EdWorkingPapers
Building the STEM Talent Pipeline: The Impact of Project Lead the Way
Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is an applied STEM Career Technical Education program that has been adopted widely across the country. Using data from Missouri, we investigate the impact of PLTW course expansion on program participation and early post-secondary outcomes overall and by gender. Our identification strategies rely on within-school between-cohort variation in PLTW course availability,… more →
Facilitating Evidence-Based Instructional Coaching With Automated Feedback on Teacher Discourse
Instructional coaching often aims to ground teacher professional learning in classroom evidence, yet it is labor-intensive for coaches to obtain and curate such evidence. This study explores possibilities for applying an automated feedback tool to classroom recordings in order to support evidence-based reflection in coaching. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 9 coaches and coded 25… more →
The New Kid on the Tutoring Block: Definitions, Developments, and Future Directions for Hybrid Human-AI Tutoring
Human tutoring is among the most effective educational interventions, yet high costs and intensive resource demands make it difficult to provide broadly and at scale. We conceptualize this tension as an “iron triangle” of tradeoffs between effectiveness, affordability, and scalable reach. This essay examines how an emerging genre of tutoring, hybrid human-AI tutoring, reconfigures these tradeoffs… more →
Variation in Post-Pandemic Postsecondary Transitions across Academic Subgroups
We examine how trends in postsecondary readiness and enrollment from pre- to post-pandemic differ across student subgroups defined by pre-pandemic (8th grade) achievement levels. Using individual-level data from North Carolina and interrupted time series approaches, we find that students with high baseline achievement became less likely to apply to and enroll in a four-year college following the… more →
The Contributions of School and Neighborhood Factors to Student Attendance Following the COVID-19 Pandemic
Student attendance remains well below pre-COVID pandemic levels, yet districts lack evidence about which levers are most influential. Whether school and neighborhood contexts still account for meaningful variation in attendance, especially for students with weaker attendance histories, is an open question. Using a longitudinal database of over 360,000 Chicago Public Schools students in grades 6-… more →
Not Too Young to Notice: The Early Emergence of Racial Disparities in Elementary Students’ School Climate Perceptions
School Climate scholarship often fails to explore the perspectives of elementary-school students. To fill this gap, we use survey-data from Georgia to examine racial disparities in elementaryschool students’ school climate perceptions, how they vary over time, and the factors that associate with them. We find that Black and "Other Race" students report worse school climate perceptions than their… more →
The Burden of Waiting: Temporal Administrative Burden and Limbo in Student Loan Repayment
Research on administrative burden establishes that interactions with government impose learning, compliance, and psychological costs. However, less is known about how these costs persist or reemerge after an administrative encounter has seemingly ended. Drawing on interviews with 72 student loan borrowers, I examine how prolonged administrative uncertainty shapes experiences with income-driven… more →
From the Right to Education to the Distribution of Resources: Testing U.S. School Finance Equity Metrics in Mexico, Brazil and France
Most national constitutions and international treaties guarantee a right to education, and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has warned that sharp geographic disparities in spending may constitute discrimination. Yet rights monitoring rarely tests whether resources within a country follow children's needs. U.S. school finance research offers a transferable method for doing so… more →
School Impacts on Absenteeism in the High School Grades following the COVID-19 Pandemic: Identifying School Factors and Strategies for Improvement
Chronic absenteeism has increased sharply in U.S. high schools following the COVID-19 pandemic, with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) mirroring national trends. Although student attendance has long been recognized as a critical factor in academic success, persistently high chronic absenteeism rates among high school students necessitate a closer examination of which school-based strategies have been… more →
Compounded Disadvantage: Intersectional Inequities in Chronic Absenteeism Prevalence and Recovery During the COVID-19 Era
This study applies an intersectional lens to examine how chronic absenteeism evolved across race, sex, economic disadvantage, disability, and housing instability before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic using data from Georgia. Consistent with national evidence, chronic absenteeism nearly doubled and remained elevated through 2023, but recovery followed distinct racialized trajectories.… more →
Cost Efficiency of U.S. School Districts: Stochastic Frontier Evidence from the National Education Cost Model
I estimate the technical efficiency of U.S. school districts in producing middle-grades achievement with a stochastic frontier model built on the National Education Cost Model (NECM), which measures each district’s spending relative to the predicted cost of national-average outcomes. Because outcomes are measured in standard-deviation units, efficiency is expressed in input terms: the share of a… more →
