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NEW EdWorkingPapers
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 →
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.
Bidirectional associations between executive function and social behavior across childhood: A registered report using a nationally representative sample
Executive function (EF) refers to a set of cognitive skills involved in deliberate, goal-oriented behavior. Although research has established links between children’s EF and aspects of their social skills, it remains unclear how EF skills are related to specific social behaviors, such as prosociality and social aggression. Additionally, the co-development of EF and social behavior during… more →
Estimating the Overall Effects of Statewide Early Literacy Policies: Evidence from Michigan
This paper evaluates the impacts of Michigan's statewide early literacy reform using a synthetic difference-in-differences approach. We estimate the policy’s effects on student achievement and grade retention and compare them to statewide literacy reforms in South Carolina and Mississippi. We find that the policy increased third-grade reading achievement by 8.7% of a standard deviation, with… more →
The Effects of State-Level Loan Forgiveness Policies on Teacher Supply
The waning prestige of the teaching profession has fueled a decline in the number of aspiring teachers entering preparation programs, compounding staffing challenges already inherent to many schools. In this paper, I show that state-level loan forgiveness policies modestly increase the number of first-year students enrolled in education programs by about 12% but have no overall effect on total… 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