EdWorkingPapers
Can Peer Group Design Improve Engagement in Online STEM Courses? The Role of Motivation to Lead
Peer interaction is important for student engagement and success in higher education and becomes even more critical in online STEM education, where limited interaction can undermine motivation and belonging—key factors for success in rigorous STEM coursework. Despite the widespread use of peer group activities to foster collaboration, there is limited understanding of how to effectively form… more →
Contemporary Child Labor and Declining School Attendance in the U.S.
The United States has experienced a 400% increase in reported child labor violations over the past decade, coinciding with declines in K-12 school attendance and enrollment. We examine the causal relationships between these patterns with microdata from the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2005 to 2023. Using a shift-share instrumental variable approach, our findings show that increased… more →
Estimating Compensating Wage Differentials for Public School Teachers in High-Poverty and High-Minority Schools: Evidence from U.S. National Data, 1988–2018
Using a hedonic wage framework, this paper estimates compensating wage differentials (CWDs) for teachers in high-poverty and/or high-minority schools, drawing on thirty years of nationally representative data from the School and Staffing Surveys (SASS), National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS), and Common Core of Data (CCD), 1988–2018. We also examine CWDs for teachers with STEM BA degrees… more →
Resilience and Transformation: The Pandemic’s Effects on Texas Community Colleges
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted higher education, particularly community colleges serving significant proportions of traditionally disadvantaged students. This mixed methods study examines how Texas community colleges responded to the crisis and the extent to which they institutionalized pandemic-driven changes. Using state-wide student-level administrative data, and survey and interview data… more →
Right to Education (RTE) Act’s Influence on Caste-based Enrollment Gaps and Segregation in India
Section 12(1)(c) of the Right to Education (RTE) Act of India expanded affirmative action to primary schooling by requiring non-government-funded private schools to reserve 25% of their admissions for students from marginalized castes and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Using variation in implementation of the policy across states in a difference-in-differences framework, this study… more →
School Bathrooms: Perspectives on Safety, Surveillance, and Privacy in the Restroom
Schools are increasing surveillance in bathrooms in response to concerns about student behaviors in the restroom such as vaping, drug use, and vandalism. This study investigates how schools secure and surveil bathrooms and how stakeholders perceive these interventions. We situate school bathrooms as part of the prison industrial complex (PIC) and identify how the carceral logics of… more →
The Labor Market Impact of K-11 vs. K-12
In 1945, Louisiana extended secondary education from 11 years to 12. Since many students followed diploma-based stopping rules, consecutive birth cohorts exogenously received different amounts of schooling. We use this natural experiment to evaluate the long-run labor market impact of having an 11-year versus a 12-year program. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we find that cohorts… more →
Beg to DIFfer: Resolving Statistical Complications of Intersectional DIF Analyses
Modern test developers conduct differential item functioning (DIF) analyses to ensure fairness in educational and psychological testing. To address previously unrecognized biases, researchers have recently demonstrated the importance of conducting intersectional DIF analyses that attend to the intersectional nature of test-takers’ multiple identities. However, these intersectional DIF… more →
Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead? Evaluating the Effects of Virginia's Workforce-Targeted Free College Program
Tuition-free college programs are gaining momentum as policymakers address rising college costs and workforce readiness. Despite their growing adoption, limited research examines how workforce-focused eligibility criteria impact student outcomes beyond enrollment. This pre-registered study employs two within-study quasi-experimental designs—differencein- discontinuity and difference-in-… more →
The Effect of College Entrance Exam Policies on Test Preparation and Tutoring Services
Multiple studies suggest that policies mandating college entrance exams can have positive impacts on college outcomes, especially for students who would otherwise not sit for the exam. Less understood is how families react to this increased competition for college admissions. Our study estimates that such statewide mandatory testing policies cause an additional 16% increase in private tutoring… more →
The Effects of K-12 Computer Science Education Policies on Postsecondary CS Participation
States have increasingly adopted policies to promote computer science education at the elementary and secondary levels. These policies are intended, in part, to promote the pursuit of computer science at the postsecondary level. We collect novel longitudinal data on adoption and implementation dates of nine policies promoted by the Code.org Advocacy Coalition in the United States since 2000… more →
Increasing Applied STEM Curricular Opportunities in High School and Impacts on Early Post-Secondary Outcomes: The Effect 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. Our identification strategies rely on within-school between-cohort variation in PLTW course availability. This serves as an… more →
The Impact of High-Impact Tutoring on Student Attendance: Evidence from a State Initiative
