EdWorkingPapers
Trends in Children’s Academic Skills at School Entry: 2010 to 2017
Students’ level of academic skills at school entry are a strong predictor of later academic success, and focusing on improving these skills during the preschool years has been a priority during the past ten years. Evidence from two prior nationally representative studies indicated that incoming kindergarteners’ math and literacy skills were higher in 2010 than 1998, but no national studies have… more →
Identifying Preferences for Equal College Access, Income, and Income Equality
Revealed preferences for equal college access may be due to beliefs that equal access increases societal income or income equality. To isolate preferences for those goods, we implement an online discrete choice experiment using social statistics generated from true variation among commuting zones. We find that, ceteris paribus, the average income that individuals are willing to sacrifice is (i… more →
The Teacher Residency: An Innovative Model for Preparing Teachers
Newly emerging teacher residency programs offer an innovative approach to recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers for hard-to-staff schools. This report summarizes the features of these programs and research about their practices and outcomes. These programs create a vehicle to recruit teachers for high-needs fields and locations; offer recruits strong content and clinical preparation… more →
Investing for Student Success: Lessons From State School Finance Reforms
Recent research demonstrates that, when more money is spent on education for students from low-income families, achievement and graduation rates improve. So, too, do life outcomes such as employment, wages, and reduced poverty rates. Investments in instruction, especially high-quality teachers, appear to leverage the largest marginal gains in performance. School funding reforms in several states… more →
Sharing the Wealth: How Regional Finance and Desegregation Plans Can Enhance Educational Equity
Most racial and ethnic segregation—and most financial inequities—in American public schools occur between, not within, school districts. Solving these problems often requires interdistrict solutions based on cooperation within regions. This report uses three examples (Boston, MA; Hartford, CT; and Omaha, NE) to explore how interdistrict desegregation plans with innovative funding strategies have… more →
Effective Teacher Professional Development
Teacher professional learning is of increasing interest as one way to support the increasingly complex skills students need to succeed in the 21st century. However, many teacher professional development initiatives appear ineffective in supporting changes in teacher practices and student learning. To identify the features of effective professional development, this paper reviews 35… more →
Understanding and Addressing Principal Turnover: A Review of the Research
This report reviews findings from 35 major studies that speak to the question of principal turnover. Within these studies, researchers have examined principal turnover nationally and within states and districts, primarily investigating the relationships between principal turnover and various characteristics of principals, schools, students, and policies. While there is some consistency across… more →
Taking the Long View: State Efforts to Solve Teacher Shortages by Strengthening the Profession
Much is known about how to attract, develop, and retain a strong and stable teacher workforce, and states across the country are taking action to address their teacher shortages in ways that strengthen their overall teacher workforce. This report highlights research on six evidence-based policies that have been used to address teacher shortages and boost teacher recruitment and retention: service… more →
Diversifying the Teaching Profession: How to Recruit and Retain Teachers of Color
Research illustrates the importance of greater teacher diversity because of the substantial benefits teachers of color provide to all students, and to students of color in particular. Studies also show that policies must focus more effectively on retention of teachers of color, if diversity in the teaching profession is to be sustained. While more teachers of color are being recruited than in… more →
Minority Teacher Recruitment, Employment, and Retention: 1987 to 2013
This study examines the extent and sources of the minority teacher shortage—the low proportion of minority teachers in comparison to the increasing numbers of minority students in the school system. Using the National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey/Teacher Follow-Up Survey, we found that efforts over recent decades to recruit more minority teachers and place them in… more →
Teacher Turnover: Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It
Without changes in current policies, U.S. teacher shortages are projected to grow in the coming years. Teacher turnover is an important source of these shortages. About 8% of teachers leave the profession each year, two-thirds of them for reasons other than retirement. Another 8% shift to different schools each year. In addition to aggravating teacher shortages, high turnover rates lower student… more →
A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S.
