EdWorkingPapers
Parent Perspectives on School Choice: Experimental Evidence from a Nationally Representative Sample
Parental attitudes and perspectives of student “success” will likely drive their educational choices, whether residentially assigned district public schools, alternative public schools, private schools, or homeschooling. However, little research has examined the importance of these attitudes on choice or how these attitudes may vary across parent characteristics. In this study, we conducted an… more →
To The Mountaintop: Transforming Educational Equity as a School Leader
School leaders, particularly principals, can be true difference makers. Having a strong school leader can shape productive learning environments, give high-quality teachers the support they need, and influence student outcomes. This literature review synthesizes research on the role that school leaders, specifically principals, play in addressing inequities and promoting student success in… more →
Does Civic Education Impact Primary-School Students’ Civic Outcomes? Experimental Evidence from Liberia
We present experimental evidence on a civic education program in Liberia's public primary schools across 140 schools serving grades 3 and 4. The program provided new civic textbooks, teacher training, bi-weekly instruction, and regular classroom monitoring. After one school year, treatment students scored 0.31SDs higher on civic knowledge assessments. Gains were concentrated in factual… more →
Unequal Foundations: Racial Disparities in School Building Conditions in New York State
School infrastructure is a critical yet often overlooked factor shaping student health, learning, and well-being. This study examines racial disparities in public school building conditions across New York State using data from building inspections linked to demographic and fiscal data. Schools serving more students of color are significantly more likely to have poor overall conditions,… more →
From Funds to Frameworks: How States Operationalize Title II Education Funding
This study employs a document analysis of Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans from 2017 to 2022 to examine Title II, Part A, implementation across all states. We analyzed state-level fund allocation, leadership development activities, and discrepancies between planned and actual spending. Results reveal substantial heterogeneity in state approaches: 23.5% made Title II-A-specific plan… more →
Leveraging IEPs to Understand Special Education Services at Scale
7.5 million (15%) U.S. public school students have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) that guide $14 billion in special education services. However, the content of IEPs remains unexplored, primarily because they have been historically inaccessible to researchers at scale. In this study, we develop a coding taxonomy to categorize IEP services from digital IEP records for an entire state.… more →
Out-of-School Learning: Subtitling vs. Dubbing and the Acquisition of Foreign-Language Skills
The development of English-language skills, a near necessity in today’s global economy, is heavily influenced by historical national decisions about whether to subtitle or dub TV content. While prior studies of language acquisition have focused on schools, we show the overwhelming influence of out-of-school learning. We identify the causal effect of subtitling in a difference-in-differences… more →
From Rural Schools to City Factories: Assessing the Quality of Chinese Rural Schools
The changing pattern of quality in China’s rural schools across time and province is extracted from the differential labor market earnings of rural migrant workers. Variations in rates of return to years of schooling across migrant workers working in the same urban labor market but having different sites of basic education provide for direct estimation of provincial school quality.… more →
Asset-Based Implementation of Structured Adaptations in an Online Third-Grade Content Literacy Intervention
Scaling up evidence-based educational interventions presents challenges, particularly in adapting to new contexts while maintaining fidelity. Structured adaptations that integrate the strengths of experimental science (high fidelity) and improvement science (high adaptation) represent a novel design framework for supporting the equitable implementation of research-based practices and programs… more →
Exploring Claims of Critical Race Theory, Divisive Topics, and Indoctrination in the Classroom
Critical race theory (CRT) and claims of political indoctrination in K-12 classrooms are at the forefront of the ongoing culture wars surrounding public education. Despite a wave of legislative action targeting CRT-related instruction, little systematic evidence documents the extent to which critics’ claims have merit. Using a nationally representative survey of American high school students,… more →
A Degree of Choice: The Role of Occupations in Educational Decision-Making
Schooling is most closely connected to work at the highest levels of education. As a growing share of adults return to higher education after beginning work, we ask how individuals draw on their work experience and career values to select a graduate program. We draw on two independent but complementary interview studies to examine this question across higher- and lower-status occupations:… more →
Measuring “Noncognitive” Skills at Scale: Building Longitudinal Student Behavior Composites Using Administrative Data
“Noncognitive” skills, especially student behavior, are critical predictors of academic and life outcomes. However, measuring student behavior at scale remains challenging, particularly for longitudinal research. This study uses a demographically diverse sample of students followed from kindergarten to eighth grade in the Boston Public Schools (N=12,232) to examine trade-offs between two… more →
The Effects of Early Childhood Science Educational Interventions on Children’s Science Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Classroom-Based Studies
The importance of providing children with more robust opportunities to access high-quality science instruction is a widely recognized challenge. Unfortunately, science instruction is often neglected in the earliest school grades, meaning that many young children face opportunity gaps to learning science. We present the results of a meta-analysis of experimental and quasiexperimental research… more →
Education and Climate Change: Synthesizing the Evidence to Guide Future Research
The effects of climate change are becoming increasingly visible across all aspects of the U.S. PreK-12 education system. Schools are both vulnerable to climate change and uniquely positioned to be part of the solution. We synthesize interdisciplinary research and data to illustrate the bi-directional relationship between schools and our changing climate. Drawing on this evidence, we map out a… more →
The effects of third-grade retention on multilingual students: A gateway or a gatekeeper?
