EdWorkingPapers
How the Engagement of High-Profile Partisan Officials Affects Education Politics, Public Opinion, and Polarization
What happens to public opinion when prominent partisan officials intervene in education policy debates? We analyzed the results of 18 survey experiments conducted between 2009 and 2021 with nationally representative samples of U.S. adults. Each experiment explored the effect of an endorsement of a specific education policy by a high-profile partisan official on the public’s attitudes toward that… more →
Do Students Respond to Sticker-Price Reductions?: Evidence from the North Carolina Promise
The North Carolina Promise is a state-level policy that reduced the cost of tuition for all students who attended one of three campuses in the University of North Carolina System starting in fall of 2018. We use IPEDS data and a synthetic control approach to examine how this tuition reduction affected enrollment and persistence at these campuses. We find that NC Promise did not increase… more →
ESSER-ting Preferences: Examining School District Preferences for Using Federal Pandemic Relief Fundings
We analyzed the proposed spending data for the American Recovery Plan’s Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief III (ESSER III) fund from the spring of 2021 of nearly 3,000 traditional public-school districts in the United States to (1) identify trends in the strategies adopted and (2) to test whether spending strategies were observably heterogeneous across district characteristics. We found… more →
High School Preparation and Post-Secondary Educational Attainment: An Analysis of Racial/Ethnic and Gender Differences for Missouri Public High School Students
This paper investigates patterns of racial/ethnic and gender gaps in post-secondary degree attainment trajectories by the levels of students’ pre-college academic preparation. We follow four cohorts of Missouri public high school freshmen for five years beyond on-time graduation among White, Black, and Hispanic male and female students. A composite measure of pre-college academic preparation is… more →
The Notorious SBG: Administrators’ Perceptions of Standards-Based Grading Practices
This mixed-methods study synthesizes Standards-Based Grading (SBG) literature, analyzes 249 Arkansas administrators' survey responses using OLS regressions, and identifies themes through in-vivo coding of qualitative feedback. Results show more SBG support among liberal, elementary-level administrators in larger, economically diverse districts. Qualitative insights highlight structural barriers… more →
Which Colleges Increase Voting Rates?
We study how colleges shape their students' voting habits by linking millions of SAT takers to their college-enrollment and voting histories. To begin, we show that the fraction of students from a particular college who vote varies systematically by the college's attributes (e.g. increasing with selectivity) but also that seemingly similar colleges can have markedly different voting rates. Next,… more →
Taking Teacher Evaluation to Scale: The Effect of State Reforms on Achievement and Attainment
Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting their staggered implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 0.017… more →
Time in School: A Conceptual Framework, Synthesis of the Causal Research, and Empirical Exploration
We examine the fundamental and complex role that time plays in the learning process. We begin by developing a conceptual framework to elucidate the multiple obstacles schools face in converting total time in school into active learning time. We then synthesize the causal research and document a clear positive effect of additional time on student achievement typically of small to medium magnitude… more →
GED® College Readiness Benchmarks and Post-Secondary Success
In 2016, the GED® introduced college readiness benchmarks designed to identify testers who are academically prepared for credit-bearing college coursework. The benchmarks are promoted as awarding college credits or exempting “college-ready” GED® graduates from remedial coursework. I show descriptive evidence that those identified as college-ready by these benchmarks enroll and persist in college… more →
Under the Weather? The 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 learning. In this paper we draw upon detailed student achievement data, combined with high-resolution weather records, to paint a clear portrait of the effect of temperature on student learning across a six-year period for students in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The… more →
How Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Influence School Board Elections?
