EdWorkingPapers
"Trial and error" and "trudging up a hill": Superintendents' beliefs about and engagement in state education policymaking
This mixed methods research study explores superintendents’ beliefs about and engagement in state education policymaking processes. Through interviews with 58 superintendents and a national survey of superintendents, I find that many superintendents feel that their voices have value in state policymaking spaces; however, superintendents’ actual engagement in state policymaking processes is… more →
The Role of School Climate in School Turnaround
School climate is critical to school effectiveness, but there is limited large-scale data available to examine the magnitude and nature of the relationship between school climate and school improvement. Drawing on statewide administrative data linked with unique teacher survey data in Michigan, we examine whether school climate appeared to play a role in the effects of a state-level school… more →
A Kindergarten Lottery Evaluation of Core Knowledge Charter Schools: Should Building General Knowledge Have a Central Role in Educational and Social Science Research and Policy?
The Core Knowledge curriculum is a K-8 curriculum focused on building students General Knowledge about the world they live in that is hypothesized to increase reading comprehension and Reading/English-LA achievement. This study utilizes an experimental design to evaluate the long term effects of attending Charter schools teaching the Core Knowledge curriculum. Fourteen oversubscribed kindergarten… more →
The Effects of At-Scale Career Pathway Investments on the Transition from High School to College
In this study, we examine an at-scale effort to encourage the formation of career pathways in California, with the goal of estimating the initiative’s causal effects on community college enrollment. We leverage a discontinuous assignment rule used to award grant funds to obtain credibly causal estimates of an ambitious $500 million effort to expand and establish career and technical education… more →
EMERGEing Educational Opportunities: The Effects of Social Capital and Nudging on Selective College Outcomes
There is a growing debate in social science and education policy research on how to improve college access for high-performing students from low-income or first-generation backgrounds. While some studies suggest that providing information to students impacts college access, other studies do not and suggest that students may need more support in the college search and choice processes. Using a… more →
Breaking Bad/GoodPatterns and Consequences of Public School Teachers’ Multiple Jobholding
Stagnating teacher salaries and the widening gap between public school teachers and similar workers have led to growing concerns that teachers will seek out additional employment—possibly impacting their instructional practice in the process. Using data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and the National Teacher and Principal Survey from 1994–2021, we show that teacher multiple jobholding has… more →
A Multi-State, Student-Level Analysis of the Effects of the Four-Day School Week on Student Achievement and Growth
Four-day school weeks are becoming increasingly common in the United States, but their effect on students’ achievement is not well-understood. The small body of existing research suggests the four-day schedule has relatively small, negative average effects (~-0.02 to -0.09 SD) on annual, standardized state test scores in math and reading, but these studies include only a single state or are… more →
COVID-19 Diagnoses and University Student Performance: Evidence from Linked Administrative Health and Education Data
We analyze the impact of COVID-19 diagnoses on student grades, retention, and on-time graduation at a large public university. Even though COVID-19 rarely causes major health complications for a typical university student, diagnosis and quarantine may cause non-trivial disruptions to learning. Using event study analysis, we find that a COVID-19 diagnosis decreased a student's term grade point… more →
Dual Language Program Expansion and Dispersion in the Context of Neighborhood Change, School Choice, and Enrollment Decline
Purpose. Bilingual programs in the United States, particularly two-way dual language immersion (TWDL) programs, have been implemented since the 1960s to support the education of English Learner-classified (EL-classified) and language minoritized students. Over the past decade, TWDL programs have grown significantly across the United States. This study examines TWDL program growth in Los Angeles… more →
When Does School Autonomy Improve Student Outcomes?
