Matthew G. Springer
Framing the pandemic: Tracking educational problem formulation, Spring 2020-Fall 2021
We use data from the applications North Carolina public school districts and charter schools submitted for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) to investigate the sense that educational leaders made of the pandemic as it unfolded. LEAs understood the pandemic as a… more →
Do Students Respond to Sticker-Price Reductions?: Evidence from the North Carolina Promise
The North Carolina Promise is a state-level policy that reduced the cost of tuition for all students who attended one of three campuses in the University of North Carolina System starting in fall of 2018. We use IPEDS data and a synthetic control approach to examine how this tuition reduction… more →
ESSER-ting Preferences: Examining School District Preferences for Using Federal Pandemic Relief Fundings
We analyzed the proposed spending data for the American Recovery Plan’s Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief III (ESSER III) fund from the spring of 2021 of nearly 3,000 traditional public-school districts in the United States to (1) identify trends in the strategies adopted and (2) to test… more →
Taking Teacher Evaluation to Scale: The Effect of State Reforms on Achievement and Attainment
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTags: School reformFederal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting their staggered implementation across… more →
The Factors of Teacher Attrition and Retention: An Updated and Expanded Meta-Analysis of the Literature
Building on a previous meta-analysis of the literature on teacher attrition and retention by leveraging studies with longitudinal data and a modern systematic search process, this updated comprehensive meta-analysis synthesizes findings from 120 studies on the factors of teacher attrition and… more →
Teachers, Schools, and Pre-K Effect Persistence: An Examination of the Sustaining Environment Hypothesis
Francis A. Pearman, II, Matthew G. Springer, Mark Lipsey, Mark Lachowicz, Dale Farran, Walker Swain.Topics: Student LearningThe sustaining environments thesis hypothesizes that PreK effects are more likely to persist into later grades if children experience high-quality learning environments in the years subsequent to PreK. This study tests this hypothesis using data from a statewide PreK randomized experiment in… more →