Media reports suggest that parent frustration with COVID school policies and the growing politicization of education have increased community engagement with local public schools. However, there is no evidence to date on whether these factors have translated into greater engagement at the ballot box. This paper uses a novel data set to explore how school board elections changed following the… more →
An Investigation of Head Start Preschool Children’s Executive Function, Early Literacy, and Numeracy Learning in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on preschool children’s school readiness skills remains understudied. This research investigates Head Start preschool children’s early numeracy, literacy, and executive function outcomes during a pandemic-affected school year. Study children (N = 336 assessed at fall baseline; N = 237-250 assessed in spring depending on outcome; fall baseline sample: mean age = 51… more →
How Measurement Affects Causal Inference: Attenuation Bias is (Usually) More Important Than Scoring Weights
When analyzing treatment effects on test scores, researchers face many choices and competing guidance for scoring tests and modeling results. This study examines the impact of scoring choices through simulation and an empirical application. Results show that estimates from multiple methods applied to the same data will vary because two-step models using sum or factor scores provide attenuated… more →
Racialized Reactivity: How Metrics-Formation Contributed to a Racialized Organizational Order in Medical Education
A common point of contention across education policy debates is whether and how facially race-neutral metrics of quality produce or maintain racialized inequities. Medical education is a useful site for interrogating this relationship, as many scholars point to the 1910, Carnegie-funded Flexner Report—which proposed standardized quality metrics—as a main driver of the closure of five of the seven… more →
Disentangling Person-Dependent and Item-Dependent Causal Effects: Applications of Item Response Theory to the Estimation of Treatment Effect Heterogeneity
Analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions. A standard practice for HTE analysis is to examine interactions between treatment status and pre-intervention participant characteristics, such as pretest scores, to identify how different groups respond to treatment. This study demonstrates that identical patterns of… more →
Competitive Effects of Charter Schools
Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging three alternative identification strategies, we explore how increase in access to charter schools in twelve districts in Florida affects students remaining in traditional public schools (TPS). We consistently find that competition stemming from the opening of new charter schools improves reading—but… more →
Racial/Ethnic Discrimination and Heterogeneity Across Schools in the U.S. Public Education System: A Correspondence Audit of Principals
Although numerous studies document different forms of discrimination in the U.S. public education system, very few provide plausibly causal estimates. Thus, it is unclear to what extent public school principals discriminate against racial and ethnic minorities. Moreover, no studies test for heterogeneity in racial/ethnic discrimination by individual-level resource needs and school-level resource… more →
Subtraction by Addition: Do Private Scholarship Awards Lead to Financial Aid Displacement?
Award displacement occurs when one type of financial aid award directly contributes to the change in the quantity of another award. We explore whether postsecondary institutions displaced awards in response to the Pittsburgh Promise scholarship by capitalizing on the doubling of the maximum Promise amount in 2012. We use de-identified student-level data on each Promise recipient’s actual cost of… more →
Computer Science for All? The Impact of High School Computer Science Courses on College Majors and Earnings
This study provides the first causal analysis of the impact of expanding Computer Science (CS) education in U.S. K-12 schools on students’ choice of college major and early career outcomes. Utilizing rich longitudinal data from Maryland, we exploit variation from the staggered rollout of CS course offerings across high schools. Our findings suggest that taking a CS course increases students’… more →
The Benefits of Math Corequisite Support for Academic Outcomes for Students in Texas
An increasing body of robust evidence concludes that corequisite remediation in math and English is a cost-effective alternative to traditional developmental education, offering improved immediate course progression and potentially better persistence and completion. This is the first study to disentangle the impacts of the two main elements of the corequisite model: accelerated college course… more →
What matters and for whom? Exploring characteristics of teacher residency programs and their relationship to participant perceptions
This concurrent mixed methods study descriptively explores teacher residency programs (TRPs) across the nation. We examine program and participant survey data from the National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR) to identify important TRP structures for resident support. Latent class analysis of program-level data reveals three types of TRPs (locally-funded low tuition, multi-funded… more →
COVID-19, School Closures, and Student Learning Outcomes: New Global Evidence from PISA
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in significant disruption in schooling worldwide. This paper uses global test score data to estimate learning losses. It models the effect of school closures on achievement by predicting the deviation of the most recent results from a linear trend using data from all rounds of the Programme for International Student Assessment. Scores declined by an average of 14… more →
What Works and For Whom? Effectiveness and Efficiency of School Capital Investments Across the U.S.
