EdWorkingPapers
(How) Do We Teach Emotions?
Emotional intelligence constitutes a key component of human capital, shaped partially by educational materials. Using machine learning and generative AI tools, we examine emotional content in public-school textbooks and children’s literature. A stark mismatch emerges: text exposes children to a broad emotional range, but images overwhelmingly depict happiness and calm, regardless of emotions… more →
"How You Spend Your Money is Your Strategy": Education Spending and the Academic Achievement of Students with and without Disabilities in Virginia, 2018-2025
Virginia experienced a boost in federal and state education funding from 2020-2025 and launched the Virginia Literacy Act in 2023. These policy events prompted our study of the impact of education spending by school divisions on growth in academic pass rates in reading and mathematics for students with and without disabilities in grades three through eight (2018-2025). To do this, we estimated… more →
Is Calculus a Gatekeeper in Selective Engineering Admissions? Insights from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment with Admissions Officers
Lower-resourced high schools are far less likely to offer calculus, raising concerns that calculus availability may be a gatekeeper in selective college admissions. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment (292 admissions officers, 1768 total observations), we investigate whether engineering applicants are penalized for not taking calculus—even when it was unavailable to them. We also investigate… more →
Shine a Light: The U.S. Federal Government Should Increase Access to Educational Administrative Data
The Institute of Educational Sciences invested substantial resources into the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grant program. These grants helped states convert their educational records to longitudinal datasets for research and evaluation. However, external researchers still have unreliable access to these datasets. In this commentary, we argue that the U.S. federal government should use… more →
Post-pandemic achievement recovery based on student characteristics and district-level policies
It is well-established that student achievement has declined dramatically since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, less is known how these patterns may vary by developmental timing of exposure to the pandemic and how district-level policies may have influenced student recovery. This descriptive study examined patterns of achievement across middle childhood during and after the COVID-19… more →
State School Accountability Decisions and the Implications for School Ratings
State school accountability systems have been a constant in educational policy since before federal law required them. Currently, state systems must include multiple measures of school quality but states otherwise have considerable leeway in measuring schools. We simulate school ratings using eight years of data to demonstrate how state decisions about (a) weighting multiple measures, and (b) how… more →
Evaluation Scores and Student Learning under Compulsory Teacher Re-Evaluation
We examine how lower-performing public school teachers respond to more frequent formative evaluations. A 2011 reform in Chile required teachers rated "basic" (the second-lowest category) to be re-evaluated after two years rather than four. Using nationwide administrative data on primary school teachers and students from 2005-2015, we show that the reform increased two-year re-evaluation rates by… more →
Measures Still Matter: Replicating and Extending a Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Educational Apps on Children's Reading and Math Skills with Six Years of New Data
This study replicates and extends a meta-analysis of 36 studies of educational apps (Kim et al., 2021) with six years of new data. We synthesize 841 effect sizes from 141 studies evaluating the effectiveness of educational apps on reading and math skills of students ages 3-9. Replicating the original study, we find a moderate positive pooled effect size with substantial heterogeneity (d = .40, 95… more →
The Access–Enrollment Disconnect in Corequisite Math Reform: Causal Evidence and Stakeholder Perspectives from a Community College
This study examines a statewide developmental education reform in Virginia that allows students who would have been placed in standalone remedial math to enroll directly in college-level math with corequisite support. Although corequisite support has been widely adopted and generally promising, less is known about how these reforms operate when expanded access does not always translate into… more →
How Colleges and Universities are Adopting AI in Higher Education: A Global Comparative Analysis
Artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI have become central strategic priorities for universities worldwide, yet the extent to which institutions formally embed AI into their governance, academic, and policy structures remains unclear. This study examines the institutionalization of AI across a global sample of research universities drawn from the Times Higher Education 2026 World… more →
Leveraging complementarities between teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical supports: Experimental evidence from India
We evaluate whether pairing strong subject-matter knowledge with pedagogical supports can improve learning in public primary schools. In Pune, India, we randomly assigned grades within 48 schools to an intervention that recruited college students in science, technology, engineering, and math (“fellows”), supported them with training, coaching, and scripts, and had them partly replace math and… more →
The Post-Pandemic “Attendance Crisis” in Historical Perspective
School attendance rates in the United States are lower now than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This rise in absenteeism has often been characterized as a crisis; but whether it amounts to a broader breakdown in norms depends on the historical baseline against which it is judged. The recent decline in attendance rates represents a small setback within a much longer trajectory of increasing school… more →
Teacher Stability in Turnaround Schools: An Examination of the Impacts of Michigan’s Partnership Model on Teacher Turnover
