Education reform advocates who base policy decisions on empirical research often face the argument that because background variables explain so much of student outcomes, it follows that policy interventions cannot be effective. This policy brief explains the logical fallacy in the argument,...

The impact of peers on student outcomes has important policy implications for how students are organized into classes and the overall impact of education interventions. But it is difficult to accurately measure peer effects because of the nonrandom sorting of students and teachers into...

Governance is widely believed to be an important determinant of the effectiveness of educational systems. Yet there are few systematic evaluations of the linkages between educational governance and student outcomes, or cogent frameworks for evaluating the effectiveness of governance arrangements...