EdWorkingPapers
How Teachers Learn Racial Competency: The Role of Peers and Contexts
This paper investigates how teachers learn about race in the school context, with a particular focus on teachers’ development of racial competency. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews we find that teachers learn through three sources: from their peers, from years of experience, and from teacher preparation and in-service experiences. Furthermore, we find that learning occurs both… more →
The Teacher Labor Market in Context: What We Can Learn from Nurses
Researchers have posited various theories to explain supposed declines in teaching quality: the expansion of labor market opportunities for women, low relative wages, compressed compensation structures, and substituting quantity for quality. We synthesize these previous theories and expand on the current literature by incorporating a useful comparison group: the nursing workforce. We document… more →
Integrating Minorities in the Classroom: The Role of Students, Parents, and Teachers
We develop a multi-agent model of the education production function where investments of students, parents, and teachers are linked to the presence of minorities in the classroom. We then test the key implications of this model using rich survey data and a mandate to randomly assign students to classrooms. Consistent with our model, we show that exposure to minority peers decreases student effort… more →
Ending Early Grade Suspensions
We investigate the beginning of the school discipline pipeline using a reform in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools that limited the use of out-of- school suspension for students in grades K–2. We find that the reform reduced the likelihood of out-of-school suspension by 1.4 percentage points (56%) and had precise null effects on test scores and disciplinary infractions. This leads us to reject a key… more →
Employee evaluation and skill investments: Evidence from public school teachers
When employees expect evaluation and performance incentives will continue (or begin) in the future, the potential future rewards create an incentive to invest in relevant skills today. Because skills benefit job performance, the effects of evaluation can persist after the rewards end or even anticipate the start of rewards. I provide empirical evidence of these dynamics from a quasi-experiment in… more →
Neighbors' Spillovers on High School Choice
Do residential neighbors affect each others' schooling choices? We exploit oversubscription lotteries in Chile's centralized school admission system to identify the effect of close neighbors on application and enrollment decisions. A student is 5-7% more likely to rank a high school as their first preference and to attend that school if their closest neighbor attended it the prior year. These… more →
Noncredit Workforce Training, Industry Credentials, and Labor Market Outcomes
Many public workforce training programs lead to industry-recognized, third-party awarded credentials, but little research has been conducted on the economic benefits of these credentials in the labor market. This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence on the labor market returns to industry-recognized credentials connected to community college workforce noncredit training programs. Based on… more →
The Challenges of Scaling up Effective Child-Rearing Practices Using Technology in Developing Settings: Experimental Evidence From India
Home-visitation programs have improved child development in low- and middle-income countries, but they are costly to scale due to their reliance on trained workers. We evaluated an inexpensive and low-tech alternative with 2,433 caregivers of children aged 6 to 30 months served by 250 public childcare centers in Uttarakhand, India: automated phone calls offering parenting advice. The intervention… more →
The Long Shadow of School Closures: Impacts on Students’ Educational and Labor Market Outcomes
Each year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation, I explore the impact of school closures on students' educational and labor market outcomes. The… more →
Empowering Educational Leaders: On-Track Indicators for College Enrollment
As states incorporate measures of college readiness into their accountability systems, school and district leaders need effective strategies to identify and support students at risk of not enrolling in college. Although there is an abundant literature on early warning indicators for high school dropout, fewer studies focus on indicators for college enrollment, especially those that are simple to… more →
Teachers in our Midst: Using Experienced School Staff to Solve Teacher Shortages
Teacher shortages are a persistent challenge in the United States. I evaluate the effectiveness of an innovative pilot program that allowed principals to hand-select experienced staff members and paraeducators already working in schools to lead classrooms. Pilot educators are predominantly Black or African American. Districts reported randomly assigning students to teachers, and my analysis… more →
Is Big Data Better? LMS Data and Predictive Analytic Performance in Postsecondary Education
Colleges have increasingly turned to data science applications to improve student outcomes. One prominent application is to predict students’ risk of failing a course. In this paper, we investigate whether incorporating data from learning management systems (LMS)--which captures detailed information on students’ engagement in course activities--increases the accuracy of predicting student success… more →
Does Teacher Professional Development Improve Student Learning? Evidence from Leading Educators’ Fellowship Model
Teachers are the most important school-specific factor in student learning. Yet, little evidence exists linking teacher professional development programs and the strategies or activities that comprise them to student achievement. In this paper, we examine a fellowship model for professional development designed and implemented by Leading Educators, a national nonprofit organization that aims to… more →
