ cluster selections depend on the clusters’ treatment assignments, and outline the magnitude of the bias that can occur with differential selection.

Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. In this working paper, Professor Matthew Kraft and co-authors examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting their staggered implementation across states.

Kiana Harriel, a Rhode Island native, is a Master of Arts in Teaching student in Secondary Social Studies Education. She has a BA in Anthropology with a Minor in Education from Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

Sara Mickelson graduated from Brown's Urban Education Policy master's program in 2012 and is the Deputy Cabinet Secretary for the New Mexico Early Childhood Education Department.

A study co-authored by Professor Lindsay Page shows that Asian American students — especially South Asian applicants — are less likely to attend Ivy League and other prestigious institutions compared to white students despite having similar academic and extracurricular credentials.

In this brief, Brown scholars highlight data-driven opportunities that build on the Providence Public School District's existing teacher staffing strategies, particularly around recruitment practices, and have identified where targeted retention efforts could be most beneficial.

Ramona Santos Torres, a current Urban Education Policy master's student at Brown, is the Executive Director and one of the Co-founders of Parents Leading for Educational Equity (PLEE). PLEE is a parent-led, grassroots organization with a mission to fight for parent voice in education decision-making, and for access to a high-quality public school option for all children of color.

A new paper from Professor Lindsay Page, along with co-authors Danielle Lowry, Aizat Nurshatayeva, and Jennifer Iriti, contributes to the literature on college financial aid and aid displacement by investigating whether the aid packaging practices of postsecondary institutions are responsive to the generosity of the Pittsburgh Promise scholarship.

This working paper by Matthew A. Kraft and Sarah Novicoff examines the fundamental and complex role that time plays in the learning process, revealing how large differences in the length of the school day and year across public schools are an underappreciated dimension of educational inequality in the United States.

At a recent event hosted by the Boston Foundation, researchers from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University joined several educational leaders to explore the changing demographics and critical resources required to support immigrant newcomers to Massachusetts high schools.

Britt Ruiz graduated from Brown's Master of Arts in Teaching program in 2023 and teaches U.S. History and AP U.S. Government at Paul Cuffee School in Providence, RI.

Christien Laible is from Norwalk, CT, and is a current Urban Education Policy master's student at Brown. He earned his Bachelor's degree in East Asian Studies with a minor in Human Development from Colby College.

The Education Department at Brown University invites applications for a one-year visiting Assistant Professor in urban education policy with expertise in race and politics to begin August 2024.

Cuauhtemoc Arizpe comes from the City of San Antonio and is a current MAT student specializing in secondary mathematics education. He earned his Bachelor's degree in Public Policy from Brown University with a primary focus on education policy.

A new policy briefing from the White House cites research by Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education. On January 17, the Biden-Harris Administration announced its Improving Student Achievement Agenda for 2024, which is focused on proven strategies that will accelerate academic performance for every child in school. The administration urges States, districts, and schools to provide high-dosage tutoring and incorporates Kraft's and Grace Falken's design and implementation principles into their recommendation.

A new publication by Professor David Rangel, Department of Education, and Professor Emily Rauscher, Department of Sociology, examines the complex relationship between infant health, parental education, and race and ethnicity.

Professor Lindsay Page is working in partnership with the NISS and Georgia State University to study how chatbots can improve student outcomes in foundational college math and English courses.

Professors Matthew Kraft, John Papay, and Lindsay Page have been recognized by Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and Education Week blogger, as being among the nation's 200 most impactful university-based scholars in education policy in 2023.

Kate Donohue graduated from Brown's Master of Arts in Urban Education Policy program in 2018 and is a Senior Project Manager at Annenberg Institute at Brown University where she studies teacher pipelines and human capital processes.

The paper, “New Schools and New Classmates: The Disruption and Peer Group Effects of School Reassignment,” was selected as one of two 2022 Best Paper winners for Economics of Education Review. Co-authored with David Liebowitz, Rodney Hughes, Matt Lenard, and Darryl Hill, the paper focuses on the impacts of the school reassignment policy in Wake County, North Carolina.