EdWorkingPapers
The Peer Effects of Grade Retention
We study the peer effects of grade retention in the context of Indiana’s statewide third-grade retention policy. When a retention occurs, it changes the peer group for two cohorts: rising fourth graders who lose a peer and rising third graders who gain a peer. We identify peer effects in both cohorts by leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in cohort-level retention rates caused by a… more →
Experimental Evidence on "Direct Admissions" from Four States: Impacts on College Application and Enrollment
Complexity and uncertainty loom large in the college application process. We leverage a largescale experiment that reduces administrative burden through a proactive guarantee of admission coupled with tailored information, a simplified application form, and automatic fee waiver to test the impact of emerging “direct admissions” policies. Students were 2.7 percentage points (or 12%) more likely… more →
More Money for Less Time? Examining the Relative and Heterogenous Financial Returns to Non-Degree Credentials and Degree Programs
There is a large and growing number of non-degree credential offerings between a high school diploma and a bachelor's degree, as well as degree programs beyond a bachelor’s degree. Nevertheless, research on the financial returns to non-degree credentials and degree-granting programs is often narrow and siloed. To fill this gap, we leverage a national sample of individuals across nine MSAs and… more →
The Learning Crisis: Three Years After COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruptions to education, with school closures affecting over one billion children. These closures, aimed at reducing virus transmission, resulted in significant learning losses, particularly in mathematics and science. Using data from TIMSS 2023, which assesses fourth and eighth-grade achievements across 71 education systems, this study analyzes the… more →
Educator Attention: How computational tools can systematically identify the distribution of a key resource for students
Educator attention is critical for student success, yet how educators distribute their attention across students remains poorly understood due to data and methodological constraints. This study presents the first large-scale computational analysis of educator attention patterns, leveraging over 1 million educator utterances from virtual group tutoring sessions linked to… more →
Exploring the Potentials of Outcomes-Based Contracting: Findings from Initial Implementations
Outcomes-Based Contracting (OBC) ties vendor payments to performance metrics, aiming to enhance accountability in public education. This study examines its implementation in tutoring services through the Southern Education Foundation pilot program. Interviews with district leaders and vendors reveal that OBC fosters collaboration, improves service alignment with student needs, and enhances… more →
Creating Short Forms of Early Childhood Development Measures: A Framework for Quantifying Statistical, Conceptual, and Practical Tradeoffs in Direct Assessment
Direct assessments of early childhood development (ECD) are a cornerstone of research in developmental psychology and are increasingly used to evaluate programs and policies in lower- and middle-income countries. Despite strong psychometric properties, these assessments are too expensive and time consuming for use in large-scale monitoring or national-level surveys. Short forms of direct… more →
A Family Affair: The Effects of College on Parent and Student Finances
Paying for college is often a family affair, with both parents and students contributing. We study the effects of college on family finances using administrative data on the universe of federal aid applicants in California linked to credit records. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of how both students and their parents use debt with college attendance and how prices affect those… more →
A Framework for Evaluating and Reforming School Vouchers
Following the 2002 work of economist Henry Levin, who laid out a framework for evaluating school vouchers, we provide an updated framework involving four major goals: equity, effiency, accountability and democratic goals. We review what is known from recent research around these four major areas under today’s voucher programs. We raise questions that policymakers and advocates should ask when… more →
Unequal Access: How Public Library Closures Affect Educational Performance
Local public institutions, such as public libraries, offer access to low-cost educational resources, potentially mitigating human capital investment disparities. However, from 2008 to 2019, 766 public library outlets closed across the US, reducing access to these critical resources. This study examines the effect of public library outlet closures on library use and educational outcomes in… more →
From Retributive to Restorative: An Alternative Approach to Justice in Schools
School districts historically approached conflict-resolution from the perspective that suspending disruptive students was necessary to protect their classmates, even if this caused harm to perceived offenders. Restorative practices (RP) – focused on reparation, accountability, and shared ownership of disciplinary justice – are designed to address undesirable behavior without harming students.… more →
Practice-Based Teacher Education Pedagogies Improve Responsiveness: Evidence from a Lab Experiment
Given the limited time available during teacher preparation, teacher educators must make zerosum choices about the pedagogies they choose to prepare pre-service teachers. Yet the field lacks rigorous causal evidence regarding the relative efficacy of different pedagogies to inform teacher educator decision-making. To begin to address this issue, we randomly assigned 185 college students to one… more →
Peer Income Exposure Across the Income Distribution
Children from families across the income distribution attend public schools, making schools and classrooms potential sites for interaction between more- and less-affluent children. However, limited information exists regarding the extent of economic integration in these contexts. We merge educational administrative data from Oregon with measures of family income derived from IRS records to… more →