Leveraging Item Parameter Drift to Assess Transfer Effects in Vocabulary Learning
Longitudinal models of individual growth typically emphasize between-person predictors of change but ignore how growth may vary within persons because each person contributes only one point at each time to the model. In contrast, modeling growth with multi-item assessments allows evaluation of how relative item performance may shift over time. While traditionally viewed as a nuisance under the… more →
Information Frictions and Teacher Turnover
Many decentralized matching markets experience high rates of instability due to information frictions. This paper analyzes these frictions in a particularly unstable U.S. market, the labor market for first-year school teachers. We develop and estimate a dynamic, partial equilibrium model of labor mobility that incorporates non-pecuniary information frictions for school climate and teacher… more →
The State of State Civics Scores: An Application of Multilevel Regression with Post-Stratification using NAEP Test Scores
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has tested the civic, or citizenship knowledge of students across the nation at irregular intervals since its very inception. Despite advancements in reading and mathematics, evidenced by results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), civics proficiency has remained consistently low, which raises concerns among educators… more →
Inequity and College Applications: Assessing Differences and Disparities in Letters of Recommendation from School Counselors with Natural Language Processing
Letters of recommendation from school counselors are required to apply to many selective colleges and universities. Still, relatively little is known about how this non-standardized component may affect equity in admissions. We use cutting-edge natural language processing techniques to algorithmically analyze a national dataset of over 600,000 student applications and counselor recommendation… more →
Should College Be “Free”? Evidence On Free College, Early Commitment, and Merit Aid From An Eight-Year Randomized Trial
We provide evidence about college financial aid from an eight-year randomized trial where high school ninth graders received a $12,000 merit-based grant offer. The program was designed to be free of tuition/fees at community colleges and substantially lower the cost of four-year colleges. During high school, it increased students’ college expectations and low-cost effort, but not higher-cost… more →
Institutional heterogeneity in the education and earnings returns to postsecondary technical education: Evidence from Missouri
We estimate the education and earnings returns to enrolling in technical two-year degree programs at community colleges in Missouri. A unique feature of the Missouri context is the presence of a highly regarded, nationally ranked technical college: State Technical College of Missouri (State Tech). We find that enrolling in a technical program in Missouri increases the likelihood of associate… more →
The Promises and Pitfalls of Using Language Models to Measure Instruction Quality in Education
Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers’ expertise and idiosyncratic factors, preventing teachers from getting timely and frequent feedback. Different from prior research that focuses on low-inference instructional practices,… more →
The Effect of Taxpayer-Funded Education Savings Accounts on Private School Tuition: Evidence from Iowa
Does state implementation of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), which are voucher-like taxpayer-funded subsidies for children to attend private schools, increase tuition prices? We analyze a novel longitudinal dataset for all private schools in Iowa and Nebraska, neighboring states that adopted ESAs in the same legislative session, with Iowa’s implementation beginning first. By leveraging state… more →
The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction over the Last Half Century
We examine the state of the U.S. K-12 teaching profession over the last half century by compiling nationally representative time-series data on four interrelated constructs: occupational prestige, interest among students, the number of individuals preparing for entry, and on-the-job satisfaction. We find a consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift… more →
The extent and consequences of teacher biases against immigrants
We study the extent and consequences of biases against immigrants exhibited by high school teachers in Finland. Compared to native students, immigrant students receive 0.06 standard deviation units lower scores from teachers than from blind graders. This effect is almost entirely driven by grading penalties incurred by high-performing immigrant students and is largest in subjects where teachers… more →
The Effects of In-School Virtual Tutoring on Student Reading Development: Evidence from a Short-Cycle Randomized Controlled Trial
This paper describes a 12-week cluster randomized controlled trial that examined the efficacy of BookNook, a virtual tutoring platform focused on reading. Cohorts of first- through fourth-grade students attending six Rocketship public charter schools in Northern California were randomly assigned within grades to receive BookNook. Intent-to-Treat models indicate that students in cohorts assigned… more →
Can the promise of free education improve college attainment? Lessons from the Milwaukee Area Technical College Promise
This study found that the MATC Promise increased college attainment by encouraging Milwaukee high school students to access state and federal aid, and to consider matriculating to their local two-year college. The MATC Promise exemplifies the last-dollar model of college aid. If seniors at Milwaukee area public high schools complete academic milestones, apply for financial aid, qualify based on… more →
Label to Help: The Effects of Special Education on Student Outcomes