Student absenteeism surged during and after the pandemic, harming engagement and achievement. We evaluate the impact of Washington DC's High-Impact Tutoring (HIT) Initiative—designed to mitigate learning loss through targeted academic supports—on student absenteeism. Using daily attendance data and a within-student fixed effects design, we find that students were 1.2 percentage points less… more →
Improving Student-Teacher Relationships Through Feedback: The Development and Evaluation of the Stanford/Leading Educators Wise Feedback Professional Development Learning Series
High-quality academic feedback, especially feedback that highlights errors, mistakes, misunderstandings and shortcomings, is one of the most valuable tools teachers have for promoting student growth and learning. It is how teachers help students go beyond what they could accomplish on their own (Vygotsky, 1978). It is unsurprising, then, that high-quality feedback is an emphasis of many… 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 utilizing an automated feedback tool to support evidence-based reasoning in coaching. We examined how mathematics coaches employed automated feedback within coaching, asking what… more →
Examining Racial Disparities in School Discipline Throughout the Pandemic
This study explores trends and disparities in school discipline during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the persistence of racial gaps in exclusionary practices. Using student-level data from Arkansas from 2017/18 to 2022/23, we study how disciplinary outcomes relate to student race while controlling for factors such as the type and frequency of infractions, as well as the school level (… more →
Gender Gaps in the Early Grades: Questioning the Narrative that Schools are Poorly Suited to Young Boys
A growing number of scholars and educational leaders have raised concerns that the mismatch between an increasingly academic focus in the early grades and boys’ maturity at school entry is disadvantaging young boys in school. In this study, we use a unique dataset of ten million students to trace the development of math and reading gender gaps from kindergarten to fifth grade for nine cohorts… more →
When interventions don’t move the needle: Insights from null results in education research
As school districts focus on improving learning, they can learn not only from when and where interventions work—but also from why they sometimes do not. Policymakers widely embraced high-impact tutoring as an evidence-supported strategy to address learning delays from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, scaling these promising practices can be difficult, and not all implementations will be… more →
Controlling For Measurement Error in Evaluation Models When Treatment Group Assignment is Based on Noisy Measures: Evaluation of an Achievement Gap-Closing Initiative
This paper develops new models to evaluate the effects of interventions and intervention-by-site heterogeneity when treatment group assignment is based on a fallible variable and the outcome of interest is determined in part by the corresponding true control variables (measured without error). The specific application concerns a school report card redesign in which school performance is… more →
The Effects of Universal School Vouchers on Private School Tuition and Enrollment: A National Analysis
Three-quarters of a century after Milton Friedman popularized the idea, universal school vouchers have suddenly become a reality in 17 states since 2021. These new policies promise to be one of the most far-reaching reforms in U.S. education history. We make two contributions to understanding this policy. First, we provide a rich description of the private school sector nationally. We show… more →
Investing in Human Capital During Wartime: Experimental Evidence from Ukraine
This paper provides insights into human capital investments during wartime by presenting evidence from three experiments of an online tutoring program for Ukrainian students amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Conducted between early 2023 and mid-2024, the experiments reached nearly 10,000 students across all regions of Ukraine. The program offered three hours per week of small-group tutoring… more →
The Design of Promises: The Structure of Local College Affordability Programs in the United States
We analyze 314 local college affordability programs (i.e., “Promise” or “free college” programs) using a novel dataset detailing, for each program, rules stipulating what programs provide (provision), where they may be used (applicability), and who may use them (eligibility). We perform three sets of analyses. First, we ask whether programs can be cogently described as involving greater or… more →
Exploring Test-Optional Admissions Policies: Patterns in Applications, Enrollment, and Diversity During the COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many aspects of higher education, including college admissions processes. Since 2020, numerous universities and colleges have adopted test-optional policies, allowing applicants to decide whether to submit standardized test scores. Although such policies have been in place at some institutions since 1998, research on their associations with student diversity and… more →
The Effect of the Second Trump Administration and the Attendance of Immigrant-Origin Students
Intensified immigration enforcement activity under the second Trump administration has increased anxiety for immigrants in the United States, including many families with school-age children. This study provides early evidence on the effects of the second Trump presidency on the attendance of students who are likely from immigrant families. Using a difference-in-differences design that… more →
The impact of increasing school resources on peer victimization: Evidence from targeted funding on low-income families in Chile
While a large body of literature has examined the impact of school spending on academic outcomes, far less is known about its effect on students’ socioemotional development and school experiences. This study contributes to narrowing this gap by evaluating the impact of a nationwide school finance reform in Chile on peer victimization in high schools. The reform significantly increased school… more →