This paper presents new evidence on the benefits of decentralization in public education, focusing on a Chicago policy that granted school principals more control over budgeting and operations. Meta-analysis of similar policies shows a small average effect with significant variation across settings. To explain this heterogeneity, I adopt theories from public finance, contract… more →
Who Benefits from Remote Schooling? Self-Selection and Match Effects
We study the distributional effects of remote learning. Our approach combines newly collected data on parental preferences with administrative data from Los Angeles. The preference data allow us to account for selection into remote learning while also studying selection patterns and treatment effect heterogeneity. We find a negative average effect of remote learning on reading (–0.14σ) and math… more →
Humanizing Policy Implementation in Higher Education Through an Equity-Centered Approach
With an urgency to leverage existing and emerging policy reforms to improve student outcomes by centering educational equity, this manuscript explores the critical role of policy implementation in higher education–specifically in community colleges. In doing so, we explore historical and contemporary approaches to higher education, highlighting how policy implementation often serves as an… more →
An Improved Method for Estimating School-Level Characteristics from Census Data
We propose a new method for estimating school-level characteristics from publicly available census data. We use a school’s location to impute its catchment area by aggregating the nearest n census block groups such that the number of school-aged children in those n block groups is just over the number of students enrolled in that school. We then weight census data by the number of school-aged… more →
COVID-19 and the Mental Health of Adolescents in British Columbia
We use linked individual-level data on school enrollment, physician services received, and prescription medications to measure the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated disruptions on mental health treatment received by adolescents in British Columbia. We also investigate whether these effects are mediated by socioeconomic status and schooling mode. The results suggest substantial… more →
Community Colleges and Careers: Evidence from Nursing School Lotteries
I estimate the effect of attending an associate's degree in nursing program on nursing licensure. I use student-level academic data for all California community college students, matched to public records on all nursing licenses earned in the state. I produce causal estimates using random variation from admissions lotteries at a large nursing program. Enrolling in the program increases the… more →
Sibling Spillovers May Enhance the Efficacy of Targeted School Policies
Public policies often target individuals but within-family externalities of such interventions are understudied. Using a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of both children while the spillover is up to 30% of the target child effect size. The effects are… more →
The Heterogeneous and Longer-Term Effects of the Great Recession on Public School District Finances
During the Great Recession and in the years that immediately followed, previous research has well-documented that U.S. public school districts receiving larger shares of their funding from state governments experienced larger declines in expenditures per student, as the GR impacted state tax bases more than it impacted local tax bases. Using detailed financial data from the academic years 2004 to… more →
Improving school management in low and middle income countries: a systematic review
Improving school quality in low and middle income countries (LMICs) is a global priority. One way to improve quality may be to improve the management skills of school leaders. In this systematic review, we analyze the impact of interventions targeting school leaders' management practices on student learning. We begin by describing the characteristics and responsibilities of school leaders using… more →
Spillover Effects of Black Teachers on White Teachers’ Racial Competency: Mixed Methods Evidence from North Carolina
The US teaching force remains disproportionately white while the student body grows more diverse. It is therefore important to understand how and under what conditions white teachers learn racial competency. This study applies a mixed-methods approach to investigate the hypothesis that Black peers improve white teachers’ effectiveness when teaching Black students. The quantitative portion of this… more →
Do Women Still Earn Less than Men after College Graduation: Evidence from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study 1993 Cohort
Even though women have continuously caught up with men in education attainment and labor market participation since the 1970s, the wage gap between men and women still universally exists today. Do female college graduates still earn less than their male counterparts if men’s and women’s “profiles” of observed productivity-related characteristics are statistically adjusted to be equivalent? To… more →
Identification of Non-Additive Fixed Effects Models: Is the Return to Teacher Quality Homogeneous?
Panel or grouped data are often used to allow for unobserved individual heterogeneity in econometric models via fixed effects. In this paper, we discuss identification of a panel data model in which the unobserved heterogeneity both enters additively and interacts with treatment variables. We present identification and estimation methods for parameters of interest in this model under both strict… more →
College Counseling in the Classroom: Randomized Evaluation of a Teacher-Based Approach to College Advising
Guidance counselors provide the main source of college advising for low-income high school students, but are woefully understaffed in high-need schools. This paper evaluates an approach to school-based college advising that relies on teachers rather than counselors. Using a randomized control trial in sixty-two Michigan high schools, I estimate the effects of a college planning course for high… more →
Learning during the Pandemic: Evidence from Uzbekistan
School closures induced by the COVID-19 pandemic led to concerns about student learning. This paper evaluates the effect of school closures on student learning in Uzbekistan, using a unique dataset that allows assessing change in learning over time. The findings show that test scores in math for grade 5 students improved over time by 0.29 standard deviation despite school closures. The outcomes… more →