Recent media reports of teacher shortages across the country are confirmed by the analysis of several national data sets reported in this paper. Shortages are particularly severe in special education, mathematics, science, and bilingual/English learner education, and in locations with lower wages and poorer working conditions. Shortages are projected to grow based on declines in teacher education… more →
Deeper Learning Networks: Taking Student-Centered Learning and Equity to Scale
One of the mysteries of education reform is how leaders and educators can successfully instantiate, sustain, and spread student-centered pedagogical practices from a few schools to many others. Advocates for deeper learning grapple with this mystery as they seek to transform teaching and learning to prepare students to meet the demands of the 21st century and to close the opportunity gap between… more →
Community Schools as an Effective School Improvement Strategy: A Review of the Evidence
This report synthesizes the research evidence about the impact of community schools on student and school outcomes. Its aim is to support and inform school, community, district, and state leaders as they consider, propose, or implement community schools as a strategy for providing equitable, high-quality education to all young people. We conclude that well-implemented community schools lead to… more →
Untangling the Evidence on Preschool Effectiveness: Insights for Policymakers
Research showing that high-quality preschool benefits children’s early learning and later life outcomes has led to increased state engagement in public preschool. However, mixed results from evaluations of two programs—Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre-K program and Head Start—have left many policymakers unsure about how to ensure productive investments. This report presents the most rigorous evidence on… more →
The Road to High-Quality Early Learning: Lessons From the States
Although there is considerable research on the elements of high-quality preschool and its many benefits, particularly for low-income children and English learners, little information is available to policymakers about how to convert their visions of good early education into on-the-ground reality. This study fills that gap by describing and analyzing how four states—Michigan, West Virginia,… more →
Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale
Estimates of teacher “value-added” suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using administrative student data from New York City, we apply commonly… more →
Horizontal Differentiation and the Policy Effect of Charter Schools
While school choice may enhance competition, incentives for public schools to raise productivity may be muted if public education is viewed as imperfectly substitutable with alternatives. This paper estimates the aggregate effect of charter school expansion on education quality while accounting for the horizontal differentiation of charter school programs. To do so, we combine student-level… more →
How important are beliefs about gender differences in math ability? Transmission across generations and impacts on child outcomes
We study the transmission of beliefs about gender differences in math ability from adults to children and how this affects girls’ academic performance relative to boys. We exploit randomly assigned variation in the proportion of a child’s middle school classmates whose parents believe boys are innately better than girls at learning math. An increase in exposure to peers whose parents report this… more →
O Brother, Where Start Thou? Sibling Spillovers in College Enrollment
We study within-family spillovers in college enrollment to show college-going behavior is transmissible between peers. Because siblings’ test scores are weakly correlated, we exploit college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options. Older siblings’ admissibility substantially increases their own four-year college enrollment rate and… more →
Teacher Accountability Reforms and the Supply and Quality of New Teachers
In recent years, states have sought to increase accountability for public school teachers by implementing a package of reforms centered on high-stakes evaluation systems. We examine the effect of these reforms on the supply and quality of new teachers. Leveraging variation across states and time, we find that accountability reforms reduced the number of newly licensed teacher candidates and… more →
California’s Positive Outliers: Districts Beating the Odds
Despite wide achievement gaps across California between students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, some school districts have excelled at supporting the learning of all their students. This analysis identifies these positive outlier districts—those in which students of color, as well as White students, consistently achieve at higher levels than students from similar racial/… more →
The Hidden Costs of Teacher Turnover
High teacher turnover imposes numerous burdens on the schools and districts from which teachers depart. Some of these burdens are explicit and take the form of recruiting, hiring and training costs. Others are more hidden and take the form of changes to the composition and quality of the teaching staff. This study focuses on the latter. We ask how schools respond to spells of high teacher… more →
Is Effective Teacher Evaluation Sustainable? Evidence from DCPS
Ten years ago, many policymakers viewed the reform of teacher evaluation as a highly promising mechanism to improve teacher effectiveness and student achievement. Recently, that enthusiasm has dimmed as the available evidence suggests the subsequent reforms had a mixed record of implementation and efficacy. Even in districts where there was evidence of efficacy, the early promise of teacher… more →
