The 10 most-cited articles in American Educational Research Journal, 2020

Many Black educators in the United States demonstrate a political clarity about white supremacy and the racialized harm it cultivates in and out of schools. We highlight the perspectives of some of these educators and ask, (1) How do they articulate the need to protect Black children? and (2) What mechanisms of protection do they enact in their classrooms and schools? Through further elaborating the politicized caring framework, our analyses show how Black educators disrupt the racialized harm produced within schools to instead (re)position Black students as children worthy of protection via caring relationships, alternative discipline policies, and other interpersonal and institutional mechanisms. This study has implications for teaching, teacher education, and how the "work" of teachers is conceptualized and researched.

This cluster randomized controlled trial investigated the impact of project-based learning with professional development supports on social studies and literacy achievement and motivation of second-grade students from low–socioeconomic status school districts. At random in within-school pairs, 48 teachers were assigned to the experimental or comparison group. Experimental group teachers were asked to teach four project-based learning units designed to address nearly all social studies and some literacy standards. Comparison group teachers were asked to teach social studies as they normally would except to teach a target number of lessons. The experimental group showed higher growth in social studies and informational reading but not writing or motivation. Greater consistency with project-based learning session plans was associated with higher growth in writing, motivation, and reading.

Research has shown that engaging students in peer feedback can help students revise documents and improve their writing skills. But the mechanistic pathways by which skills develop have remained untested: Does receiving and providing feedback lead to learning because it produces more extensive revision behavior or is such immediate implementation of feedback unnecessary? These pathways were tested through analyses of the relationships between feedback provided and received, feedback implemented and overall revisions, and improved writing quality in a new article. Overall, the number of revisions predicted growth in writing ability, and both amount of received and provided feedback were associated with being more likely to make revisions. However, providing feedback was also directly related to growth in writing ability.

Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts may have distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work focuses on these factors. We zoom out to the full spread of differential SLL and its contribution to students’ positions in the eighth-grade achievement distribution. Using a large, longitudinal NWEA data set, we document dramatic variability in SLL. While some students actually maintain their school-year learning rate, others lose nearly all their school-year progress. Moreover, decrements are not randomly distributed—52% of students lose ground in all 5 consecutive years (English language arts).

Scholarship on the links between families and schools encompasses contradictory notions about social capital and its relation to inequality. One view holds that schools can narrow inequality by generating dense relationships among families, while others suggest that advantaged parents can use these networks to hoard opportunities. This multiple case study analyzes qualitative data from diverse North Carolina elementary schools to learn how parents build and deploy social capital. We distinguish between bonding social capital, built in dense, homogeneous networks, and bridging social capital, gained through relationships across a social distance. Our analyses suggest that bonding alone is associated with opportunity hoarding; however, when schools are committed to building both bridging and bonding social capital, they can produce more equitable and inclusive schools.

Empirical research investigating the association between teacher pay incentives and student test scores has grown rapidly over the past decade. To integrate the findings from these studies and help inform the debate over teacher merit pay, this meta-analysis synthesizes effect sizes across 37 primary studies, 26 of which were conducted in the United States. Among the U.S. based studies, the results suggest that the effect of teacher merit pay on student test scores is positive and statistically significant (0.043 standard deviation). This summary effect varies by program design and study context, suggesting that teacher merit pay has the potential to improve student test scores in some contexts but researchers and policymakers should pay close attention to program design and implementation.

Nearly 15% of American students are chronically absent from school. To address absenteeism, many states have recently made chronic absence a core component of their school accountability plans. Scholars have theorized that a positive school climate can promote student attendance, but empirical support for this idea is lacking. In this study, the relationship between four student-reported measures of school climate and student attendance are investigated by analyzing two annual school climate surveys (N = 823,753) from New York City. Results indicate small associations among the four measures of perceived school climate and student attendance. Furthermore, school-level changes in perceived school climate between middle and high school were only marginally associated with student attendance.

We characterize the extent to which Black-White gaps for multiple educational outcomes are linked across school districts in the United States. Gaps in disciplinary action, grade-level retention, classification into special education and Gifted and Talented, and Advanced Placement course-taking are large in magnitude and correlated. Racial differences in family income and parent education are strikingly consistent predictors of these gaps, and districts with large gaps in one outcome are likely to have large gaps in another. Socioeconomic and segregation variables explain 1.7 to 3.5 times more variance for achievement relative to nonachievement outcomes. Systemic patterns of racial socioeconomic inequality drive inequalities across multiple educational outcomes; however, discretionary policies at local levels are more influential for nonachievement outcomes.

Parental engagement is central to Head Start’s two-generation mission. Drawing on research linking teacher-child racial/ethnic match to educational outcomes, the present study explores whether teacher-child match increases parental involvement in Head Start activities designed to support children and families. Using data from the 2006 and 2009 waves of the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey, we estimate the relationship between teacher-child racial/ethnic match and parental involvement both across and within Head Start centers. Findings suggest that match enhances parental engagement and decreases student absences, particularly among Hispanic families, suggesting that family engagement may be one potential mechanism by which racial/ethnic match improves educational outcomes. Findings also have implications for policies that reduce the diversity of the Head Start workforce.

In recent years, some U.S. school districts have shifted away from direct management of schools, toward systems in which some or all schools operate under enhanced autonomy, accountability, and parental choice. Yet dynamics driving these changes are understudied, and there are few comparative studies of system-level governance shifts. To address these gaps, we use extensive qualitative data to analyze change in Los Angeles, Denver, and New Orleans. Drawing on evolutionary theories, we find that external crises, state policy, and new actors triggered change, yet distinct contexts and change processes resulted in markedly different systems. Finally, in all three cities, concerns that emerging systems exacerbated long-standing inequities indicate that governance change is both an organizational and highly contentious political process.