EdWorkingPapers
Sibling Effects on High School Exam Taking and Performance
Younger siblings take more advanced high school course end of year exams when their older siblings perform better in those same exams. Using a regression discontinuity and data from millions of siblings who take Advanced Placement (AP) exams, we show that younger siblings with older siblings who marginally “pass” an AP exam are more likely to take at least one AP exam, increase the total… more →
How has COVID-19 impacted FAFSA submissions?
COVID has led colleges to brace for potential enrollment declines in the Fall, which would devastate budgets and potentially decrease the likelihood a student ever earns a degree. We take an early look at California’s FAFSA applications up through mid-June, to anticipate how students may be responding to this crisis. We find that COVID did not affect most of California’s “traditional” high… more →
Regulatory Arbitrage in Teacher Hiring and Retention: Evidence from Massachusetts Charter Schools
We study personnel flexibility in charter schools by exploring how teacher retention varies with teacher and school quality in Massachusetts. Charters are more likely to lose their highest and lowest value-added teachers. Low performers tend to exit public education, while high performers tend to switch to traditional public schools. To rationalize these findings, we propose a model in which… more →
Why Have College Completion Rates Increased?
College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed--since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional resources, and institution attended do not explain much of the change. However, we show that grade… more →
Inequality in Household Adaptation to Schooling Shocks: Covid-Induced Online Learning Engagement in Real Time
We use high frequency internet search data to study in real time how US households sought out online learning resources as schools closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. By April 2020, nationwide search intensity for both school- and parent-centered online learning resources had roughly doubled relative to baseline. Areas of the country with higher income, better internet access and fewer rural… more →
How America’s Schools Responded to the COVID Crisis
COVID-19 has forced essentially all schools in the country to close their doors to inperson activities. In this study, we provide new evidence about variation in school responses across school types. We focus on five main constructs of school activity during COVID-19: personalization and engagement in instruction, personalization and engagement in other school communication with students,… more →
Charter School Growth and the Evolution of Local Teacher Labor Markets
Since their introduction in the 1990s, charter schools have grown from a small-scale experiment to a ubiquitous feature of the public education landscape. The current study uses the legislative removal of a cap on the maximum number of charters, and the weakening of regulations on these new schools, in North Carolina as a natural experiment to assess the intensive impacts of charter school… more →
How Increased School Choice Affects Public School Enrollment and School Segregation
We investigate the determinants and consequences of increased school choice by analyzing a 22-year school panel matched to county-level demographic, economic, and political data. Using an event-study design exploiting the precise timing of charter school enrollment change, we provide robust evidence that charter enrollment growth increases racial and especially socioeconomic school… more →
Over Diagnosed or Over Looked? The Effect of Age at Time of School Entry On Students Receiving Special Education Services
Much of the literature estimating disproportionality in special education identification rates has focused on socioeconomic status, race, and gender. However, recent evidence suggests that a student’s school starting age also impacts the likelihood they receive special education services, particularly in the early grades. I build on the evidence that the youngest students in a grade more… more →
Public-Sector Leadership and Venture Philanthropy: The Case of Broad Superintendents
Major philanthropic initiatives that incorporate features of venture-capital practices have become increasingly prominent, particularly in K-12 public education. In this study, we provide empirical evidence on the reach, character, and impact of the Broad Superintendents Academy, a prominent and controversial venture-philanthropic initiative designed to transform leadership in the nation’s… more →
Teacher-to-classroom assignment and student achievement
We study the effects of counterfactual teacher-to-classroom assignments on average student achievement in elementary and middle schools in the US. We use the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) experiment to semiparametrically identify the average reallocation effects (AREs) of such assignments. Our findings suggest that changes in within-district teacher assignments could have appreciable… more →
Culture and Student Achievement: The Intertwined Roles of Patience and Risk-Taking
Patience and risk-taking – two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making – are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-… more →
Bricks and Mortar vs. Computers and Modems: The Impacts of Enrollment in K-12 Virtual Schools
The COVID-19 pandemic has put virtual schooling at the forefront of policy concerns, as millions of children worldwide shift to virtual schooling with hopes of “slowing the spread”. Given the emergency shift to online education coupled with the large increase in demand for virtual education over the last decade it is imperative to explore the impacts of virtual education on student outcomes.… more →
Racial Disparities in Pre-K Quality: Evidence from New York City’s Universal Pre-K Program
New York City’s universal pre-kindergarten program, which increased full-day enrollment from 19,000 to almost 70,000 children, is ambitious in both scale and implementation speed. We provide new evidence on the distribution of pre-K quality in NYC by student race/ethnicity, and investigate the extent to which observed differences are associated with the spatial distribution of higher-quality… more →
The data revolution comes to higher education: Identifying students at risk of dropout in Chile
Enrollment in higher education has risen dramatically in Latin America, especially in Chile. Yet graduation and persistence rates remain low. One way to improve graduation and persistence is to use data and analytics to identify students at risk of dropout, target interventions, and evaluate interventions’ effectiveness at improving student success. We illustrate the potential of this approach… more →
Can Greater Access to Education Be Inequitable? New Evidence from India's Right to Education Act
India took a decisive step toward universal basic education by proclaiming a constitutionally-guaranteed Right to Education (RTE) Act in 2009 that called for full access of children aged 6-14 to free schooling. This paper considers the offsetting effects to RTE from induced expansion of private tutoring in the educationally competitive districts of India. We develop a unique database of… more →
How Does Minority Political Representation Affect School District Administration and Student Outcomes?