Labor supply, learning time, and the efficiency of school spending: Evidence from school finance reforms
Does school spending raise achievement? I show that effects, benchmarked by schools’ daily value added, are one-tenth to one-third as large as spending growth. Using school finance reforms for identification, I show that schools did not raise quality measured by value added. Instead, schools raised quantity measured by time diaries of staff and student hours, more than spending, with most… more →
Teacher Strikes and the Demobilization of Republican Voters
Protests can mobilize both supporters and opponents. Extant research suggests that disruptive protests are particularly likely to mobilize opponents, yet strikes—one of the most disruptive forms of protest—have been largely absent from this literature. We use an original dataset of 716 teacher strikes from 2007-2020 to examine the causal effects of teacher strikes on political participation.… more →
High School Effects on Civic Engagement
Preparing young people for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship is cited as a fundamental purpose of public education, yet little is known about whether or how K-12 schools impact civic engagement. Using education records, birth records, and national voting records for nine cohorts of ninth-grade students in Indiana, I estimate and assess the validity of high school effects on adult… more →
Bureaucracy and Burden: Understanding Take-up of a Need-Based Financial Aid Program
Social welfare programs, including college financial aid, often only reach a fraction of eligible beneficiaries. We examine this problem through the lens of Michigan’s Tuition Incentive Program (TIP), a state need-based grant aid program. We conduct a large-scale mixed-methods study using data on over one million Michigan public-school students, and 55 interviews with front-line administrators… more →
Neighborhood Effects on STEM Major Choice
This paper provides causal evidence that the neighborhoods where students grow up play a significant role in shaping their college major choices, focusing on STEM fields. Using administrative data from Texas and variation in the timing of school moves across counties and districts, we estimate the impact of neighborhood exposure on the likelihood of pursuing a STEM major. We find that students… more →
Who Wants to Be a Teacher in America?
Long-standing compositional disparities and more recent concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the need to increase our understanding of the pipeline into K–12 teaching. Leveraging data from 11.5 million college applicants from 2014–2025, we provide the most detailed description to date of who is interested in teaching in the United States. We document substantially… more →
Political Views and College Choices in a Polarized America
We examine the role of students’ political views in shaping college enrollment decisions in the United States. We hypothesize that students derive utility from attending institutions aligned with their political identities, which could reinforce demographic and regional disparities in educational attainment and reduce ideological diversity on campuses. Using four decades of survey data on… more →
Toward More Equitable Learning Environments: Insights from Digital Trace Data on Inclusive Instructional Design Features
Seminal teaching and learning theories converge on the critical role of instructional design in promoting equity and inclusivity in higher education. However, large-scale evidence remains limited as to which specific design features promote more equitable outcomes across diverse student populations in semester-long college courses. This study proposes a comprehensive and scalable framework to… more →
"Send Them Home?" Rethinking What Public Education Owes to Flourishing Children
This essay asks what justice requires for children who are already thriving in school and argues that the dominant frameworks in educational philosophy do not answer the question. Priority, equality of opportunity, adequacy, and capabilities treat public education chiefly as redistribution to the disadvantaged and therefore offer no affirmative reason to continue educating students once… more →
Financial Aid For Future Educators: Assessing A Federal Grant's Impact On Students' Postsecondary Decisions
Created in 2007, the federal TEACH grant program is a large federal financial aid program that seeks to attract postsecondary students to the teaching profession by providing financial assistance to help pay for a teaching degree. This paper describes the uptake and usage of the federal TEACH grant program across a large four-year public university system. Initial findings suggest that there… more →
Comparing Machine Learning Methods for Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Randomized Trials: A Comprehensive Simulation Study
This study compares 18 machine learning methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects in randomized controlled trials, using simulations calibrated to two large-scale educational experiments. We evaluate performance across continuous and binary outcomes with diverse and realistic treatment effect heterogeneity patterns, varying sample sizes, covariate complexities, and effect… more →
Education and the Gender Gap in U.S. Presidential Elections
Women in the United States have outpaced men in both voter participation and educational attainment in recent decades. Since education is closely tied to political participation, we consider these trends in tandem and assess how much of the gender gap in voting is attributable to educational attainment as opposed to cognitive skills, noncognitive skills, college preparation behaviors, and… more →
Democracy For What and For Whom?: The Possibilities and Challenges of K-12 School Boards
