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NEW EdWorkingPapers
The Impact of Exam Schools on Disadvantaged Students: Evidence from NYC’s Discovery Program
This paper studies the New York City Department of Education's Discovery Program, an affirmative action policy implemented to increase access to some of New York City’s most elite public high schools. The Discovery Program allocates reserve seats at New York City’s exam schools to disadvantaged students who successfully complete the course requirements of a summer program. Using a regression… more →
Defaults, Discretion, and Local Capacity: District Leaders’ Accounts of Automatic English Learner Reclassification
Automatic policies, which produce a preferred outcome unless implementers act otherwise, are rare in K-12 education and have been studied almost entirely using quantitative methods. In 2019, Michigan replaced its district-led procedure for reclassifying students out of English learner (EL) status with an automatic, state-led one. Drawing on interviews with 17 district EL leaders across 14… more →
Beyond the Special Education Gap: Differences in Special Education Expenditures Between Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools
Researchers and policymakers have long noted differences in disability enrollment and placement between charter schools and traditional public schools (TPSs), yet little is known about whether these differences correspond to special education expenditures. Using Texas administrative and financial data from 2019-20 to 2024-25, we compare special education expenditures, disability composition,… more →
A National Measure of School District Partisanship for the 2016 to 2024 Presidential Elections
Scholars increasingly interested in the governance of local school districts, which invites curiosity about the partisanship of their voting constituencies. Presently, researchers have to translate precinct-level or county-level votes to school district geographies using imprecise imputation strategies as the geographies are not coterminous. We review the recent methods researchers use to… more →
Early Evidence on Employer Responses to College Student Use of Generative AI
We conduct a survey experiment on professionals with hiring experience to investigate how employers respond to students' use of generative AI in higher education. Prior to respondents reviewing two resumes, they were randomized into a control group or one of two treatment groups. One treatment involved framing AI use as assisting students while the other involved framing AI use as substituting… more →
Why Does Education Policy so Frequently Disappoint? Lessons from Teacher Evaluation
Decades of K–12 education reform — much of it focused on teaching — have produced a persistent paradox: policies grounded in strong evidence disappoint when scaled, even as some implementations achieve striking success. Teacher evaluation is the clearest case. Cincinnati, Dallas, Chicago, and Washington, DC produced meaningful achievement gains, while forty-four state systems, Houston, and a… more →
Policy and Practice Series
EdTalks
Centering Teachers in the AI Era
What happens when teachers are treated as professional decision-makers, not just end users of AI tools?
Watch the conversation about the future of the teaching profession in an AI-enabled education system, grounded in two recent EdWorkingPapers.