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.”

David Upegui, Adjunct Lecturer in Education, Teacher Residency Site Leader at Central Falls, and science teacher has been named among the 2022 nationwide class of PBS Digital Innovator All-Stars for his work encouraging students to be innovative thinkers and future community leaders.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Swearer Center provides Community-Based Learning and Research (CBLR) Course Mini-Grants to instructors of undergraduate and graduate courses at Brown, in order to support the implementation of high-impact community-engaged learning experiences.

The Texas State Board of Education voted this month to delay the revision process of the state’s K-12 social studies standards until 2025, bowing to conservative pressure against drafts intended to make history instruction more inclusive. Jonathan Collins says educators and parents who want more-inclusive history taught in schools will have to be civically engaged.

For fourth graders across the country, test results show the worst declines in reading and math scores in more than three decades. In this Q&A, Susanna Loeb discusses the students who suffered most during the pandemic, the different types of learning loss that kids experienced, and why the pandemic should lead people to reimagine schooling.

The results of a national test showed just how devastating the last two years have been for 9-year-old schoolchildren, especially the most vulnerable. Commentary by Professor Susanna Loeb.

His column, Policy Solutions, is about tackling some of the most pressing issues in education. His first column, "Defying the gravitational pull of education politics," looks at the threat politics surrounding public education poses to poor and/or Black and brown students.

The Swearer Center provides Community-Based Learning and Research (CBLR) Course Mini-Grants to instructors of undergraduate and graduate courses at Brown, in order to support the implementation of high-impact community-engaged learning experiences.

In this recently updated working paper, Matthew Kraft and Joshua Bleiberg offer analyses that illustrate the imperative to build more timely, detailed, and nationally representative data systems on the K-12 education labor market to better inform policy.

Education policy and the role of schools are a neglected part of the welfare state. Yet schools may be important sites for understanding how policy, work, and families intersect in immigrant households. Drawing on thirty interviews from seventeen households, an article co-authored by Professor David Rangel highlights the experiences of families with young children during a time of increased national hostility toward immigrants.

The Board of Overseers of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University established the permanent annual scholarship in 2012 for a UEP student who most epitomizes the former Brown University president’s commitment to educational equity and social justice.