We employ a regression discontinuity design leveraging close school board elections to investigate how the racial and ethnic composition of California school boards affects school district administration and student achievement. We find some evidence that increases in minority representation lead to cumulative achievement gains of approximately 0.1 standard deviations among minority students… more →
Do Peers Affect Undergraduates’ Decisions to Switch Majors?
This study used college dormitory room and social group assignment data to investigate the peer effect on the probability of college students switching their major fields of study. The results revealed strong evidence of peer effects on students’ decisions to switch majors. In particular, the number of a student’s peers who have the same major significantly reduces the student’s likelihood of… more →
The Non-Democratic Roots of Mass Education: Evidence from 200 Years
Because primary education is often conceptualized as a pro-poor redistributive policy, a common argument is that democratization increases its provision. But primary education can also serve the goals of autocrats, including redistribution, promoting loyalty, nation-building, and/or industrialization. To examine the relationship between democratization and education provision empirically, I… more →
Stress Test: Examining the Evolution of Teachers’ Mental Health Over Time
Teaching is often assumed to be a relatively stressful occupation and occupational stress among teachers has been linked to poor mental health, attrition from the profession, and decreased effectiveness in the classroom. Despite widespread concern about teachers’ mental health, however, little empirical evidence exists on long-run trends in teachers’ mental health or the prevalence of mental… more →
Collective Racial Bias and the Black-White Test Score Gap
This study examines the relationship between county-level estimates of implicit racial bias and black-white test score gaps in U.S. schools. Data from over 1 million respondents from across the United States who completed an online version of the Race Implicit Association Test (IAT) were combined with data from the Stanford Education Data Archive covering over 300 million test scores from U.S… more →
First Impressions: The Case of Teacher Racial Bias
We study racial bias and the persistence of first impressions in the context of education. Teachers who begin their careers in classrooms with large black-white score gaps carry negative views into evaluations of future cohorts of black students. Our evidence is based on novel data on blind evaluations and non-blind public school teacher assessments of fourth and fifth graders in North… more →
Experimental Evidence on Teachers' Racial Bias in Student Evaluation: The Role of Grading Scales
A vast research literature documents racial bias in teachers’ evaluations of students. Theory suggests bias may be larger on grading scales with vague or overly-general criteria versus scales with clearly-specified criteria, raising the possibility that well-designed grading policies may mitigate bias. This study offers relevant evidence through a randomized web-based experiment… more →
Measuring Teaching Practices at Scale: A Novel Application of Text-as-Data Methods
Valid and reliable measurements of teaching quality facilitate school-level decision-making and policies pertaining to teachers, but conventional classroom observations are costly, prone to rater bias, and hard to implement at scale. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of 4th- and 5th-grade English language arts classes, we apply novel text-as-data methods to develop automated,… more →
Status, Growth, and Perceptions of School Quality
States and districts are increasingly incorporating measures of achievement growth into their school accountability systems, but there is little research on how these changes affect the public’s perceptions of school quality. We conduct a nationally representative online survey experiment to identify the effects of providing participants with information about their local school districts’… more →
Experimental Effects of “Achievement Gap” News Reporting on Viewers’ Racial Stereotypes, Inequality Explanations, and Inequality Prioritization
The “achievement gap” has long dominated mainstream conversations about race and education. Some scholars warn that the discourse around racial gaps perpetuates stereotypes and promotes the adoption of deficit-based explanations that fail to appreciate the role of structural inequities. I investigate through three randomized experiments. Results indicate that a TV news story… more →
The Forgotten 20 Percent: Achievement and Growth in Rural Schools Across the Nation
Nearly one in five U.S. students attends a rural school, yet we know very little about achievement gaps and academic growth in rural schools. This study leverages a unique dataset that includes longitudinal test scores for more than five million 3rd to 8th grade students in approximately 17,000 public schools across the 50 states, including 900,000 students attending 4,727 rural schools. We… more →
The Design of Clustered Observational Studies in Education