This paper estimates the effect of test-based grade retention on multilingual students classified as English Learners (ML-ELs). This policy could provide an opportunity for ML-ELs to develop English language proficiency and master academic content or put them at increased risk of worse academic and labor market outcomes. I use a regression discontinuity design leveraging Texas’s test-based… more →
Tabling Debate: How Local Officials Use Agenda Control to Stifle Conflict
Public officials influence policymaking by deciding which items receive attention and action — and which do not. Accounts from national legislatures typically explain agenda control in terms of party leadership and discipline. But, do politicians exert agenda control outside highly professionalized legislatures? We bring the agenda control discussion to U.S. school boards, which lack strong… more →
Social Emotional Learning, Student Attendance, and Chronic Absenteeism in Pre- and Post-Pandemic Periods
We develop and implement a quasi-experimental panel data model to address the relationships between social emotional learning competencies (SEL) and annual student attendance in the pre- and post-pandemic periods. Although panel data models tend to focus on changes over time in outcomes and predictors, we develop a model that decomposes the effects of SEL into stable and transitory components… more →
Empirical Analysis of STEM Faculty Productivity: Using NbClust and Logistic Regression to Explore Interactions Among Faculty Teaching and Research Productivity Metrics, Demographic, and Disciplinary Characteristics
This study investigates the nexus between research and teaching productivity among STEM faculty at a public research-intensive university, analyzing data from 553 faculty members across four STEM disciplines: Biological Sciences, Engineering, Information and Computer Sciences, and Physical Sciences. Through the combined application of cluster analysis using the NbClust package and logistic… more →
The Value of School Social Climate Information: Evidence from Chicago Housing Transactions
In this paper, I investigate how publicizing school social climate information is capitalized into the housing market and how it affects the sorting of homebuyers from different economic backgrounds. I first provide descriptive evidence on the novelty of school climate relative to other school characteristics. Next, using a plausibly exogenous shock of school climate information in Chicago, I… more →
High School Equivalency Credentialing and Post-Secondary Success: Pre-Registered Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the GED® Test
For the over 24 million American adults who do not hold a traditional high school diploma, high school equivalency (HSE) credentials represent the primary “second-chance” pathway to many careers or educational opportunities. This project uses current, representative data to assess whether, how, and for whom HSE credentials promote post-secondary success. Examining post-secondary outcomes in a… more →
Identifying Indicators to Support Educational Attainment for Different Groups of English Learners in High School
This study examines a broad array of potential indicators for early warning and college readiness indicator systems for different subgroups of English Learners in high school. Using data from 2008 through 2021 from the Chicago Public Schools, the study follows cohorts of students from eighth grade through college graduation, using logistic regression models to run exploratory analyses, and… more →
Introducing a High-School Exit Exam in Science: Consequences in Massachusetts
Preparing students for science, technology, and engineering careers is an urgent state policy challenge. We examine the design and roll-out of a science testing requirement for high-school graduation in Massachusetts. While science test performance has improved over time for all demographic subgroups, we observe rising inequality in failure rates and retest success. English learners, almost 8… more →
Politics of the professoriate: Longitudinal evidence from a state public university system’s universe of faculty
Over the past decade, Democrats and Republicans have grown increasingly polarized in their views of American higher education. Republicans in particular have become far more critical of the political and social views of faculty. In this paper, we thus investigate whether the commonly held belief of a politically liberal professoriate is true for the universe of faculty employed by an entire… more →
School Enrollment Shifts Five Years After the Pandemic
The pandemic induced a substantial enrollment shift away from public schools in fall 2020 and a partial return of students in fall 2021, leaving longer-term impacts unclear. We use Massachusetts state- and district-level data to explore enrollment patterns five years after the pandemic’s onset. Relative to pre-pandemic trends, fall 2024 enrollment is down 2% in local public schools, up 14% in… more →
The Net Benefits of Raising Bachelor’s Degree Completion through the City University of New York ACE Program
In 2015, the City University of New York (CUNY) launched a new program— Accelerate, Complete, and Engage (ACE)—aimed at improving college graduation rates. A randomized-control evaluation of the program found a nearly 12 percentage point increase in graduation five years after college entry. Using this impact estimate and national data on earnings by gender, age, and degree status; we estimate… more →
Reclassifying English Learners
Most English learners (ELs) eventually gain sufficient English proficiency to be reclassified and receive instruction without linguistic supports. Though well-identified, prior regression discontinuity estimates for the effect of reclassification are estimated too imprecisely to detect policy-relevant effects. Applying a student fixed-effect design to data from Indiana, we show that ELs… more →
