Research

The purpose of this study was to determine the most prevalent African American Language (AAL) phonological and grammatical features in slavery- and Civil Rights-themed children’s literature.

This study investigated relations among parental education, parents’ attitudes toward their adolescents’ school, parental support for learning at home, and adolescents’ academic identity and school performance over time and in different national contexts.

New research findings show that teachers’ experiences during their first year in the profession impact how they assess students, particularly Black students, later in their careers.

This study tested the hypothesis that high-quality kindergarten teachers sustain and amplify the skill development of children who participated in North Carolina’s NC Pre-K program during the previous year. Higher value-added teachers promoted the skill development of all children, but did not differentially benefit the skill development of former NC Pre-K participants compared to non-participants.

This study assessed whether the peer environment in kindergarten and first grade affected student learning following an early mathematics intervention. Findings suggest that classroom peer effects may play only a limited role in sustaining early intervention effects.

New research findings show that teachers’ experiences during their first year teaching impact how they assess students, particularly Black students, later in their careers.

This study explored the association between relative age and the persistence of ADHD diagnosis at older ages. Contrary to some expectations, children who were younger when they started kindergarten are as likely as children who were older to have a stable ADHD diagnosis.

School districts across the U.S. have adopted funding policies designed to distribute resources more equitably across schools. However, schools are also increasing external fundraising efforts to supplement district budget allocations. This study found that external fundraising offset the policy-induced per-pupil expenditure gap by 26-39 percent.

African American students often encounter racial microaggressions when attending predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Experiencing racial microaggressions can negatively affect African American students’ feelings of belonging to the campus community. Racial microaggressions can also affect students’ physical and emotional stability.

Estimates indicate that a child’s exposure to higher NC Pre-K funding was positively associated with that child’s academic achievement 6 years later. NC Pre-K funding effects on achievement were positive for all subgroups tested, and statistically significant for most.

Article reviews what racial microaggressions are, the impact of microaggressions on african-americans students, and research-based recommendations to address racial microaggressions in educational settings.

Researchers examined whether kindergarten conduct problems among mostly population-representative samples of children were associated with increased criminal and related costs across adolescence and adulthood, as well as government and medical services costs in adulthood.

This brief, published in partnership with the Hunt Institute, describes the state of school-aged children’s health and healthcare access in the U.S., summarizes research on the link between children’s health and educational performance, and presents examples and models of school-based healthcare along with summaries of the existing evidence on their effectiveness.

In their chapter, Situated Professional Learning through Targeted Reading Instruction: Building Teacher Capacity and Diagnostic Practice, in Innovations in Literacy Professional Learning, Leslie Babinski and co-authors explore professional learning within the Targeted Reading Instruction model.

School-based telemedicine clinics (SBTCs) provide students with access to healthcare during the regular school day through private videoconferencing with a healthcare provider. SBTC access reduces the likelihood that a student is chronically absent and reduces the number of days absent.

Increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of educators serving students in our public schools is a promising strategy that is vastly underutilized. The research has repeatedly shown the importance of a diverse teacher workforce. However, the path to increase diversity of educators is complex and will take significant efforts and investments by policymakers and advocates to accomplish.

In this policy memo, Ladd argues that charter schools disrupt four core goals of education policy in the United States, namely: 1) establishing coherent systems of schools, 2) attending to child poverty and disadvantage, 3) limiting racial segregation and isolation, and 4) ensuring that public funds are spent wisely. Ladd offers policy recommendations to better meet these challenges.

A diverse teacher workforce has the potential to improve outcomes for all students, and especially for students of color. While North Carolina clearly recognizes the importance of increasing diversity in the workforce – and despite national and local efforts from school districts and policy makers – the teaching workforce remains largely white and female, even as the students they serve become increasingly diverse, widening the racial gap between teachers and students.

This article examines the impact on student absenteeism of a large, school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during times when students traveled to and from school. The authors find that the program resulted in a 0.58 percentage point (8.5 percent) reduction in the elementary school-level absence rate in the years following initial implementation.

The author investigates the effects of a multiyear program, StudentU, on the early high school outcomes of participating students by exploiting data from oversubscribed admissions lotteries. Results suggest that comprehensive services delivered outside of the regular school day have the potential to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students.