Clustered observational studies (COSs) are a critical analytic tool for educational effectiveness research. We present a design framework for the development and critique of COSs. The framework is built on the counterfactual model for causal inference and promotes the concept of designing COSs that emulate the targeted randomized trial that would have been conducted were it… more →
Matching Methods for Clustered Observational Studies in Education
Many interventions in education occur in settings where treatments are applied to groups. For example, a reading intervention may be implemented for all students in some schools and withheld from students in other schools. When such treatments are non-randomly allocated, outcomes across the treated and control groups may differ due to the treatment or due to baseline differences between groups… more →
School's Out: The Role of Summers in Understanding Achievement Disparities
Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and SES only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work focuses on these factors. We zoom out to the full spread of differential SLL and its contribution… more →
The Economic Impact of Access to Public Four-Year Colleges
We provide the first estimated economic impacts of students’ access to an entire sector of public higher education in the U.S. Approximately half of Georgia high school graduates who enroll in college do so in the state’s public four-year sector, which requires minimum SAT scores for admission. Regression discontinuity estimates show enrollment in public four-year institutions boosts students… more →
The Effects of Early College Opportunities on English Learners
English Learners (ELs) lag behind their peers in postsecondary attainment. As the EL population in the U.S. continues to grow, so does concern over their underrepresentation in higher education. Research shows that Early College High Schools have a significant impact on high school and college outcomes for students from low income and racial/ethnic minority backgrounds, but how similar… more →
Catching up or Falling Behind: Measuring Middle School Achievement Trajectories for College Readiness
This study presents a framework that uses academic trajectories in the middle grades for identifying students in need of intervention and providing targeted support. We apply a set of academic college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students in 5900 schools across 49 states and the District of Columbia. In both math and reading, each student was assessed up… more →
Teacher Evaluation, Ambitious Mathematics Instruction, and Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching: Evidence from Early Career Teachers
While teacher evaluation policies have been central to efforts to enhance teaching quality over the past decade, little is known about how teachers change their instructional practices in response to such policies. To address this question, this paper drew on classroom observation and survey data to examine how early career teachers’ (ECTs’) perceptions of pressure associated with teacher… more →
O Brother, Where Start Thou? Sibling Spillovers on College and Major Choice in Four Countries
Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we present evidence from the United States, Chile, Sweden and Croatia that older siblings’ college and major choices can significantly influence their… more →
Projecting the potential impacts of COVID-19 school closures on academic achievement
With 55 million students in the United States out of school due to the COVID-19 pandemic, education systems are scrambling to meet the needs of schools and families, including planning how best to approach instruction in the fall given students may be farther behind than in a typical year. Yet, education leaders have little data on how much learning has been… more →
Interpreting Effect Sizes of Education Interventions
Researchers commonly interpret effect sizes by applying benchmarks proposed by Cohen over a half century ago. However, effects that are small by Cohen’s standards are large relative to the impacts of most field-based interventions. These benchmarks also fail to consider important differences in study features, program costs, and scalability. In this paper, I present five broad guidelines for… more →
Decreasing Time to Baccalaureate Degree in the United States
After increasing in the 1970s and 1980s, time to bachelor’s degree has declined since the 1990s. We document this fact using data from three nationally representative surveys. We show that this pattern is occurring across school types and for all student types. Using administrative student records from 11 large universities, we confirm the finding and show that it is robust to alternative… more →
School Segregation At The Classroom Level In A Southern 'New Destination' State
Using detailed administrative data for public schools, we document racial and ethnic segregation at the classroom level in North Carolina, a state that has experienced a sharp increase in Hispanic enrollment. We decompose classroom-level segregation in counties into within-school and between-school components. We find that the within-school component accounted for a sizable share of total… more →
Pre-Service Teacher Quality and Workforce Entry