Local school boards have historically played a major role in the functioning and character of US schools, providing fiscal oversight, shaping policy, and creating avenues for community voice, representation, and accountability. As such, school boards have regularly served as critical sites for political struggle and public discourse on a range of issues. Yet growing demands on schools,… more →
The Sensitivity of Value-Added Estimates to Test Scoring Decisions
Value-Added Models (VAMs) are both common and controversial in education policy and accountability research. While the sensitivity of VAMs to model specification and covariate selection is well documented, the extent to which test scoring methods (e.g., mean scores vs. IRT-based scores) may affect VA estimates is less studied. We examine the sensitivity of VA estimates to scoring method using… more →
Staff and Faculty Unionizations in Higher Education, 2007-2023
Labor organizing efforts grew following the Covid-19 pandemic in American higher education institutions. This research brief examines unionization trends at private colleges and universities from 2007 through 2023, revealing staff as the main force behind unionization attempts, followed by contingent faculty. SEIU plays a significant role in representing college and university employees. A… more →
Examining the Relationship Between Randomization Strategies and Contamination in Higher Education Interventions
Randomized controlled trials are the reference method for causal inference, but field experiments in educational settings must balance statistical power with the risk of contamination. This study examines crossover and spillover contamination in a large-enrollment, in-person college course implementing an AI-enabled chatbot intervention. We compare two randomization approaches, individual-… more →
Efficiency or Burnout? The Effects of Condensed Course Formats on Student Achievement in Community Colleges
Condensed courses—those that compress instructional content into a shorter time frame—are increasingly popular in higher education. While they offer greater flexibility, concerns remain that the accelerated pace may compromise learning. Using administrative data from a state community college system, we provide the first large-scale evidence of their effects on students’ immediate and… more →
Causal Returns to Education
Using 182 estimates from 140 studies in 55 countries, this paper compares ordinary least squares (OLS) and instrumental variables (IV) estimates of the private returns to schooling. IV returns average 9.7 percent—38 percent higher than OLS—and exceed OLS in nearly 80 percent of cases, with the largest gaps in developing countries. These patterns align with theories of diminishing marginal… more →
Reclaiming Educational Fraud and Waste: A Conceptual Framework to Locate the True Sources of Resource Leakage and Harm in The U.S. K-12 System
The recent dismantling of federal educational institutions has been legitimated under the banner of “eliminating fraud and waste.” In this paper, we reclaim these terms to locate the sources of potential fraud and waste in the U.S. K-12 education system through a novel conceptual framework that centers both structural components and the actions of educational actors. We posit that… more →
Comparative Cost Analyses of Community College Student Success Initiatives
Limited resources hinder completion and exacerbate inequality in community colleges. Existing research identifies strategies that raise outcomes but leaves policymakers and campus leaders asking, “What do these interventions really cost—and can we afford it?” I answer these questions by presenting the first set of comparative cost analyses of community college success initiatives to date. I… more →
The Many Paths to College Enrollment: Re-Conceptualizing the Transition to College
Traditional college choice models often fall short in capturing the complex paths that today’s student population takes to postsecondary enrollment. This paper identifies the limitations of the predominant frameworks, such as Hossler and Gallagher’s (1987) three-phase model, arguing that they reflect an outdated enrollment-management perspective, which fails to capture the experiences of many… more →
The Fiscal and Resource Effects of Enrollment Increases and Decreases on American Public School Districts
Public school enrollment has decreased over the past few years and is forecast to continue decreasing for the foreseeable future. Experts and educators are concerned about the fiscal and resource effects of these enrollment declines. Using data on all public school districts from 1998 to 2019, we estimate the effects of enrollment changes on revenues and expenditures per pupil and a variety of… more →
Item-Level Heterogeneity in Value Added Models: Implications for Reliability, Cross-Study Comparability, and Effect Sizes
Value added models (VAMs) attempt to estimate the causal effects of teachers and schools on student test scores. We apply Generalizability Theory to show how estimated VA effects depend upon the selection of test items. Standard VAMs estimate causal effects on the items that are included on the test. Generalizability demands consideration of how estimates would differ had the test included… more →
Measuring Elementary School Teachers' Knowledge of Teaching Vocabulary
Teacher Knowledge in the field of literacy has become a priority across the United States, with many states passing legislation requiring that all teachers receive adequate training on the Science of Reading. One essential component of literacy development and text comprehension is vocabulary acquisition. This study examines the psychometric properties of items from the Teacher Knowledge of… more →
Leveraging Modern Machine Learning to Improve Early Warning Systems and Reduce Chronic Absenteeism in Early Childhood
This study focuses on improving the predictive power of early warning systems (EWSs) to decrease chronic absenteeism in early childhood. Using a demographically diverse sample of students followed from PreK to third grade in Boston Public Schools (N=6,698), we demonstrate how and why two modern machine learning algorithms—the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and Extreme… more →