While a large literature demonstrates that school turnaround can improve performance, impacts on teacher retention are more ambiguous. We examine the impact of Michigan’s turnaround policy on teacher turnover before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Event study findings show limited immediate effects on teacher turnover, but significant and substantively large decreases in school-level turnover… more →
The Geography of Gifted Education: Exploring School and Neighborhood Predictors of Access to Gifted & Talented Programs in New York City
Black and Hispanic students participate in gifted education at lower rates than their share of general education public school enrollment would suggest, including within New York City's Gifted and Talented (G&T) admissions process. Debates over this disparity focus on how students are identified rather than where programs exist. This paper examines a related supply-side question by asking… more →
Unveiling Racism: A Systematic Review of Survey Measures of Racism in Education
Education policy research aimed at eliminating racism necessitates methodological innovation that fosters both racial equity–centered approaches and robust empirical analysis of the systemic and structural nature of racism. Most quantitative research in educational psychology does not account for racism in its modeling, thereby obscuring the racialized environments in which students learn (DeCuir… more →
Distinguishing Burdens from Benefits in Early Care and Education Policy
Contemporary policy conversations discuss burdens imposed by regulations, describing when they render government functions ineffective and inefficient. But one can mislabel the core purposes and benefits of a policy’s existence as burdens. Applying the administrative burden framework to early care and education (ECE) policy, we describe what ECE providers face while navigating disparate state and… more →
The Disparate Impacts of Academic Probation
Institutional rules that appear neutral can produce unequal outcomes when applied to students who differ in how they respond to them. We study this in the context of academic probation, a policy used by nearly every U.S. college to warn students whose grades fall below a fixed threshold that continued enrollment is conditional on improvement. To do so, we draw on student records from a large… more →
Under the Weather? Seasonal Effects of Temperature on Student Test Performance
As students are exposed to extreme temperatures with ever-increasing frequency, it is important to understand how such exposure affects student performance. Drawing on detailed Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) achievement data combined with high-resolution weather records, we estimate the effect of temperature on student test performance across a six-year period for students in Tulsa, Oklahoma… more →
Unpacking the Socioeconomic Status Gap in Exam-Based School Admissions
We analyze the large socioeconomic status (SES) gaps in public high school assignments in Mexico City, a centralized choice system with exam-based admissions. Using a rich structural model, decomposition, and simulations, we find that placement score differences explain 83% of the gap in assignment to elite schools, contrasted with preferences (6%) and location (5%). For less-preferred technical… more →
What Drives Special Education Spending: Evidence from Texas School Districts
Special education finance systems rely on observable indicators such as disability classifications and educational placements to allocate resources, yet limited evidence exists regarding whether these indicators correspond to the expenditures districts incur serving students with disabilities. This study examines variation in special education spending across Texas public school districts… more →
Expanded High-Speed Broadband Internet Access at Home and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Federal Subsidy Program
Policymakers have argued that expanding home broadband would improve educational outcomes. However, prior studies report mixed, null, or negative effects on achievement, with limited post-pandemic evidence. Using district-level achievement and enrollment data from a national broadband subsidy program serving 23 million low-income households, we examine whether increased uptake is associated with… more →
When Youth Enter The Chat: An Epistemic Shift in the Validation of LLM-Based Measures of Student Talk
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used increasingly to measure aspects of student discourse (e.g. talk moves, collaboration, equity of voice) at scale. Typically, LLM-based measures of student talk use transcriptions of classroom conversations that only include verbal contributions, which de-contextualize student language. Common practices for validating these measures include comparing… more →
What’s in Play: The Strategic and Symbolic Use of Racial Equity Frames When Racial Politics Shift
Shifting racial politics place substantial pressures on organizations to navigate whether and how to sustain DEI commitments. In this study, I examine how partnerships between public school districts and private school improvement organizations (SIOs) responded to shifting environmental pressures around racial equity in their espoused goals and practice over time. I found that organizations… more →
The Chronic(les) of Absenteeism Measurement: Unpacking the Many Measures of Attendance and Evidence for a Lower Chronic Absenteeism Threshold
This study investigates how absenteeism can be more rigorously measured as an early warning indicator of future academic risk. Using administrative data from 8,891 Boston Public Schools students followed from Pre-K through eighth grade, we (1) describe patterns in excused, unexcused, and total absences, measured as both days and rates, across grades; (2) apply Signal Detection Theory and Receiver… more →
Measuring Academic Behaviors at Scale: Developing Longitudinal Measures of “Noncognitive” Skills Using Administrative Data and Examining Predictive Validity
Academic behaviors, as reflected in administrative indicators such as attendance and suspensions, are widely used in education research. However, limited guidance exists on how to measure them longitudinally and at scale. Using longitudinal data from Boston Public Schools students followed from kindergarten through high school (N = 12,232), we compare grade-specific point-in-time indicators with… more →