This paper identifies which investments in school facilities help students and are valued by homeowners. Using novel data on school district bonds, test scores, and house prices for 29 U.S. states and a research design that exploits close elections with staggered timing, we show that increased school capital spending raises test scores and house prices on average. However, impacts differ vastly… more →
COVID-19, Online Learning, and Absenteeism in Detroit
How much school students attend is a powerful indicator of their well-being and a strong predictor of their future success in school. Prior research has documented the myriad in-school and out-of-school factors that contribute to high levels of student absenteeism, many emerging from the root causes of poverty and disengagement. The shift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic likely… more →
The Ups and Downs of Classroom Quality Over the Preschool Year and Relations to Children’s School Readiness
Despite considerable evidence on the links between average classroom quality and children’s learning, the importance of variation in quality is not well understood. We examined whether three measures of variation in observed classroom quality over the school year – overall variation in quality, teacher-specific trends in quality, and instability in quality – were associated with children’s… more →
Understanding Heterogeneous Patterns of Family Engagement with Educational Technology to Inform School-Family Communication in Linguistically Diverse Communities
We leverage log data from an educational app and two-way text message records from over 3,500 students during the summers of 2019 and 2020, along with in-depth interviews in Spanish and English, to identify patterns of family engagement with educational technology. Based on the type and timing of technology use, we identify several distinct profiles of engagement, which we group into two… more →
The Effects of Teacher-Student Demographic Matching on Social-Emotional Learning
A growing body of research shows that students benefit when they demographically match their teachers. However, little is known about how matching affects social-emotional development. We use student-fixed effects to exploit changes over time in the proportion of teachers within a school grade who demographically match a student to estimate matching's effect on social-emotional measures, test… more →
Clinical teaching learning trajectory: Exploring field supervisor written feedback on clinical teacher pedagogy
Field supervisors are central to clinical teaching, but little is known about how their feedback informs preservice teachers (PSTs) development. This sequential mixed methods study examines over 3,000 supervisor observation evaluations. We qualitatively code supervisor written feedback, which indicates 2 broad pedagogical categories and 9 separate skills. We then quantize these feedback codes to… more →
Grow Your Own: An Umbrella Term for Very Different Localized Teacher Pipeline Programs
“Grow Your Own” (GYO) programs have recently emerged as a promising approach to expand teacher supply, address localized teacher shortages, and diversify the profession. However, little is known about the scale and design of GYO programs, which recruit and support individuals from the local community to become teachers. We conduct a quantitative content analysis to describe 94 GYO initiatives. We… more →
Making Moves: The Role of Demotion in School Leadership
This study examines the experience of demotion from a principalship to an assistant principalship and how race and gender can differentially impact career trajectories. Using administrative state dataset of 10,946 observations at the principal level, we used probit regression to determine the overall probability of demotion and Kaplan Meier survival analysis to estimate the differences in… more →
Misclassification of Career and Technical Education Concentrators: Analysis and Policy Recommendations
Career and Technical Education (CTE) prepares students for life beyond high school by providing practical labor skills, workforce credentials, and early post-secondary credits. States are required to report the number of CTE concentrators to receive federal Perkins funding, but systems of identifying students as concentrators vary among states. We analyzed two distinct concentrator identification… more →
Does Feedback on Talk Time Increase Student Engagement? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial on a Math Tutoring Platform
Providing ample opportunities for students to express their thinking is pivotal to their learning of mathematical concepts. We introduce the Talk Meter, which provides in-the-moment automated feedback on student-teacher talk ratios. We conduct a randomized controlled trial on a virtual math tutoring platform (n=742 tutors) to evaluate the effectiveness of the Talk Meter at increasing student talk… more →
Are Algorithms Biased in Education? Exploring Racial Bias in Predicting Community College Student Success
Predictive analytics are increasingly pervasive in higher education. However, algorithmic bias has the potential to reinforce racial inequities in postsecondary success. We provide a comprehensive and translational investigation of algorithmic bias in two separate prediction models -- one predicting course completion, the second predicting degree completion. Our results show that algorithmic bias… more →
Time to Transfer: Long-Term Effects of a Sustained and Spiraled Content Literacy Intervention in the Elementary Grades
We investigated the effectiveness of a sustained and spiraled content literacy intervention that emphasizes building domain and topic knowledge schemas and vocabulary for elementary-grade students. The Model of Reading Engagement (MORE) intervention underscores thematic lessons that provide an intellectual structure for helping students connect new learning to a general schema in Grade 1 (animal… more →
Latent Classes of Teacher Working Conditions in Virginia: Description, Teacher Preferences, and Contextual Factors
Many dimensions of teacher working conditions influence both teacher and student outcomes; yet, analyses of schools’ overall working conditions are challenged by high correlations among the dimensions. Our study overcame this challenge by applying latent profile analysis of Virginia teachers’ perceptions of school leadership, instructional agency, professional growth opportunities, rigorous… more →
HBCU Enrollment and Longer-Term Outcomes
Using data from nearly 1.2 million Black SAT takers, we estimate the impacts of initially enrolling in an Historically Black College and University (HBCU) on educational, economic, and financial outcomes. We control for the college application portfolio and compare students with similar portfolios and levels of interest in HBCUs and non-HBCUs who ultimately make divergent enrollment decisions -… more →