In their chapter, Latinx Immigrant Parents and Their Children in Times of COVID-19: Facing Inequities Together in the “Mexican Room” of the New Latino South, in The Pandemic Divide: How Covid Increased Inequality in America, Leslie Babinski and co-authors outline the state of affairs for Latinx families in the southeastern US in times of Covid-19 and to situate what is happening within the broader experiences of Latinx communities in the US.

This research brief examines two measures of educational opportunity in North Carolina public school districts, average achievement and achievement growth. The first measure— average achievement—indexes the average level of student achievement at a single point in time. The second measure—achievement growth—indexes the rate of growth in student achievement over time.

Economic theory suggests that crime should respond to punishment severity. Using increases in punishment severity in drug-free school zones along with changes in the probability of detection resulting from a community crime-monitoring program, we demonstrate that drug-related crime drops in blocks just within the drug-free school zones, where punishments are more severe, but only if the monitoring intensity–and hence the probability of detection–is at intermediate levels.

Project goal is to design, develop, and test an online professional development program called Bridging English Language Learning and Academics (BELLA) for improving teacher and student outcomes for working with English Learners (ELs).

In this paper the authors study the effects of three large, nearly-simultaneous coal-fired power plant closures on school absences in Chicago. They find that the closures resulted in a 6 percent reduction in absenteeism in nearby schools relative to those farther away following the closures.

This study examines the essential nature of coordinating entities during a crisis by comparing the experiences of out-of-school time (OST) stakeholders in cities with coordinating entities to OST stakeholders in cities that may have elements of an OST system (e.g., common data system) but not a coordinating entity.

The pandemic profoundly affected American children with disruptions to their schooling and daily care. A new study found that service sector workers who had a young child reported disruption on 24 percent of days in fall 2020. The disruptions were more common in remote learning and had a negative impact on children’s behavior and on parenting mood and behavior.

This brief examines how the benefits of high-quality ECE might simultaneously diminish and persist in the long run. Strategies are then discussed to sustain the impacts of ECE during elementary school.

Early proficiency in math skills is increasingly being seen as an independent area worthy of early curriculum development and policy investment to reduce socioeconomic disparities in children’s school readiness.

This project seeks to understand whether, for whom, and how the effects of successful early childhood school readiness interventions are sustained across a child’s development.

The North Carolina Resilience and Learning Project is a partnership with the Public School Forum of North Carolina to promote and support trauma-informed schools across the state. The project team works closely with districts and schools to provide professional learning and ongoing coaching to meet school-specific needs and goals. Our work aims to create systems-level change by shifting the culture and mindset of an entire school so that staff begin to see a child’s behavior in the context of their life experiences, in consideration of possible trauma history or stress response system triggers.

Project Description The Durham Children’s Initiative (DCI) (formerly East Durham Children’s Initiative) is a place-based, nonprofit organization that supports children and families from cradle to college or career. Established in 2010, DCI’s vision is that all children in Durham graduate from high school ready for college or career. To achieve this vision, DCI provides children…

Project Description Principal Investigator Desiree W. Murray, co-Investigator David Rabiner, and research staff investigated whether the Incredible Years Teacher Program (IYT) had an impact on K-2 students’ attention, social-emotional functioning, and academic achievement. The Incredible Years Training Series, developed by Carolyn Webster-Stratton, is a multi-component evidence-based intervention for young children including parent training, teacher training,…

Project Description This project evaluated the School Based Child and Family Support Team (CFST) Initiative, which provides appropriate family-centered, strengths-based community services and supports to those children at risk of school failure or out-of-home placements as a result of physical, social, legal, emotional or developmental factors that affect their academic performance. Early results indicated that…

Project Description The Safe Schools/Healthy Students program strove to reduce school violence and promote students’ healthy development. The Center’s work involved: Researching funding opportunities Assistance to secure $7.5M in federal funds to reduce school violence and promote student health Staff training and supervision to implement evidence-based programs to reduce school violence Evaluating programs in accordance…

Project Description Chronic truancy is prevalent among school children who are at risk. Truancy in primary school is predictive of truancy in later years, school dropout, and the closely associated problems of adolescence, including substance abuse and delinquency. Hence there is reason to believe that an effective program of truancy reduction in the primary years…