Measuring Conflict in Local Politics
Many of the most tangible and immediate political conflicts in Americans’ lives occur at the local level. Yet, we lack large-scale evidence on how, why, and where conflict occurs in local governments. In this paper, we present a new dataset of nearly 100,000 videos of school board meetings, and use them to create a new measure of local political conflict. We validate this new approach using… more →
Closing the Gaps: An Examination of Early Impacts of Dallas ISD’s Opt-out Policy on Advanced Course Enrollment
While there is consensus that taking advanced coursework in high school is strongly related to subsequent academic outcomes, well-qualified Students of Color are less likely than White students to take advanced high school courses. K12 schools have sought strategies to encourage more qualified Students of Color to take advanced courses in secondary school. One policy that has gained traction… more →
Revisiting The Rural Teacher Workforce: Insights from a Novel Rurality Measure
How we define rurality fundamentally shapes our place-based understanding of the teacher workforce. This study uses the Community Assets and Relative Rurality (CARR) Index—a novel, multidimensional measure of rurality—alongside longitudinal administrative data to examine K–12 teachers in Kansas and Missouri. We find substantial variation in teacher demographic and professional characteristics… more →
Implicit Gender-STEM Stereotypes and College Major Choice
Implicit stereotypes about gender and STEM may unconsciously shape students' academic choices and contribute to gender gaps in major choice, but there is limited economic evidence on this channel. To study this relationship, we administer a gender-science Implicit Association Test (IAT) to a sample of primarily first-semester undergraduates, and link results to original survey data and… more →
A Critical Appraisal of the Evidence on Racial Disproportionality in Special Education
This essay provides a two-pronged critical assessment of a subset of the literature on racial disproportionality in special education: that which aims to estimate racial disparities among otherwise similar children. This body of research has shown that Black students are less likely than comparable White students to receive special education, and has been interpreted by many to mean that… more →
Teaching Practices and the Persistence of School-Entry Age Effects
We consider the effect of teaching practices on the persistence of school-entry age effects caused by rigid cutoff dates for school eligibility in Spain. We document significant school-entry age effects for the same cohort of students when they were in elementary and secondary school. Then, we test whether school-entry age effects at age 15 are lower for those students who were more frequently… more →
The Effect of Raising School Quality on Earnings
The evidence underscores the need to shift attention from school attainment to actual learning. While the average global return to an additional year of schooling is about 10 percent, a one standard deviation increase in test scores raises earnings by 15 percent. Studies show that including direct measures of skills reduces the estimated return to schooling, revealing the stronger role of… more →
Choosing Schools in Choice Neighborhoods: Impacts of Student Mobility, School Composition, and Case Management on Academic Outcomes
This study examines the academic impacts of the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI), a federal public housing revitalization program, focusing on how case management, student mobility, and school compositional change intersect to shape outcomes. Using an eight-year student-level panel (2015–2023), we estimate three-way fixed effects models that account for school year, grade, and individual… more →
From Disruption to Recovery: Charter School Performance During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic
In recent decades, an increasing number of students have pursued alternative educational options, including charter schools, as school choice has continued to expand. This trend was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. While it is well established that students experienced widespread learning loss during the pandemic, it remains unclear whether the extent of that loss or the pace of recovery… more →
Supportive Teacher Working Conditions as a Tool to Retain Non-Local Teachers in Rural Schools
Rural school administrators prefer hiring homegrown teachers because they are more likely to stay than non-local teachers; however, administrators need to hire non-local candidates to meet their staffing needs. Our examination of rural teachers’ preferences for local was guided by person-organization fit theory. Specifically, we investigated the role of teacher working conditions (TWC) in the… more →
Teaching Computational Thinking to Children in Head Start Classrooms: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial
Despite efforts to broaden participation in computer science and its related fields, there exist stark disparities in participation in computer related fields by gender, race/ethnicity, and socio-economic status. One approach to combat these disparities is to expose children to computing concepts early, to provide them with the foundational skills needed to be successful in later computing… more →
Cosmetology Gets a Trim: The Impact of Reducing Licensing Hours on Colleges and Students
In the United States, licenses are required for entry into many different occupations. Requirements vary by state and occupation, but many licenses require a minimum number of training or instructional hours. We consider the impact of these hours requirements on students and postsecondary institutions, with a particular focus on cosmetology (also known as hairstyling or beauty). Cosmetology… more →