Do Dual Enrollment Students Realize Better Long-Run Earnings? Variations in Financial Outcomes Among Key Student Groups
This study considers whether dual enrollment is associated with students’ financial outcomes over a longer, twelve-year time horizon after high school graduation than previously analyzed in the existing literature. Using longitudinal administrative data that span K-12, higher education, and the workforce, we conduct a propensity score analysis to understand how dual credit participation among… more →
Leveraging Quarterly Workforce Indicators to Analyze Teacher Labor Market Dynamics: Inequitable Trends in Educator Turnover
Educator labor markets vary considerably across the country and can change quickly during recessions. We use data from the Quality Workforce Indicators (QWI) on educators in Elementary and Secondary Schools from 2000-01 to 2022-23. We demonstrate how to transform the quarter-level data in the QWI to construct valid educator labor market measures. The strengths of the QWI address the… more →
Corequisite Course Models in California Community Colleges: Implementation Variation and Challenges
As community colleges and systems move away from developmental education and encourage students to enroll in introductory, college-level coursework to complete their math and English requirements, it is critical to provide students with additional academic supports to help them succeed. One such model is the corequisite course, a model that offers a separate support lab to provide academic… more →
The Costs and Benefits of North Carolina’s Early College High School Model
Early colleges are high schools that blend the high school and college experiences. They have been shown to increase college enrollment and completion; however less is known about the costs of the early college model relative to traditional high schools. We leverage randomized assignment of North Carolina students to early colleges to estimate the costs, benefits, and net benefits (benefits… more →
Combining Early Grade Assessments to Study Literacy Skills: Addressing the Variability in Tests Taken across Schools and Students
There is considerable variability in the literacy assessments taken in Kindergarten through second grade, across schools and between multilingual learners and other students, and within students over time. This makes it difficult to study changes in students’ acquisition of ELA skills in these formative years, or to evaluate policies and practices meant to support literacy development. Here we… more →
Return on Investment or Ripoff? Examining the Returns to New Master’s Degree Programs
Universities have created more than 14,000 new master’s degree programs in the last two decades, and much of this is likely driven by an effort to increase institutional revenues during challenging financial times. But this expansion in graduate education creates a risk that these new programs fail to generate a return on investment to students or taxpayers. We examined student debt and debt-… more →
The Decline in Teacher Working Conditions During and After the COVID Pandemic
We study changes to teacher working conditions from 2016-17 to 2022-23, covering school years before, during, and after the COVID pandemic. We show working conditions were improving leading into the pandemic but declined when the pandemic arrived. Perhaps more surprisingly, the peak of the pandemic was not a low point for teacher working conditions, which have continued to decline during the… more →
Effectiveness of Structured Teacher Adaptations to an Online Content Literacy Intervention for Third Graders: A Randomized Controlled Trial During COVID-19
Scaling up evidence-based educational interventions to improve student outcomes presents challenges, especially when adapting to new contexts while maintaining fidelity. Structured teacher adaptations that integrate the strengths of experimental science (high fidelity) and improvement science (high adaptation) offer a viable solution to bridge the research-practice divide. This preregistered… more →
Improving College Readiness in Mathematics in the Context of a Comprehensive High School Reform
This mixed methods experimental study examined the impacts of the Early College High School model on students’ college readiness in mathematics measured by their success in college preparatory mathematics courses in the 9th through 11th grades, and disaggregated for academically prepared and underprepared students. This study looked at the longitudinal sample of students who moved from the 9th… more →
Early Impacts of the FAFSA Requirement in Texas
In 2021−22, Texas implemented a policy requiring all public high school seniors to complete a financial aid application. This paper examines the early impacts of this requirement on Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) completion rates and college enrollment using a difference-in-differences model. First, using a sample of high schools in Texas, I find that the FAFSA requirement… more →
State Intervention and Racialized Policy Aversion in Michigan's Black School Districts
For the past thirty years, Michigan has used Emergency Management (EM) and receiverships to solve city and school finance issues. The impact of these state intervention policies has been highly publicized and has led to institutional distrust among black citizens in urban communities —with the Flint water crisis standing out as the most infamous and high-profile example. A possible outcome of… more →
Curricular-Credential Decoupling: How Schools Respond to Career and Technical Education Policy
This study examines College and Career Readiness (CCR) policy implementation through the lens of decoupling. We investigate how high schools have jointly implemented Career and Technical Education (CTE) and Industry-Based Certifications (IBCs), and whether there is evidence of curricular-credential decoupling via misalignment between the subject-areas of students’ CTE course and IBC completion… more →