More than Just Suspension: Informal Discipline in K-12 Schools
In this paper we document the prevalence and distribution of informal disciplinary consequences in K-12 public schools and examine how they contribute to disparities in school discipline. Using administrative data from North Carolina, we first describe the landscape of informal consequences across grade levels. Informal consequences are the most common disciplinary response in the early… more →
The Effects of Four-Day School Weeks in Texas
Four-day school weeks (FDSWs) have expanded rapidly in Texas in recent years. Districts cite teacher retention and recruitment as the primary motivation, though little is known about the impacts of FDSWs in this context. We study the effects of FDSW adoption on students and teachers in Texas using a staggered differences-in-differences design with a propensity score matched control group. We find… more →
Assessment Design and Course Grades: Evidence from Linked College Syllabi and Grade Records
Grade inflation is of increasing concern on college campuses, yet little is known about the course-level practices associated with higher grades. We examine one such practice: assessment design. Using syllabi from more than 400 undergraduate courses at four public universities, we identify criterion-relevant (CR) assessments—which require comparable demonstrations of knowledge or skill that can… more →
Fathers as Caregivers: Peer Exposure to Household Gender Roles and Girls’ Beliefs and Achievement
Gender roles are shaped within families, but whether family gender-role arrangements extend beyond households and influence other children remains unclear. This paper studies whether exposure to peers from father-dominant caregiving households affects students’ gender beliefs and educational outcomes. Using nationally representative data from Chinese middle schools and exploiting quasi-random… more →
Family Language Transmission Under Institutional Language Regimes Shapes Adolescent Mental Health Through Peers
In many societies, institutional languages shape participation, recognition, and belonging, while families transmit language backgrounds across generations. These inherited backgrounds may shape children’s communication and, once they enter shared classrooms, the experiences of their peers. This paper examines whether family language environments generate spillovers beyond the household through… more →
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 economic… more →
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. This commentary… 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 →
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. Exploiting variation from the… 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 →
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? Using a computational mixed methods analysis of 624 district strategic plans, we find that districts a) commit to a broad range of goals beyond student… more →
Legislating Literacy: Estimating the Impact of State-Level Science of Reading Reforms on Reading Test Scores
This study examines the extent to which state adoption of Science of Reading (SoR)-aligned policies was associated with changes in fourth-grade reading achievement. Using longitudinal state-level panel data from 2003-2024 and quasi-experimental difference-in-differences (DiD) methods, the study estimates relationships between SoR policy adoption and NAEP Grade 4 reading outcomes. Findings suggest… more →
Screen or Barrier? Science of Reading Certification Exams and Teacher Supply in Texas
Twenty states now require prospective teachers to pass a standalone Science of Reading (SOR) exam. These exams restrict teacher supply as a barrier, and whether they are worth that cost depends on whether they also screen on teaching quality. This paper explores this tension in Texas' SOR exam, required since 2021 for new elementary and middle-grades candidates, using administrative data linking… more →
Integrated vs. Separated Schooling for Refugee Children: Long-Term Effects on Education and Assimilation
Does direct integration into native schools or temporary placement in separate schools better promote the education and cultural assimilation of refugee children? In the Netherlands, primary-school-aged refugee children are placed in either integrated or separated schools depending on their randomly assigned municipality. By contrast, all secondary-school-aged arrivals are initially separated. We… more →
The Time Costs of Academic Credit Hours
Do students give up free time with added classes? We estimate the effect of additional credits on leisure using campus departure logs linked to academic records of U.S. Air Force Academy students and two natural experiments. Leveraging pre-assigned schedules, each credit reduces leisure by 7 hours per semester, while unexpected changes to graduation requirements crowded out 17 hours. Foregone… more →
Designing Effective Public-Private Partnerships in Education
Publicly funded school choice is examined as a form of education public-private partnership (PPP), with cross-national differences interpreted through institutional design rather than private provision alone. A novel theoretical framework derives two indicators – alignment and coherence – from a formal utility-theoretic model of PPP maturity, applied here for the first time to education. Across… more →
One Fell Through the Safety Net: Embeddedness and Take Up of Social Benefits