Teacher Evaluation and Teacher Turnover, New Evidence from District of Columbia Public Schools
Few topics in education policy have received more attention than teacher turnover—and rightly so. The cost of losing a good teacher can be substantial and is born most directly by students. It is now widely recognized that teachers differ considerably in their ability to improve student outcomes, but discussions of teacher turnover rarely reflect these differences. Instead, we typically treat… more →
Categorical Inequality in Black and White: Linking Disproportionality across Multiple Educational Outcomes
We characterize the extent to which Black-White gaps for multiple educational outcomes are linked across school districts in the United States. Gaps in disciplinary action, grade-level retention, classification into special education and Gifted and Talented, and Advanced Placement course-taking are large in magnitude and correlated. Racial differences in family income and parent education are… more →
Ever Failed, Try Again, Succeed Better: Results from a Randomized Educational Intervention on Grit
We show that grit, a skill that has been shown to be highly predictive of achievement, is malleable in childhood and can be fostered in the classroom environment. We evaluate a randomized educational intervention implemented in two independent elementary school samples. Outcomes are measured via a novel incentivized real effort task and performance in standardized tests. We find that treated… more →
Mitigating the Gender Gap in the Willingness to Compete: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
We evaluate the impact on competitiveness of a randomized educational intervention that aims to foster grit, a skill that is highly predictive of achievement. The intervention is implemented in elementary schools, and we measure its impact using a dynamic competition task with interim performance feedback. We find that when children are exposed to a worldview that emphasizes the role of effort in… more →
Fostering Patience in the Classroom: Results from Randomized Educational Intervention
We evaluate the impact of a randomized educational intervention on children’s intertemporal choices. The intervention aims to improve the ability to imagine future selves, and encourages forward-looking behavior using a structured curriculum delivered by children’s own trained teachers. We find that treated students make more patient intertemporal decisions in incentivized experimental tasks. The… more →
Gender Stereotypes in the Classroom and Effects on Achievement
We study the effect of elementary school teachers’ beliefs about gender roles on student achievement. We exploit a natural experiment where teachers are prevented from self-selecting into schools, and conditional on school, students are allocated to teachers randomly. We show that girls who are taught for longer than a year by teachers with traditional gender views have lower performance in… more →
The effects of higher-stakes teacher evaluation on office disciplinary referrals
Despite frequent political and policy debates, the effects of imposing accountability pressures on public school teachers are empirically indeterminate. In this paper, we study the effects of accountability in the context of teacher responses to student behavioral infractions in the aftermath of teacher evaluation reforms. We leverage cross-state variation in the timing of state policy… more →
The Effects of a Comprehensive College Transition Program on Psychosocial Factors Associated with Success in College
We examine the effects of a comprehensive college transition program (CCTP) on four psychosocial outcomes associated with postsecondary success: sense of belonging, mattering, and academic and social self-efficacy. The CCTP operates on three four-year campuses and includes a range of supports, including shared academic courses, peer mentoring, and residential or common community spaces. We… more →
How much can we remedy very low learning levels in rural parts of low-income countries? Impact and generalizability of a multi-pronged para-teacher intervention from a cluster-randomized trial in The Gambia
Despite large schooling and learning gains in many developing countries, children in highly deprived areas are often unlikely to achieve even basic literacy and numeracy. We study how much of this problem can be resolved using a multi-pronged intervention combining several distinct interventions known to be effective in isolation. We conducted a cluster-randomized trial in The Gambia evaluating a… more →
Students with Growth Mindset Learn More in School: Evidence from California’s CORE School Districts
While the importance of social-emotional learning for student success is well established, educators and researchers have less knowledge and agreement about which social-emotional skills are most important for students and how these skills distribute across student subgroups. Using a rich longitudinal dataset of 221,840 fourth through seventh grade students in California districts, this paper… more →
Advisor Value-Added and Student Outcomes: Evidence from Randomly Assigned College Advisors
This paper provides the first causal evidence on the impact of college advisor quality on student outcomes. To do so, we exploit a unique setting where students are randomly assigned to faculty advisors during their first year of college. We find that higher advisor value-added (VA) substantially improves freshman year GPA, time to complete freshman year and four-year graduation rates.… more →
Nearly three decades into the charter school movement, what has research told us about charter schools?