Helping the Many by Tutoring the Few: The Social Multiplier of Early Literacy Instruction
Tutoring is almost always evaluated by randomizing students within schools, a design that differences out any spillover onto classmates. We instead randomize 81 Danish schools and 2,583 kindergartners, tutoring a few children in each and testing all. Decoding improved 0.38 standard deviations among the pre-registered target group and 0.27 SD school-wide. Bounds requiring only the test’s range and… more →
Local Signals in a Global Tournament: Information Frictions, Optimism, and College Completion
Families frequently receive local signals about children’s skills, such as class rank in high school, yet the college market in which most students ultimately compete is much broader. Using nationally-representative data, we show that student effort, parental investment, and beliefs about college degree attainment all respond predominantly to local ranks as opposed to global ranks, despite both… more →
An Untappable Pipeline? Examining Why Many Educators with Administrative Licenses Do Not Pursue School Leadership
States' licensure requirements typically mean that new school principals and assistant principals must come from the pool of educators holding an administrative license. Yet if many license- holders are uninterested in leadership positions, even districts with large numbers of licensed educators may face a constrained supply of leaders. Using statewide administrative and survey data from… more →
Unpacking Racial Disparities in School Spending: Why “progressiveness” and “comparability” are not enough
Studies of racial and economic disparities in school funding typically rely on simple spending comparisons or "progressiveness" measures that ignore variation in the cost of achieving common educational outcomes. This article argues that such approaches essentially ignore how much it costs schools in order to provide students with an adequate opportunity to learn. Simplistic spending measures… more →
The Effects of State-Level Loan Forgiveness Policies on Teacher Supply
The waning prestige of the teaching profession has fueled a decline in the number of aspiring teachers entering preparation programs, compounding staffing challenges already inherent to many schools. In this paper, I show that state-level loan forgiveness policies modestly increase the number of first-year students enrolled in education programs by about 12% but have no overall effect on total… more →
Remediation or Roadblock? The Effects of Failing Virginia's Accountability Exams
Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL) system requires students to pass end-of-course exams to earn verified credits needed for high school graduation. Scoring below the passing cutoff may create a barrier to completing a high school degree, but it also triggers state-mandated remediation, which may include additional instruction and tutoring. Because these channels push in opposite directions,… more →
Estimating the Overall Effects of Statewide Early Literacy Policies: Evidence from Michigan
This paper evaluates the impacts of Michigan's statewide early literacy reform using a synthetic difference-in-differences approach. We estimate the policy’s effects on student achievement and grade retention and compare them to statewide literacy reforms in South Carolina and Mississippi. We find that the policy increased third-grade reading achievement by 8.7% of a standard deviation, with… more →
Bidirectional associations between executive function and social behavior across childhood: A registered report using a nationally representative sample
Executive function (EF) refers to a set of cognitive skills involved in deliberate, goal-oriented behavior. Although research has established links between children’s EF and aspects of their social skills, it remains unclear how EF skills are related to specific social behaviors, such as prosociality and social aggression. Additionally, the co-development of EF and social behavior during… more →
Parents’ Biased Beliefs and Competitive Investments in Education: A Field Experiment
Using a field experiment in China, we demonstrate that parental investment decisions are affected by their beliefs about their peers’ investment levels, and that they often hold biased beliefs about these levels. When provided information about the true distribution of tutoring hours invested among their reference groups, parents in the treated group significantly adjust their investments (by… more →
Early literacy tutoring and children’s reading trajectories: Evidence from a four-year randomized controlled trial
Most evidence on early literacy tutoring comes from intensive one-year interventions. Much less is known about whether schools can sustain individualized instructional support as students’ reading needs evolve across the early grades. We present findings from a four-year randomized controlled trial evaluating Chapter One, an adaptive instructional support system designed to translate the… more →
Virtual Tutoring with Computer-Assisted Learning: An Experiment in Take-Up and Learning
We explore the efficacy of an online after-school tutoring program that complements teacher-provided computer-assisted learning practice. The aim is to scaffold students struggling with online Khan Academy practice at school with low-cost, one-on-one virtual supervision for about an hour a week at home. In a two-year randomized trial with the Toronto District School Board, teachers identified… more →
Making AI Tutoring Productive: Evidence from a Mastery-Based Math Practice Experiment
Large language models (LLMs) can make tutoring more scalable, but only if students use them to reason through mistakes rather than avoid effort. We study this question in a randomized field experiment with more than 6,000 middle-school students in Hamilton County Schools using NUMI, a research-based computer-assisted learning (CAL) platform. Students were randomized to AI versus CAL-only support… more →
One Click Away: AI Tutoring with Khanmigo in a Two-Year School Experiment