Project Description The Be CALM (Cool, Attentive, Logical, and Mature) intervention is guided by a theory of change that intentionally targets self-regulatory processes in need of support and development during early adolescence: immature cognitive controls, increased emotionality and stress reactivity, and responsivity to peers. This approach, which is delivered by teachers in health education classes…

Project Description Write a book for educational researchers, and for those training to become educational researchers, to introduce basic normative concepts concerning education, in terms that they can use to guide and frame their work, and provide them with the intellectual resources needed to scrutinize these concepts, make judgments about them, and apply those judgments…

Project Description This project evaluates the first phase of America’s Promise Alliance’s new nationwide effort to deliver five ‘promises’ to 15 million young people between 2008 and 2012. The first phase focuses on improving high school graduation rates through a series of school dropout summits. The Alliance has planned a series of 50 state-level and…

Project Description The Larry King Center for Building Children’s Futures is a new initiative aimed at improving the lives of children in Charlotte, North Carolina. Project Goals The Larry King Center has identified the following key objectives: improve school readiness, reduce the incidence and impact of child abuse and neglect, and increase access to health…

Project Description Center researchers developed a web-based data collection system to collect evaluation measures for the Title V State Abstinence Education Plan. The new system was based on the model that the Center for Child and Family Policy developed for the Child and Family Support Teams, which has been functioning for over five years. The…

Project Description This study harvests state administrative data for insights into who teaches what kinds of students, what determines teacher quality and how these concerns affect academic achievement and high school graduation rates. The research, on public school teachers and students in kindergarten through 12th grade, concentrates on interactions among teacher hiring, compensation, assignment and…

Project Description United Way Worldwide provided grant funds to 14 United Way agencies in three states to increase the demand for teacher effectiveness. The underlying assumption of this initiative is that creating policies that promote the training, recruitment, and retention of effective teachers will lead to increased student success. Furthermore, it is assumed that elected officials,…

Project Description A team of social policy researchers from the Center for Child and Family Policy and the Sanford School of Public Policy examined the connection between test scores and important outcomes that signaled or influenced the accumulation of human capital. The research had policy implications for high school graduation and post-secondary education rates, labor…

Project Description Current research indicates that formative assessment programs in various states have resulted in improved outcomes for students. However, the degree of benefit varies widely and the specific impact of NC’s KEA remains unknown. Dr. Muschkin, Dr. Glennie and Dr. Lennon will conduct an impact study to holistically assess the impact of KEA in…

Project Description Evaluate the work and activities of the Larry King Center in Charlotte, NC. Project Goals The evaluation of the activities of the Larry King Center involved four components: Survey with participants of the School Readiness Action Planning Process that occurred in 2011. The goal of this survey was to assess what activities have…

Project Description The U.S. Government has made the collection of large-scale individual-level longitudinal data for students in kindergarten through twelfth grade and beyond a major national priority, and has to date invested $500 million (with another $100 million slated for awards during fiscal year 2012) in helping states to develop the capacity to collect, maintain,…

Project Description The GREAT Schools and Families Project – completed in 2007 – was a multi-site program to develop and evaluate violence prevention programs for middle school students. Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the University of Georgia-Athens collaborated on this project. The project was funded by the National Centers for…

Project Description The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) received funding from the Gates Foundation for this project. The American Institutes of Research (AIR) was the main contractor and worked with subcontractors from several universities, including Duke University, who, among them, have experience working with rich administrative data in North…

Project Description This includes an evaluation of the Hill Center Reading Achievement Program (HillRAP) as implemented in the Durham Public Schools from September 2008 to June 2010. The Center for Child and Family Policy conducted this evaluation in collaboration with the Durham Public School System and the NC GlaxoSmithKline Foundation. This study is an extension…

Project Description This project established and maintained databases for conducting study on high school reform and integrates the data with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. Project Goals The goal of this project is to investigate the Early College High School model and its impact on students. Project Findings

Project Description Accountability programs are intended to induce teachers and schools to adopt more effective and efficient means of achieving set educational goals using a system of extrinsic punishments and rewards. In North Carolina, two different accountability systems were jointly adopted in 2002. NCLB focused on punishment for underperforming schools by introducing parental choice, after-school…

