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NEW EdWorkingPapers
Empty Desks: Schools and Staffing after the Pandemic
Sustained enrollment losses and other post-pandemic factors have placed budgetary pressures on many school districts and motivated difficult discussions about both closing under enrolled schools and staffing reductions. Using the most currently available national data, this brief provides descriptive evidence on trends in the number of operating schools and their teacher staffing and discusses… more →
Does Liberal Education Produce Engaged Citizens? The Relationship Between Curricular Breadth, Depth, and Democratic Outcomes
Liberal education is often touted as an ideal format for preparing students for civic engagement, yet this claim is seldom empirically tested. In this study, we quantify the relationship between college students’ liberal education, measured by the breadth and depth of their curriculum, and markers of civic engagement in four domains: participating in civic life, acting politically, being… more →
Big P and Little P Politics: Contemporary and Enduring Challenges for K-12 School Board Members
School board service has become more complex in the current era of heightened partisan polarization and the nationalization of education. This mixed-methods paper draws on interviews with and a statewide survey of board members in California, and the theory of emotional labor. We explore how members experience contemporary national issues (“Big P Politics”), and everyday challenges of managing… more →
Aligned Pathways, Unequal Earnings: Gendered Transitions from Community College to Work
States increasingly use financial aid policy to steer students into designated high-demand workforce fields, yet evidence on whether these fields offer stronger labor-market pathways remains limited. We study Virginia's Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead (G3) initiative, which provides tuition-free community college to income-eligible students in high-demand workforce areas. Using linked… more →
Building the STEM Talent Pipeline: The Impact of Project Lead the Way
Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is an applied STEM Career Technical Education program that has been adopted widely across the country. Using data from Missouri, we investigate the impact of PLTW course expansion on program participation and early post-secondary outcomes overall and by gender. Our identification strategies rely on within-school between-cohort variation in PLTW course availability,… more →
Facilitating Evidence-Based Instructional Coaching With Automated Feedback on Teacher Discourse
Instructional coaching often aims to ground teacher professional learning in classroom evidence, yet it is labor-intensive for coaches to obtain and curate such evidence. This study explores possibilities for applying an automated feedback tool to classroom recordings in order to support evidence-based reflection in coaching. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 9 coaches and coded 25… 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.