The U.S. social safety net comprises a patchwork quilt of welfare programs, but not all eligible beneficiaries receive aid. Incomplete take-up suggests that some children and families are not receiving access to the education, healthcare, housing, and income needed to break the cycle of poverty and may reflect unequal burdens in accessing benefits. We examine incomplete take-up using the case of… more →
Teacher-Mediated Multimodal Platform and Math Achievement: Evidence from Goblins' Yearlong District Implementation
Despite the rapid adoption of AI-powered learning tools in K–12 classrooms, there is limited evidence about their effectiveness in improving student learning. This paper examines the usage of Goblins—a teacher-mediated multimodal AI math platform that allows students to type, draw, and speak while receiving personalized feedback—and how that usage associates with middle school math achievement.… more →
Career ready or not? The relationship of WorkKeys scores, ACT scores, and high school GPAs with college and early-career outcomes
Growing efforts to ensure that students graduate high school both college- and career-ready raise a need for better understanding and measures of “career readiness.” We leverage data from one state (North Carolina) where nearly half of students take a college entrance exam (the ACT) in 11th grade and a career readiness exam (the WorkKeys) in 12th grade to examine how these different measures of… more →
Talent at the Top: Effects of Taxation on University Presidents’ Compensation and Priorities
College presidents are among the highest-paid individuals in higher education, and in 2017 the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act increased their cost to their institutions via a 21% excise tax on nonprofit executive compensation above $1 million. I examine how private colleges and universities and their presidents responded using an event study design. Presidential compensation fell by 13%, with the entire… more →
Improvements in Using Distance to Predict College Enrollment
Geographic proximity to college is a widely used instrument for estimating returns to postsecondary education. Most applications rely on geodesic ("crow-flies") distance, which is easy to calculate but a poor proxy for actual travel costs when terrain, water, or congestion intervene. We show that replacing geodesic distance with driving distance or driving time substantially strengthens… more →
The Impact of Exam Schools on Disadvantaged Students: Evidence from NYC’s Discovery Program
This paper studies the New York City Department of Education's Discovery Program, an affirmative action policy implemented to increase access to some of New York City’s most elite public high schools. The Discovery Program allocates reserve seats at New York City’s exam schools to disadvantaged students who successfully complete the course requirements of a summer program. Using a regression… more →
Beyond the Special Education Gap: Differences in Special Education Expenditures Between Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools
Researchers and policymakers have long noted differences in disability enrollment and placement between charter schools and traditional public schools (TPSs), yet little is known about whether these differences correspond to special education expenditures. Using Texas administrative and financial data from 2019-20 to 2024-25, we compare special education expenditures, disability composition, and… more →
Defaults, Discretion, and Local Capacity: District Leaders’ Accounts of Automatic English Learner Reclassification
Automatic policies, which produce a preferred outcome unless implementers act otherwise, are rare in K-12 education and have been studied almost entirely using quantitative methods. In 2019, Michigan replaced its district-led procedure for reclassifying students out of English learner (EL) status with an automatic, state-led one. Drawing on interviews with 17 district EL leaders across 14… more →
Early Evidence on Employer Responses to College Student Use of Generative AI
We conduct a survey experiment on professionals with hiring experience to investigate how employers respond to students' use of generative AI in higher education. Prior to respondents reviewing two resumes, they were randomized into a control group or one of two treatment groups. One treatment involved framing AI use as assisting students while the other involved framing AI use as substituting… more →
Human-, GRM-, and LLM-Generated School-Improvement Leadership Scores from Missouri: Structural Bias and Concurrent and Predictive Validity
Head or assistant principal evaluation systems are widely deployed but rarely examined for validity, and AI scoring tools have entered K–12 workflows ahead of the evidence. We examine human supervisor ratings, Graded Response Model (GRM) rescaling, and large language model (LLM) scoring of 1,385 yearly leader-authored, standards-based, retrospective accounts of school improvement efforts and… more →
Why Does Education Policy so Frequently Disappoint? Lessons from Teacher Evaluation
Decades of K–12 education reform — much of it focused on teaching — have produced a persistent paradox: policies grounded in strong evidence disappoint when scaled, even as some implementations achieve striking success. Teacher evaluation is the clearest case. Cincinnati, Dallas, Chicago, schools in a teacher development experiment, and Washington, DC produced meaningful achievement gains, while… more →
A National Measure of School District Partisanship for the 2016 to 2024 Presidential Elections
Scholars increasingly interested in the governance of local school districts, which invites curiosity about the partisanship of their voting constituencies. Presently, researchers have to translate precinct-level or county-level votes to school district geographies using imprecise imputation strategies as the geographies are not coterminous. We review the recent methods researchers use to… more →