Project Description Accountability programs rely on high-stakes testing in order to measure progress toward equity in educational resources and student outcomes, with an emphasis on empirical criteria of improvement. These criteria have enhanced the collection of administrative data on districts, schools, and students for accountability reporting requirements, as well as focus on using this information…

Project Description An important part of the U.S. safety net, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides cash-like benefits to low-income people that can only be used to purchase food. My proposed project will investigate relationships between the timing of SNAP benefit receipt and children’s achievement test scores in North Carolina (NC), using a unique…

Project Description We combined the quasi-experimental data we have constructed on mass job losses by month in every county in North Carolina and by quarter in every state in the US (Ananat, Gassman-Pines, and Gibson-Davis 2013) with local area statistics on mobility by cohort (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, and Turner 2014) to identify how changing local…

Project Description This study evaluated the effectiveness of two promising interventions – computerized attention training and computer-assisted instruction (CAI) – for 77 first-graders identified by their teachers as having attention difficulties. Project CLASS assessed the impact of these interventions on students’ behavior, attention and academic achievement. Students who received either intervention were more likely than…

Project Description This project provided a preliminary evaluation of the National STEM Career Platform, a web-based system for helping high school students identify STEM careers that match their interests and to become aware of the educational and career opportunities that are available to them. Researchers in the Center for Child and Family Policy created and…

Project Description The William T. Grant Scholars Program supports promising early-career researchers from diverse disciplines, who have demonstrated success in conducting high-quality research and are seeking to further develop and broaden their expertise. Selected as a 2010-11 Scholar, Dr. Elizabeth Ananat received funding from the W.T. Grant Foundation for this research. It will follow several…

Project Description The Duke Endowment and the Say Yes to Education programs requested that the Center for Child and Family Policy conduct a Feasibility Study to determine whether a comprehensive information system can be engineered for their proposed Guilford Initiative. The information system will track every child living in Guilford County over time, pull in…

Project Description Every summer, The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) works with four universities (Appalachian State, North Carolina Central University, East Carolina University, and University of North Carolina-Charlotte) to bring rising juniors and seniors from across North Carolina to their campuses for the opportunity to take part in a four week program…

Project Description Funding was received from Durham Public Schools to evaluate the Magic Johnson Bridgescape Academy, a new alternative high school program, on the academic engagement and performance of approximately 100 Durham area students who previously dropped out of high school and have enrolled in this new program. The evaluation consisted of qualitative methods including…

Project Description This project brings together an interdisciplinary research team from Duke University, SRI International, Teachers College, and the Association of American Geographers to explore relationships between the socioeconomic status (SES) of students and their STEM learning outcomes. The motivations for this project are twofold (1) identify the links between SES and STEM Learning and…

Project Description This grant supported Dr. Jacob Vigdor’s research examining institutional factors that influence adolescent decision making processes. These factors include policies determining the grade configuration of schools and the assignment of students to classrooms, neighborhood-level influences, and incentive systems that aim to induce adolescents to avoid behaviors with long-run negative consequences. One study published…

Project Description Students are expected to use their brain power to achieve academic, physical, and social success, although they receive no explicit instruction about how to care for and effectively use their brains. As neuroscientists and educators, we realize that recent advances in neuroscience about how the brain works have not yet been integrated into…

The purpose of this study is to determine the efficacy of Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI) with young English language learners. TRI is an instructional intervention and professional development program for early reading, designed to help classroom teachers acquire key diagnostic strategies for use with young, struggling readers.

This study tests a new teacher professional development program, Developing Consultation and Collaboration Skills (DCCS), for increasing the language and literacy skills of young Latino English learners. The DCCS model has three key components that coaches work with classroom and English as a Second Lanuage (ESL) teachers.

This article examines the influence of teacher assistants and other personnel on outcomes for elementary school students during a period of recession-induced cutbacks in teacher assistants.

Nationwide, school principals are given wide discretion to use disciplinary tools like suspension and expulsion to create a safe learning environment.