Recent Immigration Raids Increased Student Absences
Local immigration raids expanded dramatically across the U.S. during the first two months of 2025. Anecdotal accounts suggest that these raids increased student absences from schools because parents fear being separated from their children. This study evaluates this claim using a daily times series of school absences spanning the current and two prior school years from five school districts… more →
Making the Grade: Accounting for Course Selection in High School Transcripts with Item Response Theory
We apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to high-school transcript data, treating courses as items and grades as ordered responses, to estimate student transcript strength (θ̂) and course difficulty on a common scale. IRT estimation orders courses plausibly by difficulty, differentiates students with identical GPAs, correlates strongly with SAT scores, and demonstrates more than twice the… more →
Closing gaps for racial minorities and immigrants through school-to-work linkages and occupational match
This study investigates the role of college major choices in labor market outcomes, with a focus on racial minorities and immigrants. Drawing upon research on school-to-work linkages, we examine two measures, linkage – the connection between college majors and specific occupations in the labor market – and match – the alignment of workers’ occupations with their college majors. Analyzing data… more →
Can States Sustain and Replicate School District Improvement? Evidence from Massachusetts
Limited scholarship examines school districtwide turnaround reforms beyond the first few years of implementation or efforts to replicate successes in new contexts. We study Massachusetts, home to a state takeover of the Lawrence district that led to academic gains in early reform years, and where state leaders attempted to replicate this success in three additional communities. We use… more →
Testing Away from One's Own School: Exam Location and Performance in High-Stakes Exams
High-stakes exams are often administered at designated test centers, requiring many students to test in unfamiliar environments. We investigate whether such arrangements impact students' test performance and, by extension, access to educational opportunities. Using unique administrative data from China’s national college entrance examination between 2016 and 2018 and its random assignment of… more →
Impacts of Michigan Transitional Kindergarten Through Third Grade
Transitional Kindergarten (TK) is a relatively new model of early childhood education, with little evidence on whether and how it affects children’s development. This study provides new evidence using data from Michigan, which has the nation’s second-largest TK program. Using survey data (N=171) from administrators in 2021-2022, the paper documents several program features that distinguish TK… more →
The Extent of Student Mobility Among Vulnerable Groups in California
Nonstructural student mobility—school changes not tied to grade-level promotion—is common and consequential yet remains underexamined in recent research. This paper analyzes the incidence, disparities, and predictors of nonstructural school mobility using longitudinal data from six demographically diverse California school districts, with attention to pre- and post-COVID-19 trends and… more →
Behind the Push for Licensure Reform: How Beliefs About the Teaching Profession Unite and Divide Coalitions
A long history of scholarship on teacher professionalism documents how different narratives about teaching animate education policy and practice. We bridge the Advocacy Coalition Framework with institutional logics to examine how beliefs about teaching unite and divide a state-level coalition pursuing teacher licensure policy reform and manifest in the policymaking process. Drawing on… more →
The Impact of Increased Exposure of Diversity on Suburban Students’ Outcomes: An Analysis of the METCO Voluntary Desegregation Program
Over sixty years following Brown vs. Board of Education, racial and socioeconomic segregation and lack of equal access to educational opportunities persist. Across the country, voluntary desegregation busing programs aim to ameliorate these imbalances and disparities. A longstanding Massachusetts program, METCO, buses K-12 students of color from Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts to 37… more →
Portraying Governance: Demographic Misalignment in University Board Representation
Higher education governing boards are important bodies with far-reaching powers over the institutions they oversee. Yet little is known about individual board members, how the composition of boards varies across institutions, or whether boards are at all representative of their institutional populations. In this paper, I introduce a novel dataset that includes individual-level details about… more →
The Unintended Cost of Distance Learning: An Analysis of Child Maltreatment
Education personnel play a crucial role in identifying and reporting child maltreatment. However, school closures amid COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this vital reporting system. I causally investigate how remote learning influenced trends in child maltreatment reports and risks, leveraging county-level variations in remote learning instructional weeks in the United States during the 2020-21… more →
Efficacy of Zearn Math over two years in grades 3 to 5: An experiment in Texas
Zearn Math is a popular software platform for K-8 mathematics learning, designed to enable all students to successfully access grade-level content. RAND researchers collaborated with Zearn, the product’s developer, to design this evaluation. Then RAND conducted the study independently, randomly assigning 64 schools in an urban Texas district to either supplement classroom instruction with… more →