Nathalie Kirsch

A $7 billion federal grant program designed to turn around struggling schools may have also turned around the nearby neighborhoods, leading to higher property values and pushing out some of the low-income families the program was intended to benefit, according to a recent paper from Vanderbilt University researchers Cameron Friday and Tucker Smith. Their research focuses on the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program’s investment in Metro-Nashville Public Schools from 2009 to 2016 as a case study.

A new study from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) has found that performance-based pay incentives in one of the nation’s largest school districts  helped schools attract and retain effective teachers and significantly boost student achievement.

With a growing interest in career and technical education (CTE),  a recent paper from CALDER explores how teachers’ professional backgrounds influence student success in high school. Researchers Roddy Theobald, Dan Goldhaber, and Erica Mallett Moore looked at outcomes beyond standardized tests–including absenteeism, disciplinary incidents, grade point averages, retention in grade, and on-time graduation—for students in Washington state.