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NEW EdWorkingPapers
Title I and IDEA as Complementary Federal Responses: Distinguishing Opportunity-Mediated and Opportunity-Independent Underachievement
Title I and IDEA are complementary federal responses to different sources of low achievement: each addresses needs that the other does not fully address. Title I targets opportunity-mediated underachievement, or low achievement linked to limited educational opportunity, while IDEA addresses persistent learning needs for which educational opportunity is not the primary explanation.
Nowcasting Teacher Turnover
Policymakers need timely, local information about teacher turnover to make informed decisions, yet turnover data are typically several years out of date and lack the context to assess whether a district's turnover is high or low relative to similar districts. We assemble district-level teacher turnover data from every state from 2003-04 to 2024-25, along with education, labor market, and… more →
Geographic and Community Correlates of College Savings: Evidence from the Universe of Pennsylvania 529 Accounts
College savings behaviors are associated with students’ postsecondary enrollment and degree attainment. While prior research has focused on economic and sociological influences, less is known about how geographic and community factors relate to savings. Using administrative data on nearly 200,000 Pennsylvania 529 accounts linked with community-level indicators, this study explores how place… more →
How Much Do Principals Matter When Politicians Choose Them? Evidence from Dated Successions and Close Elections in Brazil
Estimates of how much school principals matter differ by an order of magnitude, in part because conventional estimators require principal identifiers and absorb sampling noise into the estimated dispersion. We identify the variance of principal-by-school effects without identifiers, using successions dated by principals' reported tenure in Brazil's 2011 national assessment, which imply known… more →
The Returns to Private Tutoring Centers
Private tutoring centers have expanded rapidly across the United States, yet there is little evidence on whether these centers improve student outcomes. Using business records on tutoring establishments linked to administrative data covering over five million public school students in Texas, this paper estimates the short- and long-run impacts of tutoring centers.
What Districts Aim to Do: A Computational Mixed Methods Analysis of School District Strategic Plans
School districts are a distinct but long-critiqued feature of the United States educational system. Amid these critiques and increased public dissatisfaction with education, we revisit a fundamental question: What do school districts aim to do?
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.