This study examines the impact of special education on academic and behavioral outcomes for students with learning disabilities (LD) by using statewide Indiana data covering kindergarten through eighth grade. The results from student fixed effects models show that special education services improve achievement in math and English Language Arts, but they also increase suspensions and absences for… more →
Peer Effects in Vocational Education and Training
Vocational Education and Training (VET) programs are prevalent in a European context, but often struggle with drop-out rates that exceed those of general upper-secondary education. Using Danish administrative data, we study the effects of reform-induced reductions in shares of VET students who did not pass their lower secondary final exams on passing GPA VET students. We find that passing… more →
Parsing Coaching Practice: A Systematic Framework for Describing Coaching Discourse
Despite the common title of “coach,” definitions of high-quality coaching vary tremendously across models and programs. Yet, few studies make comparisons across different models to understand what is most helpful, for whom, and under what circumstances. As a result, practitioners are left with many options and little evidence-based direction. This is exacerbated by the literature’s focus on more… more →
Teacher Licensure and Workforce Quality: Insights from Covid-Era Emergency Licenses in Massachusetts
Much recent debate among policymakers and policy advocates focuses on whether states should reduce teacher licensure requirements to ease the burdens of recruiting high quality teachers to the workforce. We examine the effectiveness of individuals who entered the teacher workforce in Massachusetts during the pandemic by obtaining an emergency license, which requires only a bachelor’s degree. Our… more →
How State Takeovers of School Districts Affect Education Finance, 1990 to 2019
State takeover of school districts—a form of political centralization that shifts decision-making power from locally elected leaders to the state—has increased in recent years, often with the purported goal of improving district financial condition. Takeover has affected millions of students throughout the U.S. since the first takeover in 1988 and is most common in larger districts and… more →
The Prevalence and Policy Implications of Between-School Heterogeneity in Learning Outcomes: Evidence from Six Public Education Systems
While learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries are generally at low levels, the degree to which students and schools more broadly within education systems lag behind grade-level proficiency can vary significantly. A substantial portion of existing literature advocates for aligning curricula closer to the proficiency level of the “median child” within each system. Yet, amidst… more →
How Early Morning Classes Change Academic Trajectories: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Using a natural experiment which randomized class times to students, this study reveals that enrolling in early morning classes lowers students' course grades and the likelihood of future STEM course enrollment. There is a 79% reduction in pursuing the corresponding major and a 26% rise in choosing a lower-earning major, predominantly influenced by early morning STEM classes. To understand the… more →
Can Computer-Assisted Instruction Help Schools to Close the Achievement Gap: Evaluation of a District-Wide Reading Intervention
A concerning number of middle and high school students lack fundamental reading skills in the United States. One common way schools address this issue is by supporting those students with computer-assisted instruction. This study evaluates the causal effect of one such computer-assisted instruction intervention on English Language Arts achievement for middle and high school students in a large… more →
Sustained Effects of Small-Group Instruction in Mathematics
Recent research suggests that using additional teachers to provide small-group instruction or tutoring substantially improves student learning. However, treatment effects on test scores can fade over time, and less is known about the lasting effects of such interventions. We leverage data from a Norwegian large-scale field experiment to examine the effects of small-group instruction in… more →
The Effect of Early Childhood Programs on Third-Grade Test Scores: Evidence from Transitional Kindergarten in Michigan
Transitional Kindergarten (TK) is a relatively recent entrant into the U.S. early education landscape, combining features of public pre-K and regular kindergarten. We provide the first estimates of the impact of Michigan’s TK program on 3rd grade test scores. Using an augmented regression discontinuity design, we find that TK improves 3rd grade math scores by 0.29 standard deviations relative to… more →
Do Financial Incentives Increase the Impact of National-Scale Educational Programs? Experimental Evidence from a National College Advising Initiative
Recent work highlights the challenge of scaling evidence-based educational programs. We report on a randomized controlled trial of a financial incentive program designed to increase the efficacy of a national remote college advising initiative for high-achieving students. We find substantial positive effects of the program on student engagement with college advisors; applications to well-matched… more →
Local Political Party Voting Context Moderates Public School Principals’ Levels of Racial/Ethnic Discrimination
Correspondence audits document causal evidence of racial/ethnic discrimination in many contexts. However, few studies have examined whether local political party voting context influences individuals to engage in “stakeholder-centric” discrimination on behalf of or in response to expectations of others. We examine heterogeneity in racial/ethnic discrimination by the county-level Republican vote… more →
Next-Generation Teacher Evaluation in Rural Missouri: Main and Moderated Effects on Student Achievement and Effects-to-Expenditure Ratios
We extend teacher evaluation research by estimating a reformed evaluation system's plausibly causal average effects on rural student achievement, identifying the settings where evaluation works, and incorporating evaluation expenditures. That the literature omits these contributions is concerning as research implies it hinders evidence-based teacher evaluation policymaking for rural districts,… more →