When charter schools first entered the landscape, the debate was contentious, with both advocates and critics using strong rhetoric. Advocates often sold charter schools as a silver bullet solution for not only the students who attend these schools, but the broader traditional public school system as well. Similarly, critics painted charter schools as an apocalyptic threat to public… more →
Child beliefs, societal beliefs, and teacher-student identity match
Children routinely benefit from being assigned a teacher who shares an identity with them, such as gender or ethnicity. We study how student beliefs impact teacher-student gender match effects, and how this varies across subjects with different societal beliefs about differential ability by gender. A simple model of belief formation predicts that match effects will be larger for students who… more →
Impacts of state aid for non-traditional students on educational and labor market outcomes
Up to three-fourths of college students can be classified as “non-traditional”, yet whether typical policy interventions improves their education and labor market outcomes is understudied. I use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impacts of a state financial aid program aimed towards non-traditional students. Eligibility has no impacts on degree completion for students intending to… more →
The Long-Run Impacts of Special Education
Over 13 percent of US students participate in Special Education (SE) programs annually, at a cost of $40 billion. However, the effect of SE placements remains unclear. This paper uses administrative data from Texas to examine the long-run effect of reducing SE access. Our research design exploits variation in SE placement driven by a state policy that required school districts to reduce SE… more →
The Effects of Student Growth Data on School District Choice: Evidence from a Survey Experiment
We conduct an online survey experiment in which participants are asked to imagine that they are parents moving to a new metropolitan area. They then choose between the five largest school districts in that area. All participants receive demographic data for each district. In addition, some participants are randomly assigned to receive average achievement and/or average growth data for each… more →
The Factors of Teacher Attrition and Retention: An Updated and Expanded Meta-Analysis of the Literature
Building on a previous meta-analysis of the literature on teacher attrition and retention by leveraging studies with longitudinal data and a modern systematic search process, this updated comprehensive meta-analysis synthesizes findings from 120 studies on the factors of teacher attrition and retention. We find the research on teacher attrition has grown substantially over the last thirteen years… more →
Improving Student Teachers’ Feelings of Preparedness to Teach Through Recruitment of Instructionally Effective and Experienced Cooperating Teachers: A Randomized Experiment
Prior work suggests that recent graduates from teacher education programs feel better prepared to teach and are more instructionally effective when they learned to teach with more instructionally effective cooperating teachers. However, we do not know if these relationships are causal. Even if they are, we do not know if it is possible to recruit cooperating teachers who are, on average,… more →
Parental Occupational Choice and Children’s Entry into a STEM Field
We explore the intergenerational occupational transmission between parents and their children as it pertains to entry into the STEM field. Using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, we study student’s aspirations to work in a STEM field and eventual STEM education and employment. We show how these patterns change depending on whether the student’s parents work in a STEM field. We find strong… more →
School Sector and Satisfaction: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Sample
Access to private schools and public charter schools might improve parent and student satisfaction through competitive pressures and improved matches between educators and students. Using a nationally representative sample of 13,436 students in the United States in 2016, I find that public charter schools and private schools outperform traditional public schools on six measures of parent and… more →
My Brother’s Keeper? The Impact of Targeted Educational Supports
The My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) Challenge developed by President Obama supports communities that promote civic initiatives designed to improve the educational and economic opportunities specifically for young men of color. In Oakland, California, the MBK educational initiative features the African American Male Achievement (AAMA) program. The AAMA focuses on regularly scheduled classes exclusively… more →
The Impact of Low-Ability Peers on Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Outcomes: Random Assignment Evidence on the Effects and Operating Channels
This paper presents new experimental estimates of the impact of low-ability peers on own outcomes using nationally representative data from China. We exploit the random assignment of students to junior high school classrooms and find that the proportion of low-ability peers, defined as having been retained during primary school (“repeaters”), has negative effects on non-repeaters’ cognitive and… more →
Strengthening STEM Instruction in Schools: Learning from Research
More than half of U.S. children fail to meet proficiency standards in mathematics and science in fourth grade. Teacher professional development and curriculum improvement are two of the primary levers that school leaders and policymakers use to improve children’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning, yet until recently, the evidence base for understanding their… more →
Breaking the Cycle? Intergenerational Effects of an Anti-Poverty Program in Early Childhood
Despite substantial evidence that resources and outcomes are transmitted across generations, there has been limited inquiry into the extent to which anti-poverty programs actually disrupt the cycle of bad outcomes. We explore how the effects of the United States’ largest early childhood program, Head Start, transfer across generations. We leverage the rollout of this federally funded, means-… more →
Female Science Advisors and the STEM Gender Gap
In an effort to reduce the STEM gender gap, policymakers often propose providing women with close mentoring by female scientists. This is based on the idea that female scientists might act as role models and counteract negative gender stereotypes that are pervasive in science fields. However, as of yet, there is still no clear evidence on the role of mentor or advisor gender in reducing the STEM… more →
Self-Management Skills and Student Achievement Gains: Evidence from California’s CORE Districts
Existing research on self-management skills shows that measures of self-management predict student success. However, these conclusions are based on small samples or narrowly defined self-management measures. Using a rich longitudinal dataset of 221,840 fourth through seventh grade students, this paper describes self-management gaps across student groups, and confirms, at a large scale, the… more →