The 10 most-cited articles in American Educational Research Journal, 2023

Tutoring ranks among the most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools available. Dozens of randomized experiments have evaluated preK–12 tutoring programs, varying widely in approaches, contexts, and costs. This article presents results from a systematic review and meta-analysis of tutoring field experiments. We develop a framework for understanding variation in tutoring program impact and examine effect sizes (ESs) across a range of characteristics. We find that tutoring programs yield consistently substantial positive impacts on learning, with an overall pooled ES of 0.288 SD (SE = 0.029, p < .001). ESs tend to be largest for programs that use teachers or paraprofessionals as tutors, are held in earlier grades, occur at least 3 days per week, and are held during school.

We used a situated approach to examine the aftermath of citations for racial disparities in special education and discipline. The study was conducted in one suburban school district and examined staff’s interpretations and responses to multiple disproportionality citations. We found that historical, spatial, and sociocultural contexts mediated stakeholders’ interpretations and reactions to citations and the consequences of their responses. Our findings demonstrate how a history of race relations in the district and the community as well as spatial opportunity structures shaped disability and discipline racial disparities; the consequences of a damaged imagery for multiply marginalized youth and their families in explanations of disproportionality citations; and the shortcomings of the district’s symbolic and predominately color-evasive responses as a consequence of ambiguous federal and state policy mandates.

Strengthening teacher supply is a key policy objective for K–12 public education, but understanding of the early teacher pipeline remains limited. In this descriptive analysis, we leverage the universe of applications to a large public university in Texas from 2009 to 2020 to examine the pipeline into teacher education and employment as a K–12 public school teacher. A unique feature of Texas’s centralized higher education application is that it solicits potential interest in teacher certification. We document sharply declining interest in teaching over the period. Further, we show that students of color, men, and students with higher SAT scores are substantially underrepresented in teacher education. Particularly for race/ethnicity, these disparities are only partially explained by differences in interest at application.

We use data from the Stanford Education Data Archive to describe district-level trends in average academic achievement between 2009 and 2019. Although on average school districts’ test scores improved very modestly (by about 0.001 standard deviations per year), there is significant variation among districts. Moreover, we find that average test score disparities between nonpoor and poor students and between White and Black students are growing; those between White and Hispanic students are shrinking. We find no evidence of achievement-equity synergies or trade-offs: Improvements in overall achievement are uncorrelated with trends in achievement disparities. Finally, we find that the strongest predictors of achievement disparity trends are the levels and trends in within-district racial and socioeconomic segregation and changes in differential access to certified teachers.

Education research increasingly conceptualizes how social interactions and contexts of public schools replicate practices found in prisons. Yet prison-schooling is often left out of education research. Concurrently, prison-schooling is where we educate a disproportionate amount of multiply marginalized youth, specifically disabled Girls of Color. The lack of attention to prison-schools has limited how teaching in youth carceral facilities can be examined for its challenges and supports of disabled Girls of Color. Centering the girls’ words from class observations, field notes, and interviews, this study describes and intervenes in dehumanizing and (de)socializing mechanisms in prison-school education. We explore attempts and impacts of countering prison-school education through a sociocritical literacy course infused with an abolitionist praxis. We end with discussion on the limits of countering prison-school through courses alone, suggesting abolition across multiple scales instead.

This study applied Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analysis to disentangle friendship selection and influence regarding the academic achievement of Chinese adolescents in a 3-year longitudinal study of 880 middle school students (400 girls, Year 1 mean age = 13.33) and 525 high school students (284 girls, mean age = 16.45). Both peer selection and influence effects were obtained. Chinese adolescents preferred friendships with similarly achieving or higher achieving peers but avoided friendships with lower achieving peers. They increased achievement when they befriended high-achieving peers but decreased achievement when they befriended low-achieving peers. Influence but not selection was stronger for middle school students than for high school students. The results may be a function of the importance of academic success for Chinese students.

Black students face hyper-disciplining and high levels of social control when they enter American schools. The cultural mismatch hypothesis attempts to explain this hyper-disciplining by arguing that the mostly White teaching force misinterprets the attitudes and behaviors of Black students, which leads to their hyper-disciplining. Utilizing a longitudinal, deeply iterative, participatory, and critical ethnographic research process, however, this article shows that traditional scholarship around the cultural mismatch hypothesis is insufficient. The analysis indicates that teachers’ misinterpretation of mismatched capital (the traditional cultural mismatch hypothesis) is actually a racialized interpretation of both matched and mismatched capital coming from Black students, and such racialized interpretations are guided by the logic of antiblackness endemic to American institutions. Hence, this research argues for the integration of antiblackness as a theoretical tool to expand upon cultural mismatch explanations and for the creation of educational spaces where Black students are…

Black and Latinx adolescent boys from economically stratified communities face pervasive societal inequities and, therefore, deserve more responsive school supports to determine and actualize postsecondary pathways. For insights into how such students conceptualize their futures and their school’s role in facilitating this process, this ethnographic study investigated one urban school’s college-going culture and its impact on shaping what the author calls participants’ postsecondary future selves. This theoretical approach encompasses three domains: college (i.e., postsecondary education), career (i.e., post-college employment trajectory), and condition (i.e., expected financial stability, relational and familial prospects, future living arrangements, happiness, and joy). Implications suggest that college-going school practitioners widen supports so students can imagine and envision how college ambitions align with career and condition goals.

Inadequate compensation is often viewed as the root of teacher workforce challenges despite teacher reports that working conditions matter more. Using an original discrete choice experiment with a national sample of 1,030 U.S. teachers, we found that support staff—special education specialists, counselors, and nurses—play an essential role in shaping teachers’ employment preferences. Teachers value access to these support staff more than they value a 10% increase to their own salary. We also assessed teachers’ preferences regarding childcare subsidies and find that teachers treat a 10% salary increase and a childcare benefit of similar value as near perfect substitutes. To test the durability of these findings, we replicated our study 2 years later and found nearly identical results.

This study examines implementation of college-and-career-ready (CCR) education standards across five school districts in Ohio, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Drawing on the policy attributes theory, we found that the specificity of districts’ approaches to two long-recognized policy levers, curriculum and professional learning, was critical in shaping how stakeholders implemented and experienced CCR policies. We identified an approach we called “flexible specificity”—flexibility informed by ongoing data collection and evaluation that allowed districts to develop specific, useful guidance about curriculum and professional learning based on stakeholder needs. We present four shared practices characterizing this approach in two districts, analyzing why those districts seemed to find the right balance of specificity and flexibility while others struggled.