The disproportionality between the representation of white students and students of color in gifted education programs is both persistent and pervasive. Attempts over the years to remedy the issue have done little to narrow this disparity.

Social and emotional development was in peril prior to the pandemic. After this time apart, it will take systematic, intentional, and intensive efforts to get social and emotional learning back on track.

Using detailed administrative data for public schools, we document racial and ethnic segregation at the classroom level in North Carolina, a state that has experienced a sharp increase in Hispanic enrollment.

This project has been examining how race and nonverbal communication, such as gesture and affect, impact children’s learning. The team is now working to replicate their research in the lab and pilot a gesture intervention in first and second grade classrooms in local elementary schools.

This brief uses data from a survey of educators in nine districts participating in the North Carolina Resilience and Learning Project on the challenges of remote learning and education during the COVID-19 pandemic. It offers recommendations for improving educational equity during remote learning, addressing the following areas: technology access, availability of adult support, student well-being,…

This Brief Will Cover Emotional and Mental Health Support for Teachers. Survey data from N.C. teachers on their concerns about returning to school in the fall. Recommended strategies for helping school administrators promote wellness among school staff upon their return. Re-envisioning the Way Students and Schools Interact. Recommended practices for promoting relationship building among teachers,…

This brief provides an overview of lessons learned about online schooling for young children during the COVID-19 pandemic from K-1 classroom and ESL teachers, and 5 recommendations for how to support the continuation of online learning into the next school year.

Katie Rosanbalm wrote the opening chapter of a book entitled, Alleviating the Educational Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences. The book is a collection of approaches to trauma-informed education based on school-university-community collaborations. Rosanbalm’s chapter summarizes the literature on why trauma-informed strategies are important to academic success and describes the specifics of the Resilience and Learning Model. It concludes with preliminary qualitative findings from pilot schools.

Based on growing evidence of the long-term benefits of enriched early childhood experiences, we evaluate the potential for addressing gender disparities in elementary school through early care and education programs.

Carolyn Barnes uses ethnographic accounts of three organizations to reveal how interacting with government-funded after-school programs can enhance the civic and political lives of low-income citizens.

Charles T. Clotfelter, Steven W. Hemelt, Helen F. Ladd Education Finance and Policy (2019) 14 (3): 492–521. https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00258

Policy makers, practitioners, and researchers have emphasized the importance of supportive relationships between staff and parents in early childhood education settings and schools.

The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate the potential of an innovative high school neuroscience-based health course for implementation feasibility and impact on student outcomes.

Using a randomized controlled trial, we tested a new teacher professional development program for increasing the language and literacy skills of young Latino English learners with 45 teachers and 105 students in 12 elementary schools.

North Carolina’s Smart Start and More at Four (MAF) early childhood programs were evaluated through the end of elementary school (age 11) by estimating the impact of state funding allocations to programs in each of 100 counties across 13 consecutive years on outcomes for all children in each county-year group (n = 1,004,571; 49% female; 61% non-Latinx White, 30% African American, 4% Latinx, 5% other).

Many advocacy organizations devote time and resources to increasing community awareness and educating the public in an effort to gain support for their issue.

This study examines the community-wide effects of investments in two early childhood initiatives in North Carolina (Smart Start and More at Four) on the likelihood of a student being placed into special education.

This memo examines recent data from Durham Public Schools related to student absenteeism. This memo examines four related issues surrounding absenteeism: Description of student absenteeism by grade-level Persistence of truancy from one year to the next The association between truancy and grade retention, and The overlap between absenteeism and tardies.

Approximately one quarter of U.S. students do not graduate from high school with their peers. Failing to complete high school severely limits opportunities for employment and future financial stability. High school dropouts earn lower wages through their lifetime and work for fewer years.1 The costs to society of high school dropouts are also high and…

In 2009, the Spencer Foundation renewed its generous support of the Data Center with an additional two years of funding. In addition, Duke University and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction have continued to support the Data Center through the collaborative relationship established in the current Memorandum of Understanding between the two institutions.

This report presents the final findings for a two-year evaluation of the Hill Center Reading Achievement Program (HillRAP) as implemented in a middle school setting from September 2008 to June 2010. The Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University conducted this evaluation in collaboration with the Davie County Public Schools and the Mebane…