College Course Shutouts
What happens when college students are not able to enroll in the courses they want? We use a natural experiment at Purdue University in which first-year students are conditionally randomly assigned to oversubscribed courses. Compared to students who are assigned a requested course, those who are shut out are 40% less likely to ever take the oversubscribed course and 30% less likely to ever take a… more →
Attendance Practices in High-Absenteeism Districts
Educational policymakers, leaders, and researchers are paying increasing attention to student attendance and chronic absenteeism, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though researchers have documented the consequences and causes of absenteeism, there is limited empirical evidence about what schools and districts are actually doing to improve attendance. This study presents evidence… more →
Public Good Perceptions and Polarization: Evidence from Higher Education Appropriations
To understand the causes and consequences of polarized demand for government expenditure, we conduct three field experiments in the context of public higher education. The first two experiments study polarization in taxpayer demand. We provide information to shape beliefs about social returns on investment. Our treatments narrow the political partisan gap in ideal policies---a reduction in… more →
Does Corequisite Remediation Work for Everyone? An Exploration of Heterogeneous Effects and Mechanisms
The landscape of developmental education has experienced significant shifts over the last decade nationwide, as more than 20 states and higher education systems have transitioned from the traditional prerequisite model to corequisite remediation. Drawing on administrative data from Tennessee community colleges from 2010 to 2020, this study examined the heterogeneous effects of corequisite reform… more →
Does One Plus One Always Equal Two? Examining Complementarities in Educational Interventions
Public policies targeting individuals based on need often impose disproportionate burden on communities that lack the resources to implement these policies effectively. In an elementary school setting, I examine whether community-level interventions focusing on similar needs and providing resources to build capacity in these communities could improve outcomes by improving the effectiveness of… more →
Teachers of Color, Culturally Responsive Teaching, and Student Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from the Random Assignment of Teachers to Classes
Black teachers are critical resources for our children and schools. Pairing experimental data with rich measures of teacher mindsets and practices and varied student outcomes, I document that: (1) Black teachers in upper-elementary grades have large effects on the self-efficacy and classroom engagement of their Black students (0.7 and 0.8 SD) but not for non-Black students, potentially driven by… more →
Constrained Agency and the Architecture of Educational Choice: Evidence from New York City
Many school districts consider family preferences in allocating students to schools. In theory, this approach provides traditionally disadvantaged families greater access to high-quality schools by weakening the link between residential location and school assignment. We leverage data on the school choices made by over 233,000 New York City families to examine the extent to which the city’s… more →
Multiply by 37 (or Divide by 0.023): A Surprisingly Accurate Rule of Thumb for Converting Effect Sizes from Standard Deviations to Percentile Points
Educational researchers often report effect sizes in standard deviation units (SD), but SD effects are hard to interpret. Effects are easier to interpret in percentile points, but converting SDs to percentile points involves a calculation that is not transparent to educational stakeholders. We show that if the outcome variable is normally distributed, we can approximate the percentile-point… more →
Challenges and opportunity: An examination of barriers to postsecondary academic success
Community colleges are a critical component of the U.S. higher education system, providing access to students from traditionally underserved communities. However, enduring challenges to completion stemming from educational, economic, and social inequities persist. Building on prior work that examines barriers to student success and their relationship to student outcomes, this descriptive study… more →
Exploring Multidimensional Approaches to Learning During Early Childhood in Ghana
Children's approaches to learning (AtL) are widely recognized as a critical predictor of educational outcomes, especially in early childhood. Nevertheless, there remains a dearth of understanding regarding the dimensionality of AtL, the reciprocal dynamics between AtL and learning outcomes, and how AtL operates in non-Western contexts. This paper aims to extend the existing AtL literature by both… more →
Scaling High-impact tutoring: School Level Perspectives on Implementation Challenges and Strategies
High-impact tutoring has emerged as a primary school district investment for addressing learning loss that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing research shows that high-impact tutoring is effective for accelerating student learning, this study examined the school-level facilitators and barriers to scaling high-impact tutoring. Situated in an urban traditional school district and… more →
Of DEI and Denials: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Texas’ 88th Legislative Session
Emerging literature on anti-CRT, anti-DEI efforts in education suggest that these attacks represent a rearticulation of racial ideologies which seek to contain racial progress. Although crafting anti-CRT and anti-DEI policies is primarily conducted through discourse, few studies explore the specific discursive mechanisms used to justify these efforts as racially neutral. Using critical discourse… more →