Using rich longitudinal data from one of the largest teacher education programs in Texas, we examine the measurement of pre-service teacher (PST) quality and its relationship with entry into the K–12 public school teacher workforce. Drawing on rubric-based observations of PSTs during clinical teaching, we find that little of the variation in observation scores is attributable to actual… more →
The effects of English language development curriculum materials on students’ English proficiency
Castañeda v. Pickard (1981) mandated that educational programs for emergent bilinguals be tested for program efficacy. Since English language development (ELD) curricular materials are one part of an instructional program, we assess this mandate by examining the effectiveness of ELD materials in Texas. Using local linear matching, we find that schools that do not purchase any ELD curricula… more →
Experimentally Estimated Impacts of School Vouchers on Educational Attainments of Moderately and Severely Disadvantaged Students
Although qualitative research suggests that school choice and other interventions are more beneficial for moderately disadvantaged than severely deprived students, the subject has barely been explored by quantitative studies with either observational or experimental designs. We estimate experimentally the impact of a voucher offer on college attainment of poor minority students by… more →
Targeted Interventions in High School: Preparing Students for College
This study adds to the currently limited evidence base on the efficacy of interventions targeting non-college-ready high school students by examining the impact of Kentucky’s Targeted Interventions (TI) program. We focus on interventions that students received under TI in the senior year of high school based on their 11th grade ACT test scores. Using difference-in-regression discontinuity and… more →
The learning curve: Revisiting the assumption of linear growth across the school year
Important educational policy decisions, like whether to shorten or extend the school year, often require accurate estimates of how much students learn during the year. Yet, related research relies on a mostly untested assumption: that growth in achievement is linear throughout the entire school year. We examine this assumption using a data set containing math and reading test… more →
Air Filters, Pollution and Student Achievement
This paper identifies the achievement impact of installing air filters in classrooms for the first time. To do so, I leverage a unique setting arising from the largest gas leak in United States history, whereby the offending gas company installed air filters in every classroom, office and common area for all schools within five miles of the leak (but not beyond). This variation allows me to… more →
Social Returns to Private Choice? Effects of Charter Schools on Behavioral Outcomes, Arrests, and Civic Participation
The vast majority of literature on school choice, and charter schools in particular, focus on attending an elementary or middle school grades and often focus on test scores or other proximal outcomes. Much less is known about the long-term effects of attending a charter school in 9th grade. It is important to fill this information void for a few reasons. First, schools in general affect more… more →
Does the Common Core Have a Common Effect?: An Exploration of Effects on Academically Vulnerable Students
Policymakers have sought to increase the rigor of content standards since the 1990s. However, the literature examining the effects of reforms to content standards on student outcomes is still developing. This study examines the extent to which the Common Core State Content Standards (CC) affected student achievement and the size of achievement gaps. To identify the effect of CC I compare early… more →
Unequal Pay for Equal Work? Unpacking the Gender Gap in Principal Compensation
We investigate the male–female gap in principal compensation in state and national data: detailed longitudinal personnel records from the state of Missouri and repeated cross-sections from the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). In both data sets, we estimate substantively important compensation gaps for school leaders. In Missouri, female principals make… more →
Winners and Losers? The Effect of Gaining and Losing Access to Selective Colleges on Education and Labor Market Outcomes
Selective college admissions are fundamentally a question of tradeoffs: Given capacity, admitting one student means rejecting another. Research to date has generally estimated average effects of college selectivity, and has been unable to distinguish between the effects on students gaining access and on those losing access under alternative admissions policies. We use the introduction of the… more →
Is the Rise of High School Graduation Rates Real? High-Stakes School Accountability and Strategic Behavior
High school graduation rates have increased dramatically in the past two decades. Some skepticism has arisen, however, because of the confluence of the graduation rise and the starts of high-stakes accountability for graduation rates with No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In this study we provide some of the first evidence about the role of accountability versus strategic behavior, especially the… more →