Generative AI has been promoted as the technology that could transform education by providing every student a personal tutor. We provide some of the first large-scale experimental evidence, from a two-year cluster randomized trial in 18 Tennessee middle schools in which randomly assigned students used Khan Academy with its AI tutor, Khanmigo, configured to coach rather than give answers, during… more →
Equity in context: Institutional agency in targeting student supports in Massachusetts community colleges
How do related, but independent community colleges operationalize and implement an equity-oriented initiative? In 2021, Massachusetts established the SUCCESS initiative to provide non-financial student supports in all 15 of the state’s public community colleges. This paper draws on 35 interviews with program staff across the colleges to ask how they used their institutional data and designed new… more →
Ethnic Studies Courses Across California High Schools: A Mixed-Method Analysis of Teacher-Intended Curricula
Ethnic Studies courses, which center the counternarratives of racialized communities, are rapidly expanding across California in advance of a high school graduation requirement for the class of 2029-30. However, content and pedagogical guidance for practitioners remains limited. To learn how teachers throughout the state have aligned Ethnic Studies courses with existing principles defined by… more →
Can We Save Failing Schools? Evidence From Los Angeles
Can providing funding and support to failing schools help them improve? This paper studies this question using a natural experiment based on a 2017 lawsuit settlement that allocated substantial resources and support to the lowest-performing schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Using a difference-in-differences design, I compare 50 secondary schools that received an increase… more →
The Role of Career Advising in High School in Shaping the Aspirations of First-Generation Students
College aspirations often form by 8th grade, yet first-generation students—those whose parents lack post-secondary education—miss out on resources continuing-generation peers use to make informed decisions about their futures. School-based career advising can help fill this gap. Using 2018 PISA data, this study examined whether the provider (counselors vs. teachers) and scheduling format (formal… more →
Translating Policy into Opportunity: School Counselors and the Implementation of CTE-Focused Dual Enrollment Pathways
Dual enrollment programs have expanded rapidly in the United States as a mechanism to improve college readiness, accelerate time to credential, and support postsecondary transitions. Yet empirical research on dual enrollment has largely centered on academic coursework offered through community colleges or four-year institutions. Considerably less is known about career-oriented dual enrollment… more →
A Systematic Review of Research Designs Used to Evaluate State and Locally Funded Pre-K Programs
Expansions of state and locally funded pre-k programs in recent decades have been promoted by advocates citing strong research support. However, questions have been raised about how supportive the research base actually is. We conducted a systematic review of pre-k evaluation studies (from 2000-2021) to document their research designs and the direction of their reported impacts. Most of the 120… more →
The Effects of School Building HVAC System Conditions on Student Academic and Behavioral Outcomes
There is growing awareness of the importance of school building environments for student health, well-being, and even educational outcomes. We ask in this study what role school building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems play in shaping student attendance, behavior, and learning. In particular, we extract information from school building inspection reports and link them to… more →
More STEM Credentials at What Cost? Unpacking 2-Year Colleges’ Response to the STEM Incentive in Performance-Based Funding
Objective: Performance-based funding (PBF) has gained significant traction in US higher education over the past few decades. It aims to improve student outcomes by tying a portion of state funding to outcomes (e.g., graduation, retention). In recent years, an increasing number of states have added workforce metrics to their PBF policies to promote STEM and health credentials aimed at… more →
Who Belongs in Math? Gendered Peer Math Beliefs and Girls' Gender Beliefs, Math Beliefs, and Achievement
This paper studies how exposure to gendered peer math beliefs shapes girls' gender-math beliefs, their own math beliefs, and mathematics achievement. I exploit quasi-random variation in girls' exposure to peer math beliefs generated by random classroom assignment at entry into Chinese middle schools. Exposure to girls' and boys' peer math beliefs has opposite effects on gender-math beliefs: girls… more →
“Can we fight this fight?”: How Racial Politics Shape the Implementation of Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education Teaching Standards
In this study, we investigate the role of teacher education (TE) programs in filtering the implementation of Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education teaching guidelines in Pennsylvania. Drawing on a comparative case study of three TE programs across diverse institutional and political contexts, we find that implementation varied from surface-level adoption of the guidelines to deeper… more →
Head Start Plus: The Case for Piloting a Cadillac Public ECE Program
The long-term impacts of early childhood education (ECE) programs at scale are smaller than those produced by influential demonstration programs half a century ago. Several factors likely contribute, some of which are in the control of policymakers and the designers of ECE programs (e.g., targeting and quality), and some of which are not (quality of conditions for children not served by ECE… more →
23 Years of State Pre-K Expansion: How States Balance Investment, Access, and Quality in the Modern Era
We describe state-funded pre-kindergarten (pre-K) expansion in the modern era from 2002 to 2024, documenting patterns of investment and reach. Although spending and enrollment increased substantially, states pursued widely varying expansion strategies. A 200% increase in pre-K enrollment did not reduce spending on enrolled children. Instead, we observed an average increase of 21% in per-pupil… more →