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.