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NEW EdWorkingPapers
An Untappable Pipeline? Examining Why Many Educators with Administrative Licenses Do Not Pursue School Leadership
States' licensure requirements typically mean that new school principals and assistant principals must come from the pool of educators holding an administrative license. Yet if many license- holders are uninterested in leadership positions, even districts with large numbers of licensed educators may face a constrained supply of leaders.
Unpacking Racial Disparities in School Spending: Why “progressiveness” and “comparability” are not enough
Studies of racial and economic disparities in school funding typically rely on simple spending comparisons or "progressiveness" measures that ignore variation in the cost of achieving common educational outcomes. This article argues that such approaches essentially ignore how much it costs schools in order to provide students with an adequate opportunity to learn. Simplistic spending measures… more →
Local Signals in a Global Tournament: Information Frictions, Optimism, and College Completion
Families frequently receive local signals about children’s skills, such as class rank in high school, yet the college market in which most students ultimately compete is much broader. Using nationally-representative data, we show that student effort, parental investment, and beliefs about college degree attainment all respond predominantly to local ranks as opposed to global ranks, despite… more →
Helping the Many by Tutoring the Few: The Social Multiplier of Early Literacy Instruction
Tutoring is almost always evaluated by randomizing students within schools, a design that differences out any spillover onto classmates. We instead randomize 81 Danish schools and 2,583 kindergartners, tutoring a few children in each and testing all. Decoding improved 0.38 standard deviations among the pre-registered target group and 0.27 SD school-wide. Bounds requiring only the test’s range… more →
Parents’ Biased Beliefs and Competitive Investments in Education: A Field Experiment
Using a field experiment in China, we demonstrate that parental investment decisions are affected by their beliefs about their peers’ investment levels, and that they often hold biased beliefs about these levels. When provided information about the true distribution of tutoring hours invested among their reference groups, parents in the treated group significantly adjust their investments (by… more →
Remediation or Roadblock? The Effects of Failing Virginia's Accountability Exams
Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL) system requires students to pass end-of-course exams to earn verified credits needed for high school graduation. Scoring below the passing cutoff may create a barrier to completing a high school degree, but it also triggers state-mandated remediation, which may include additional instruction and tutoring. Because these channels push in opposite directions… 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?
Weigh in: What’s on your mind regarding AI and the teaching profession? >>
We’ll soon record a conversation about the future of the teaching profession in an AI-enabled education system, grounded in two recent EdWorkingPapers.
Maya Kaul representing Landscape Analysis of the Teaching Profession
Dorottya Demszky representing Practitioner Voices Summit: How Teachers Evaluate AI Tools through Deliberative Sensemaking
Constance Lindsay, EdWorkingPapers Review Board member, facilitating the conversation