Staffing, Retention, and Expenditures in the Four-Day School Week
School districts across the United States are increasingly adopting the four-day school week, often in the hope of addressing teacher staffing challenges. We examine the effects of the four-day week on non-teacher staffing and recruitment, and schoolwide expenditures in Missouri, where three in ten districts currently use it. Using a difference-in-differences design to identify the causal impact… more →
The Effects of Course-Integrated AI Tutoring on Student Performance and Engagement: A Randomized University Trial
We evaluate access to a course-integrated generative AI (GenAI) tutor in a randomized controlled trial involving 2,379 undergraduate students and 30 instructors across multiple disciplines in a large U.S. public university. Among sections of the same course, tutor access reduced final grades by 0.37 standard deviations and learning management system participation by 0.90 standard deviations.… more →
High School College-Conduciveness and Its Association with the Top Ten Percent Students’ Academic Profiles
High school college-conducive resources shape students’ college readiness, which may explain the relative disadvantage racialized minority and low-income students face in accessing selective universities. Texas Top Ten Percent Plan (TTP) aims to bridge this gap by conditioning admission on class rank, which accounts for between-school differences. However, under policy complementarity theory,… more →
Tutor Traits and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
Tutors are increasingly central to school-based instruction, with the potential to personalize learning at scale. Little is known about which tutor characteristics predict effectiveness, limiting providers' and schools' recruiting, hiring, and retention strategies. Using random assignment of tutors in a high-dosage elementary-grade online literacy tutoring program, we examine how literacy… more →
The Impact of International Students on US Colleges: Higher Education as a Service Export
Between 2003 and 2016, international enrollment in US higher education nearly doubled. We examine how trade shocks in education affect public universities’ decision-making. We construct a shift-share instrument exploiting institutions’ historical networks with different origins of international students, income growth, and exchange-rate fluctuations. Contrary to claims that US-born students are… more →
Estimating the Expenditures Associated with Special Education: Evidence from Michigan
Using a 13-year panel of school districts in Michigan, this paper estimates the average expenditures associated with different disability category labels. Increasing the number of students with disabilities by 1 student in the average school district is associated with an increase in expenditures between $1,998 for students with specific learning disabilities to more than a $23,000 increase in… more →
Non-traditional Student Advising Before College: Lessons from Navigate Reconnect
Prospective college students benefit from tailored advising and guidance about whether, where, and how to enroll. Support for college planning drops sharply after students leave high school, however, leaving non-traditional students largely on their own. We study Navigate Reconnect, a Tennessee advising program that intends to fill this gap. We evaluate how Navigate Reconnect access and… more →
Do Civic Infrastructures Predict Student Outcomes? Comparing Grassroots and Professional Education Nonprofits
Local civic infrastructures—the networks of organizations, relations, and community resources supporting schools—can shape education policy and practice, yet evidence of their relationship to student outcomes remains limited. We examine this relationship using a novel panel dataset of US education nonprofits from 2010 to 2019, geocoded and linked to over 10,000 school districts. Grassroots… more →
Can Early Exposure to the Teaching Profession Increase Teacher Supply and Diversity? New Evidence on the Teacher Pipeline
We examine whether early exposure to the teaching career has the potential to expand the size and diversity of new teacher supply. Exploiting the staggered expansion of high school education courses across Texas, we find little evidence that these courses increased new teacher supply or diversity despite course takers being substantially more diverse than the teacher workforce. High school… more →
Heterogeneous Fadeout of Cognitive Gains: Evidence from Head Start Preschool
Fadeout is defined as the decline in an intervention's initial treatment effect in subsequent follow-up periods. This paper uses the Head Start Impact Study to examine heterogeneity in the fadeout of cognitive gains from access to Head Start preschool. I find that Black children experience substantially less fadeout than non-Black children and retain a 0.23 standard deviation gain at the end of… more →
Why aren’t online learning programs working better in schools: Maybe they need to be more integrated with what is actually taught during whole classroom instruction?
Computer-assisted learning (CAL)—educational software providing instruction to help students learn concepts and skills—is ubiquitous in US schools. Despite meta-analyses suggesting benefits, national test scores have declined during rapid CAL adoption. This may reflect insufficient research on how and when CAL complements instruction. Using a fixed effect model, we find 60 additional minutes of… more →