Jennifer Oppong learned a lot during her four years at the University of Virginia, including how to listen to her heart and keep her mind open to change.

Mindy Adnot, a graduate student in the Education Policy doctoral program, has been awarded a $20,000 Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Fellowship Program.

Today, the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy is proud to announce that ten Batten students were elected to Phi Beta Kappa Society. Founded in 1776 amidst the American Revolution by five William and Mary students, Phi Beta Kappa remains America’s most prestigious honors society, and one whose founders believed education and academic excellence were integral to freedom of thought.

There is little direct evidence on the widely held view that school districts spend too few of available resources on student instruction. I find evidence of such an expense preference by assessing the effect of competition from private schools on the allocation of resources by school districts. 

A prominent class of explanations for the gender gaps in student outcomes focuses on the interactions between students and teachers. In this study, I examine whether assignment to a same-gender teacher influences student achievement, teacher perceptions of student performance, and student engagement.

This guide identifies practices that can improve the performance of chronically low-performing schools — a process commonly referred to as creating “turnaround schools.” The four recommendations in this guide work together to help failing schools make adequate yearly progress.

Children in households reporting the receipt of free or reduced-price school meals through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) are more likely to have negative health outcomes than observationally similar nonparticipants. Assessing causal effects of the program is made difficult, however, by missing counterfactuals and systematic underreporting of program participation. 

The retirement security landscape has changed drastically for most workers over the last thirty years – except for public school teachers and other state and local government employees. Many private-sector employers have stopped offering traditional retirement plans, while most state and local employees remain covered by defined benefit (DB) pension plans. 

While the retirement security landscape has changed drastically for most workers over the last twenty years, traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans remain the overwhelming norm for K–12 teachers. Because DB plans pay off fully with a fixed income after retirement only if a teacher stays in the profession for decades and yield little or nothing if a teacher leaves early, DB plans induce a strong, nonlinear relationship between years of tenure and benefit accrual.

Many believe that the War on Poverty, launched by President Johnson in 1964, ended in failure. In 2010, the official poverty rate was 15 percent, almost as high as when the War on Poverty was declared. Historical and contemporary accounts often portray the War on Poverty as a costly experiment that created doubts about the ability of public policies to address complex social problems.