Access to Ethnic Studies in California Public Schools
We examine access to high school Ethnic Studies in California, a new graduation requirement beginning in 2029-30. Data from the California Department of Education and the University of California Office of the President indicate that roughly 50 percent of public high school students in 2020-21 attend a school that offers Ethnic Studies or a related course, but as of 2018-19, only 0.2 percent of… more →
Bending Without Breaking - COVID-19 Tests the Resilience of State Education Policymaking Institutions
COVID-19 upended schooling across the United States, but with what consequences for the state-level institutions that drive most education policy? This paper reports findings on two related research questions. First, what were the most important ways state government education policymakers changed schools and schooling from the moment they began to reckon with the seriousness of COVID-19 through… more →
Rethinking Principal Effects on Student Outcomes
School principals are viewed as critical actors to improve student outcomes, but there remain important methodological questions about how to measure principals’ effects. We propose a framework for measuring principals’ contributions to student outcomes and apply it empirically using data from Tennessee, New York City, and Oregon. As commonly implemented, value-added models misattribute to… more →
The Effects of Economic Conditions on the Labor Market for Teachers
Prior research has found that economic downturns have positive effects on new teacher quality, but has not been able to determine the extent to which this relationship arises from a supply response (increased quantity or positive selection of teaching candidates) vs. a demand response (selection in hiring enabled by falling demand). In this paper, I use longitudinal data on students and teachers… more →
The Role and Influence of Exclusively Online Degree Programs in Higher Education
This study leverages national data and a quasi-experimental design to examine the influence of enrolling in an exclusively online degree program on students’ likelihood of completing their degree. We find that enrolling in an exclusively online degree program had a negative influence on students’ likelihood of completing their bachelor’s degree or any degree when compared to their otherwise-… more →
Assessing the Benefits of Education in Early Childhood: Evidence from a Pre-K Lottery in Georgia
Numerous studies have demonstrated a strong link between participation in pre-K programs and both short-term student achievement and positive later-life outcomes. Existing evidence primarily stems from experimental studies of small-scale, high-quality programs conducted in the 1960s and 1970s and analyses of the federal Head Start program. Meanwhile, evidence on state-funded pre-K… more →
Early Algebra Affects Peer Composition
Although existing research suggests that students benefit on a range of outcomes when they enroll in early algebra classes, policy efforts that accelerate algebra enrollment for large numbers of students often have negative effects. Explanations for this apparent contradiction often emphasize the potential role of teacher and peer effects, which could create positive effects for individual… more →
Beyond Prescriptive Reforms: An Examination of North Carolina’s Flexible School Restart Program
While multiple studies have examined the impact of school turnaround, less is known about reforms under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). To advance this literature, we examine North Carolina’s Restart (NCR) model. NCR aligns with ESSA by giving school leaders increased flexibility. Also, NCR differs from previous turnaround models by repackaging a traditionally sanction-based approach to… more →
The long-term distributional impacts of a full-year interleaving math program in Nigeria
This study reports the findings from a year-long randomized evaluation assessing the impact of assigning 62 classrooms in Nigeria to receive either blocked or interleaved math problem sets. Blocked practice sessions focused on a single skill at a time. Interleaved problem sets alternated between different skills within a practice session. On tests of short-term retention, interleaved practice… more →
How Free Market Logic Fails in Schooling— and What It Means for the Role of Government
Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This essay broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, while prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I provide a more comprehensive list. Second, with an up-to-… more →
Financial Deregulation, School Finance, and Student Achievement
This paper studies how school spending impacts student achievement by exploiting the US interstate branching deregulation as state tax revenue shocks. Leveraging school finance data from universal school districts, our difference-in-differences estimation reveals that deregulation leads to an increase in per-pupil total revenue and expenditure. The rise in revenue is primarily attributed to… more →
Are Teachers Absent More? Examining Differences in Absence Between K-12 Teachers and Other College-Educated Workers
While it is commonly believed that teachers take more absences than other professionals, few empirical studies have systematically investigated the prevalence of teacher absences in the US. This study documents the level of teacher absences and compares it with other college-educated workers. Using the Monthly Current Population Survey between the 1995 and 2019 school years, we conduct… more →
Noncognitive Factors and Student Long-Run Success: Comparing the Predictive Validity of Observable Academic Behaviors and Social-Emotional Skills
Noncognitive constructs such as self-e cacy, social awareness, and academic engagement are widely acknowledged as critical components of human capital, but systematic data collection on such skills in school systems is complicated by conceptual ambiguities, measurement challenges and resource constraints. This study addresses this issue by comparing the predictive validity of two most widely used… more →
The Opportunity Costs of Career and Technical Education: Coursetaking Tradeoffs for High School CTE Students
Career and Technical Education (CTE) has long played a substantial, though controversial, role within America’s public schools. While supporters argue that CTE may increase student engagement and prepare students for success in the workforce, detractors caution that CTE may inhibit students’ access to the rigorous academic coursework needed for college and high-status careers. As students’ time… more →