On-the-Job Learning: How Peers and Experience Drive Productivity among Teachers
Workers learn on the job from both repetition and peers. Less understood is how specific types of experience and peer characteristics affect on-the-job learning. This likely differs by context (e.g., occupation, tasks, or roles). Absent such knowledge, it is unclear how to optimally assign workers to tasks and peers. We examine on-the-job learning among elementary school teachers. We… more →
Beyond School Police Officers: Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Exposure to a Fuller Range of School Disciplinary Personnel
Using data from the 2017–18 and 2020–21 Civil Rights Data Collection, we document dis-parities in exposure to disciplinary staff across US high schools and geographic levels. Black and Hispanic students are exposed to 1.1 and 0.8 more disciplinary personnel than White students, respectively, which is equivalent to roughly twice the total average expo-sure to disciplinary personnel in high… more →
In the Wake of Dobbs: The Effect of State Abortion Bans on Women's College Choices
This paper studies the impact of state reproductive rights laws on women’s human capital decisions after the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). Using data from the Common App, the undergraduate college admission application, I implement a difference-in-differences design that compares high-achieving women’s… more →
Results from NCME Survey on Revisions to the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing
The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing have served as a cornerstone for best practices in assessment. As the field evolves, so must these standards, with regular revisions ensuring they reflect current knowledge and practice. The National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) conducted a survey to gather feedback from its members regarding potential updates to the 2014… more →
Framework for Evaluating & Reforming Education Finance Systems
This paper presents a comprehensive framework for evaluating and reforming education finance systems to ensure equity, adequacy, and equal opportunity in publicly funded education. We summarize decades conceptual work, explaining our evolving understanding of the role and purpose of school finance systems, leading to our current framing that the purpose of these systems is to deliver the… more →
Pinpointing Persistence in Alternative STEM Pipelines: Evidence from a Novel Coding and Apprenticeship Program
The shortage of STEM workers, particularly in computer science, is compounded by the underrepresentation of women and certain minoritized racial/ethnic groups in these fields. Efforts to address worker shortages and broaden participation include improving traditional STEM education pathways and creating alternative pathways. While persistence has been examined in traditional STEM pathways,… more →
Inequities and Impacts of Investments in New School Facilities
There is growing evidence that investment in school facilities, and new school construction in particular, can improve K-12 student outcomes, particularly for low-income students. Funding for school infrastructure, however, is inequitably distributed. Moreover, given a lack of national data on school facilities, researchers have focused on specific states or districts, leaving contextual… more →
The Prevalence of LGBTQ+ Teachers in the U.S.
Due to limited data, we know little about the prevalence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) educators. Using the American Community Survey and Census Pulse, we examine the representation of LGBTQ+ individuals in PK-12 teaching. We find that 3.3-3.5 percent of LGBTQ+ individuals are teachers; in contrast, 4.4-4.9 percent of non-LGBTQ+ individuals are teachers. This new… more →
The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms
While legislators have implemented many “science of reading” initiatives in the last two decades, the evidence on the impact of these reforms at scale is limited. In this pre-registered, quasi-experimental study, we examine California’s recent initiative to improve early literacy across the state’s lowest-performing schools. The Early Literacy Support Block Grant (ELSBG) provided teacher… more →
How Not to Fool Ourselves About Heterogeneity of Treatment Effects
Researchers across many fields have called for greater attention to heterogeneity of treatment effects—shifting focus from the average effect to variation in effects between different treatments, studies, or subgroups. True heterogeneity is important, but many reports of heterogeneity have proved to be false, non-replicable, or inflated. In this review, we catalog ways that past… more →
School Calendars and Student Obesity
Ample evidence documents rising student obesity in summer months and falling student obesity during the school year. One theory for this pattern is that out-of-school days lack some of the structure and health-promoting behaviors that schools provide. Given this observed seasonal pattern, a natural question is whether there is room for policies that alter the summer vacation to serve as an… more →
The Correlated Proxy Problem: Why Control Variables can Obscure the Contribution of Selection Processes to Group-Level Inequality
Whether selection processes contribute to group-level disparities or merely reflect pre-existing inequalities is an important societal question. In the context of observational data, researchers, concerned about omitted-variable bias, assess selection-contributing inequality via a kitchen-sink approach, comparing selection outcomes of different-group individuals net of various characteristics… more →
Addressing Threats to Validity in Supervised Machine Learning: A Framework and Best Practices for Education Researchers
Given the rapid adoption of machine learning methods by education researchers, and growing acknowledgement of their inherent risks, there is an urgent need for tailored methodological guidance on how to improve and evaluate the validity of inferences drawn from these methods. Drawing upon an integrative literature review and extending a well-known framework for theorizing validity in the… more →