Can brick phones bridge the digital learning divide? Evidence from SMS-based math practice
Hardware requirements are a barrier to widespread adoption of digital learning software among low-income populations. We investigate the demand among smallholder-farming households for a simple, adaptive math learning tool that can be accessed by widely available ``brick'' phones, and its effect on educational outcomes. Over a quarter of invited households used the tool, with greater demand among… more →
Why Do You Want to Be a Teacher? A Natural Language Processing Approach
Heightened concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the importance of studying the early teacher pipeline. This exploratory, descriptive paper examines preservice teachers' (PST) expressed motivation for pursuing a teaching career and its relationship with PST characteristics and outcomes. Using data from one of the largest teacher education programs in Texas, we use a… more →
The Effects of Early Literacy Policies on Student Achievement
Given the importance of early literacy to long-term student success, by 2021, 41 states and the District of Columbia adopted early literacy policies to improve student literacy by the end of third grade. We use an event-study approach to examine the impact of these policies on high- and low-stakes test scores. Our results suggest that adopting an early literacy policy improves elementary students… more →
For-profit milk in nonprofit cartons? The case of nonprofit charter schools subcontracting with for-profit education management organizations
There is growing concern that some nonprofit public service providers may be nonprofit in name but not in fact. We consider this concern in the context of nonprofit charter schools, which sometimes subcontract their daily operations to for-profit management organizations. We use unique data from Ohio to study how nonprofit charter schools’ reliance on for-profit operators affects student… more →
Unequal Learning Loss: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced the Academic Growth of Learners at the Tails of the Achievement Distribution
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in substantial unfinished learning for U.S. students, but to differing degrees for various subgroups. For example, students of color, from low-income families, or who attended high-poverty schools experienced greater unfinished learning. In this study we examined the degree of unfinished learning for students who went into the pandemic scoring in the top or bottom… more →
Integrated Student Support Intervention Mitigates the Adverse Impact of School Mobility on Middle School Students' Achievement and Behavior
School mobility, compounding socioeconomic inequities, can undermine academic achievement and behavior, particularly during middle school years. This study investigates the effect of a school-based integrated student support intervention – City Connects – on the achievement and behavior of middle school students who experience school mobility. Using administrative data from a large, urban, public… more →
Can Automated Feedback Improve Teachers’ Uptake of Student Ideas? Evidence From a Randomized Controlled Trial In a Large-Scale Online Course
Providing consistent, individualized feedback to teachers is essential for improving instruction but can be prohibitively resource-intensive in most educational contexts. We develop M-Powering Teachers, an automated tool based on natural language processing to give teachers feedback on their uptake of student contributions, a high-leverage dialogic teaching practice that makes students feel heard… more →
PLUS or Minus? The Effect of Graduate School Loans on Access, Attainment, and Prices
In 2006, the federal government effectively uncapped student borrowing for graduate programs with the introduction of the Graduate PLUS loan program. Access to additional federal loans increased graduate students’ borrowing and shifted the composition of their loans from private to federal debt. However, the increase in borrowing limits did not improve access to existing programs overall or for… more →
Choosing Alone? Peer Similarity in High School Choices
We provide a descriptive analysis of within-school and neighborhood similarity in high school applications in New York City. We depart from prior work by examining similarity in applications to specific schools rather than preferences for school characteristics. We find surprisingly low similarity within schools and neighborhoods, but substantial variation by race and prior achievement. White and… more →
Incidence and Outcomes of School Finance Litigation: 1968-2021
School finance court cases have proceeded one or more times in all but two states. Plaintiffs ask the courts to rule that the existing funding formula is unconstitutional under state constitutions, and the defendants call for continuation of the existing finance formula. By compiling and analyzing the universe of such cases, we can accurately describe the nature of the cases, the decisions made,… more →
Within-School Heterogeneity in Quality: Do Schools Provide Equal Value Added to All Students?
Low-socioeconomic status (SES), minority, and male students perform worse than their high-SES, non-minority, and female peers on standardized tests. This paper investigates how within-school differences in school quality contribute to these educational achievement gaps. Using individual-level data on the universe of public-school students in California, I estimate school quality using a value… more →
Revolving School Doors? A Longitudinal Examination of Teacher, Administrator and Staff Contributions to School Churn
Non-teaching staff comprise over half of all school employees and their turnover may be consequential for school operation, culture, and student success, yet we lack evidence documenting their attrition. We use 11 years of administrative data from Oregon to examine mobility and exit among teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, and other staff. Although teachers dominate staff turnover… more →
Instructional Alignment is Associated with Sustained Benefits of PreK
This study uses implementation fidelity data from PreK to 1st grade in the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to measure instructional alignment and examine whether stronger alignment is associated with sustained benefits of BPS PreK on children’s language, literacy, and math skills through first grade. The study includes N = 498 students (mean age = 5.47, SD = 0.30 in K fall). Children who experienced… more →
Are Connections the Way to Get Ahead? Social Capital, Student Achievement, Friendships, and Social Mobility
