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With budget season upon us and planning for the 2022-23 school year well underway, district and school leaders have important decisions to make about how to best support educators, students, and families as we continue to build toward a stronger and more equitable education system in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Drawing on the library of EdResearch for Recovery briefs released over the past two years, here are 7 evidence-based strategies we hope districts prioritize in budgets and programmatic decisions this coming fall.

Yet on Thursday, April 14, even amid all the existing hubbub, it was hard to miss one particular group of visitors.

High school students from an array of schools in Providence arrived on a fleet of yellow school buses, flooding onto the sidewalk in front of the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center. They greeted each other warmly, the sounds of their laughter carrying across the College Green. They poured into the Salomon Center for Teaching, cheered boisterously and waved Brown pennants as University President Christina H. Paxson invited them to express their excitement for the day ahead.

The recipient of the 2022 Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award is Dr. Matthew A. Kraft. Using a “multi-channel communications approach,” Dr. Kraft goes beyond traditional outlets for scholarly work to share research relevant to K-12 teachers and teaching. This includes topics such as teacher evaluation, teaching coaching and tutoring, the need to decrease classroom interruptions and the inequitable impact of teacher layoffs, all from the perspectives of research, policy and practice. Dr. Kraft incorporates use of social media, conversations with practitioners and service deliverers, op-eds and articles in the popular and education press as well as active partnerships with members of various stakeholder groups.

The number of Providence teachers who retired or left the school district jumped from an average of 94 per year before the COVID-19 pandemic and the state takeover to 157 in the current school year, but overall teacher retention has been better than the national average, according to a new study.

Researchers from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform found that an average of 93 percent of city teachers returned to the district for another school year over the last five years, compared to the national average of 92 percent.

Co-authored by Penn GSE associate professor Michael Gottfried and the Annenberg Institute at Brown University's Lindsay Page and Danielle Edwards, the evidence brief, "District Strategies to Reduce Student Absenteeism," takes aim at the growing problem of absenteeism. Meticulously researched and cited, it breaks down the issue of absenteeism and introduces a three-tier strategy for administrators, teachers, and parents to employ.

The brief is part of the Annenberg Institute's EdResearch for Recovery initiative, designed to provide schools with the data and evidence they need to navigate recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the wake of moves by states to assert growing authority over struggling school districts, Beth Schueler, an assistant professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia, and Joshua Bleiberg, a researcher at the Annenberg Institute for Education Reform at Brown University, recently set out to examine the impact of state takeovers of districts. They looked at the effect of state takeovers in the 35 districts, spanning 14 states, that were taken over by state authorities between 2011 and 2016. These included Lawrence and Holyoke, but not Southbridge, where 2016-17 was the first full school year under state control. 

Today, Results for America and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University released two new EdResearch for Recovery briefs by leading national experts highlighting evidence-based strategies to reduce student absenteeism and help students make more informed choices about college.

• District Strategies to Reduce Student Absenteeism - Michael Gottfried (University of Pennsylvania), Lindsay Page and Danielle Edwards (Annenberg Institute at Brown University)
• Helping Students Make Informed Choices About College - Celeste K. Carruthers (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Oded Gurantz (Truman School of Public Affairs, University of Missouri) and Lindsay Page (Annenberg Institute at Brown University)

Over the last decade, nearly every state in the U.S. implemented major reforms to its teacher evaluation systems. These reforms sought to use evaluation for two purposes: 1) to inform personnel decisions, such as rewarding highly effective teachers and removing ineffective ones, and 2) to provide feedback to teachers to help them improve their practice. The idea was appealing—two birds, one stone.

But new evidence undermines that idea. A recent  study by Alvin Christian and me suggests that new evaluation systems have not been able to produce high-quality evaluation feedback at scale. Providing feedback to teachers is a worthy investment, but we suspect it would be more effective to focus the evaluation system on career decisions and provide the most formative feedback outside of the evaluation process.