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Beth E. Schueler
The Politics of Pandemic School Operations for Reopening and Beyond: Evidence from Virginia
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernancePost COVID, is education losing its special status as a policy domain more insulated from partisan politics than other policy areas? Indeed, a community’s political makeup influenced its’ schools’ pandemic learning modality, but did it predict other aspects of educational operations? We study… more →
What Impacts Should We Expect from Tutoring at Scale? Exploring Meta-Analytic Generalizability
Topics: MethodsU.S. public schools are engaged in an unprecedented effort to expand tutoring in the wake of the pandemic. Broad-based support for scaling tutoring emerged, in part, because of the large effects on student achievement found in prior meta-analyses. We conduct an expanded meta-analysis of 282… more →
How State Takeovers of School Districts Affect Education Finance, 1990 to 2019
Tags: School districts, School reformState takeover of school districts—a form of political centralization that shifts decision-making power from locally elected leaders to the state—has increased in recent years, often with the purported goal of improving district financial condition. Takeover has affected millions of students… more →
Interscholastic Policy Debate Promotes Critical Thinking and College-going: Evidence From Boston Public Schools
Few interventions reduce inequality in reading achievement, let alone higher order thinking skills, among adolescents. We study “policy debate”—an extracurricular activity focused on improving middle and high schoolers’ critical thinking, argumentation, and policy analysis skills—in Boston… more →
Assessors influence results: Evidence on enumerator effects and educational impact evaluations
Topics: MethodsA significant share of education and development research uses data collected by workers called “enumerators.” It is well-documented that “enumerator effects”—or inconsistent practices between the individual people who administer measurement tools— can be a key source of error in survey data… more →
Can learning be measured by phone? Evidence from Kenya
Topics: MethodsSchool closures induced by COVID-19 placed heightened emphasis on alternative ways to measure student learning besides in-person exams. We leverage the administration of phone-based assessments (PBAs) measuring numeracy and literacy for primary school children in Kenya, along with in-person… more →
A Cautionary Tale of Tutoring Hard-to-Reach Students in Kenya
Topics: Student LearningCovid-19-induced school closures generated great interest in tutoring as a strategy to make up for lost learning time. Tutoring is backed by a rigorous body of research, but it is unclear whether it can be delivered effectively remotely. We study the effect of teacher-student phone call… more →
Evaluating Education Governance: Does State Takeover of School Districts Affect Student Achievement?
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: School reformLocal school boards have primary authority for running educational systems in the U.S. but little is known empirically about the merits of this arrangement. State takeovers of struggling districts represent a rare alternative form of educational governance and have become an increasingly common… more →
Improving Low-Performing Schools: A Meta-Analysis of Impact Evaluation Studies
Tags: School reformThe public narrative surrounding efforts to improve low-performing K-12 schools in the U.S. has been notably gloomy. Observers argue that either nothing works or we don’t know what works. At the same time, the federal government is asking localities to implement evidence-based interventions. But… more →