The (Conference) Room Where it Happens: Explaining Disproportional Representation in Gifted and Talented Education
The current study leveraged comprehensive data from a large school district to better understand the degree to which disproportional representation in gifted education can be explained by mean assessment score differences across racial and socioeconomic groups. The findings indicate that after controlling for nonverbal ability, cognitive ability, math achievement, reading achievement, and… more →
Who’s Matched Up? Access to Same-Race Instructors in Higher Education
Despite consistent evidence on the benefits of same-race instructor matching in K-12 settings and developing work in higher education, research has yet to conceptualize and document the incidence of same-race matching. That is, even if same-race matching produces positive effects, how likely are racially minoritized students to ever experience an instructor of the same race? Using… more →
GenAI-101: What Undergraduate Students Need to Know and Actually Know About Generative AI
In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a groundbreaking generative AI chatbot backed by large language models (LLMs). Since then, these models have seen various applications in education, from Socratic tutoring and writing assistance to teacher training and essay scoring. Despite their widespread use among high school and college students in the United States, there is limited research on… more →
A Global Regression Discontinuity Design: Theory and Application to Grade Retention Policies
We use a marginal treatment effect (MTE) representation of a fuzzy regression discontinuity setting to propose a novel estimation approach. The estimator can be thought of as extrapolating a traditional fuzzy regression discontinuity estimate or as an observational study that adjusts for endogenous selection into treatment using information at the discontinuity. We show in a frequentist… more →
Effects of High-Impact Tutoring on Student Attendance: Evidence from the OSSE HIT Initiative in the District of Columbia
Student absenteeism, which skyrocketed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, has negative consequences for student engagement and achievement. This study examines the impact of the High-Impact Tutoring (HIT) Initiative, implemented by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education in Washington DC, on reducing absenteeism. The HIT initiative was designed to mitigate learning loss by… more →
How are Institutions Positioned on the Brink of the Enrollment Cliff?: Evidence from Ohio
Since 2018, institutions of higher education have been aware of the "enrollment cliff" which refers to expected declines in future enrollment. This paper attempts to describe how prepared institutions in Ohio are for this future by looking at trends leading up to the anticipated decline. Using IPEDS data from 2012-2022, we analyze trends in enrollment, revenues, debt and staffing across Ohio's… more →
Understanding Variation in Post-College Earnings: Evidence from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard
Using the detailed college level data from the College Scorecard on students’ post-college earnings from the near universe of four-year colleges, we assess the usefulness of going beyond comparing colleges based only on median earnings and analyze the descriptive relationship between college selectivity and earnings outcomes and how this relationship may differ by student sex and field of… more →
Do Human Capital Adjustments Protect Youths from Structural Change?
Structural changes to labor demand can have lasting consequences on the employment and earnings of workers in affected industries and geographies. However, individuals coming of age may avoid similar fates if they internalize salient changes to the returns to education and adjust their human capital investments. This paper studies the effects of exposure to structural labor demand shocks… more →
The Differential Sorting of Disadvantaged Students in the Competitive K-12 Market
School choice options offer potential educational gains for disadvantaged students, but do they take advantage of such options? I study the sorting patterns of students with prior child welfare reports (12 percent of incoming kindergartners) across traditional public, magnet, charter, and private schools in a mid-sized city. These students are significantly less likely to opt out of… more →
Funding the Digital Divide? How School District Financing for Educational Technology Changed During the COVID-19 Pandemic
School finance inequities are a key driver of disparities in educational outcomes. Higher per-pupil funding levels allow schools to provide more qualified educators, smaller class sizes, and high-quality physical resources such as modern instructional technology. We study how Washington state school districts generate and allocate funding for instructional technology, and how that changed… more →
Inequality Beyond Standardized Tests: Trends in Extracurricular Activity Reporting in College Applications Across Race and Class
For years, discussions on inequality in college admissions have addressed standardized tests, but less is known about inequality in non-standardized components of applications. We analyzed extracurricular activity descriptions in 6,054,104 applications submitted through the Common Application using natural language processing methods. Overall, White, Asian American, wealthier, and private… more →
Making the Grade: Accounting for Course Selection in High School Transcripts with Item Response Theory
We use student-level administrative data from Delaware for 43,767 high school students across five 12th grade cohorts from 2017 to 2021. We apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to high school transcript data, treating courses as items and grades as ordered responses, to estimate both student transcript strength (𝜃̂) and course difficulty. We prove, via construct and predictive validation and… more →