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.

Nicole Mathis graduated from Brown's Master of Arts in Teaching program in 1996 and is an Assistant Principal at Classical High School in Providence, RI. 

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

The move away from exit exams has a lot to do with a growing sense that, while standardized tests measure student learning, they don’t capture the full range of student abilities, said John Papay, an associate professor of education at Brown University who studies high-stakes testing.

New research from the Annenberg Institute offers a case study of how one state, Massachusetts, has fared in addressing the needs of a unique English-learner population and what lessons other states can learn.

In his latest column for Kappan, Professor Jonathan Collins explains that superintendent turnover is one of the biggest problems plaguing urban school districts.

A team of Annenberg Institute researchers, including Professor John Papay, has released a report on the demographic characteristics and educational outcomes of high school newcomers, defined as English learners (ELs) in their first 12 months of schooling in the United States.

“Our work shows that there is good evidence that the MCAS is measuring the academic skills of students,” said John Papay, associate professor of education and economics at Brown University and director of the Annenberg Institute. If MCAS scores simply reflected “teaching to the test, we wouldn’t see the same relationship with long-term outcomes that we do,” the Brown economist noted.

“We ask the K-12 school system to do lots of things,” said John Papay, an associate professor at Brown University who studies high-stakes testing. “One of the questions is ‘How do we have requirements ensure students leave high school ready to live productive lives?’”

A psychologist and an economist walk into a debate … Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Matthew A. Kraft, associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, discuss looping—staying with the same teacher for multiple years.

Ellie Jurmann is a current senior in Brown's Combined Baccalaureate/Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program. After completing her undergraduate degree in 2024, she will enroll in the MAT program as a member of the mathematics cohort.

Adam Jackson is from Carlisle, PA, and is a current student in our MAT-Science Education program. He has a B.A. in Physics from Wesleyan University.

In an increasingly competitive academic environment, high school students often turn to data to inform their college application decisions. Professor Lindsay Page and others show that the adoption of one popular tool to view historical admissions data, Naviance, inadvertently dissuaded many high-achieving high school students from applying to colleges for which they were competitive.

In July, Professor Tricia Kelly traveled to Guatemala with educators and pre-service teachers to engage with local educators, youth, and families, and to exchange ideas and understanding of Guatemalan and U.S. educational systems and practices. Here she reflects on the experience.

In this chapter, Professor Lindsay Page and co-authors present the economic rationale for financial aid, a summary of how aid works in the US context, and common methodological challenges in the study of financial aid.

Three grads of Brown’s master’s program in urban education policy are working to help Providence families get their kids to college. One, Madalyn Ciampi ’17 AM, helped launch the nonprofit Providence Promise six years ago and is the organization’s executive director. Two others joined her: Rachel Palumbo ’21 AM, development manager, and Chandana Srinivas ’21 AM, family engagement director.