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.