Chetty et al. (2022) say county density of cross-class friendships (referred to here as “adult-bridging capital”) has causal impacts on social mobility within the United States. We instead find that social mobility rates are a function of county density of family capital (higher marriage rates and two-person households), community capital (community organizations, religious congregations, and… more →
Teacher Licensing, Teacher Supply, and Student Achievement: Nationwide Implementation of edTPA
The debate on the stringency of licensure exams for prospective public school teachers is on-going, including the recent controversial roll-out of the educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). We leverage the quasi-experimental setting of different adoption timing by states and analyze multiple data sources containing a national sample of prospective teachers and students of new teachers… more →
Virtual Charter Students Have Worse Labor Market Outcomes as Young Adults
Virtual charter schools are increasingly popular, yet there is no research on the long-term outcomes of virtual charter students. We link statewide education records from Oregon with earnings information from IRS records housed at the US Census Bureau to provide evidence on how virtual charter students fare as young adults. Virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation… more →
Race below the fold: Race-evasiveness in the news media’s coverage of student loans
The media discourse on student loans plays a significant role in the way that policy actors conceptualize challenges and potential solutions related to student debt. This study examines the racialized language in student loan news articles published in eight major news outlets between 2006 and 2021. We found that 18% of articles use any racialized language, though use has accelerated since 2018.… more →
Attracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Hard-to-Staff Schools
Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge by using information produced by its evaluation and compensation reforms as the basis for effectiveness-adjusted payments that provided large compensating differentials to attract and retain effective teachers in its lowest achievement schools. The… more →
Debt Moratoria: Evidence from Student Loan Forbearance
We evaluate the effects of the 2020 student debt moratorium that paused payments for student loan borrowers. Using administrative credit panel data, we show that the payment pause led to a sharp drop in student loan payments and delinquencies for borrowers subject to the debt moratorium, as well as an increase in credit scores. We find a large stimulus effect, as borrowers substitute increased… more →
M-Powering Teachers: Natural Language Processing Powered Feedback Improves 1:1 Instruction and Student Outcomes
Although learners are being connected 1:1 with instructors at an increasing scale, most of these instructors do not receive effective, consistent feedback to help them improved. We deployed M-Powering Teachers, an automated tool based on natural language processing to give instructors feedback on dialogic instructional practices —including their uptake of student contributions, talk time and… more →
Rich Grad, Poor Grad: Family Background and College Major Choice
Expected earnings matter for college major choices, and majors differ in both their average earnings and the age profile of their earnings. We show that students' family background is strongly related to the earnings paths of the major they choose. Students with more educated parents, especially those who have graduate degrees, choose majors with lower early-career earnings but much faster… more →
The Effects of Comprehensive Educator Evaluation and Pay Reform on Achievement
A fundamental question for education policy is whether outcomes-based accountability including comprehensive educator evaluations and a closer relationship between effectiveness and compensation improves the quality of instruction and raises achievement. We use synthetic control methods to study the comprehensive teacher and principal evaluation and compensation systems introduced in the Dallas… more →
Estimating the Impact of Temporary COVID-19 College Closures on the 2020 Census Count
Temporary college closures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic created an exodus of students from college towns just as the decennial census count was getting underway. We use aggregate cellular mobility data to evaluate if this population movement affected the distributional accuracy of the 2020 Census. Based on the outflow of devices in late March 2020, we estimate that counties with a college… more →
A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Corequisite English Developmental Education: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Texas Community Colleges
We estimate the societal costs associated with corequisite and traditional pre-requisite English developmental education and compare them to societal benefits. Our context is the randomized controlled trial conducted by Miller et al. (2022) that estimated the effects of three different approaches to English corequisites implemented in 5 Texas community colleges. The main drivers of differential… more →
The Thin Blue Line in Schools: New Evidence on School-Based Policing Across the U.S.
U.S. public school students increasingly attend schools with sworn law enforcement officers present. Yet, little is known about how these school resource officers (SROs) affect school environments or student outcomes. Our study uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) design with national school-level data from 2014 to 2018 to estimate the impacts of SRO placement. We construct this… more →
Parental and Student Time Use Around the Academic Year
We demonstrate how mothers, fathers, and 15–17-year-old students alter their schedules around the K-12 academic year. Using regression discontinuity (RDD) methods, combined with dates on school year start and end dates by locality, we document several notable results. First, mothers are substantially more affected by the school year than are fathers. When school is in session, mothers sleep less… more →
ESSER III Investments in North Carolina: A Preliminary Analysis of PRC 181 and PRC 182
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic and school disruption, both the federal and state government have sought to allocate needed funding to schools so they can provide adequate instruction and safe learning spaces to students in North Carolina. These funds, particularly the ESSER III funding through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, were provided to individual Public School Units (PSUs) based… more →