EdWorkingPapers
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… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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 →
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… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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)… more →
Average and heterogeneous effects of political party on education finance and outcomes: Regression discontinuity evidence from U.S. states across election cycles
In the U.S., state politicians directly influence legislation and budget decisions that can substantially affect public education spending and students. Does the political party of elected officials matter for these outcomes? We use a regression discontinuity design to analyze close house and gubernatorial elections from 1982 to 2016 and find that the impact of Democratic control of state… more →
The Increasing Penalty to Occupation-Education Mismatch
College-educated workers in jobs unrelated to their degree generally receive lower wages compared to well-matched workers. Our analysis of data from the National Survey of College Graduates shows that although the rate of this mismatch declined only slightly (19% to 17%), the wage penalty increased by 51% between 1993 and 2019. Changes in the composition of field of study over time, as well as… more →
Digital redlining: the relevance of 20th century housing policy to 21st century broadband access and education
Broadband is not equally accessible among students despite its increasing importance to education. We investigate the relationship between broadband and housing policy by joining two measures of broadband access with Depression-era redlining maps that classified neighborhoods based in part on racist and classist beliefs. We find that despite internet service provider selfreports of similar… more →
Teacher Turnover During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Teachers' levels of stress and burnout have been high throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, raising concerns about a potential increase in teacher turnover and future teacher shortages. We examine how the COVID-19 pandemic affected teacher turnover in Arkansas from 2018-19 to 2022-23 using administrative data. We find no major changes in turnover entering the first two pandemic years, but a large… more →
Does Regulating Entry Requirements Lead to More Effective Principals?
Anecdotal evidence points to the importance of school principals, but the limited existing research has neither provided consistent results nor indicated any set of essential characteristics of effective principals. This paper exploits extensive student-level panel data across six states to investigate both variations in principal performance and the relationship between effectiveness and key… more →
Inequality Beyond Standardized Tests: Trends in Extracurricular Activity Reporting in College Applications Across Race and Class
Inequality related to standardized tests in college admissions has long been a subject of discussion; less is known about inequality in non-standardized components of the college application. We analyzed extracurricular activity descriptions in 5,967,920 applications submitted through the Common Application platform. Using human-crafted keyword dictionaries combined with text-as-data (natural… more →
The Politics of School Reopening during COVID-19: A Multiple Case Study of Five Urban Districts in the 2020-21 School Year
Purpose: Nearly all schools in the United States closed in spring 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze traditional public and charter school reopenings for the 2020-21 school year in five urban districts. We provide a rich and theoretically grounded description of how and why educational leaders made reopening decisions in each of… more →
The Causal Impact of Charter Schools on Private Tutoring Prevalence
Greater school choice leads to lower demand for private tutoring according to various international studies, but this has not been explicitly tested for the U.S. context. To estimate the causal effect of charter school appearances on neighboring private tutoring prevalence, we employ a comparative event study model combined with a longitudinal matching strategy to accommodate differing… more →
Heterogeneity of item-treatment interactions masks complexity and generalizability in randomized controlled trials
Researchers use test outcomes to evaluate the effectiveness of education interventions across numerous randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Aggregate test data—for example, simple measures like the sum of correct responses—are compared across treatment and control groups to determine whether an intervention has had a positive impact on student achievement. We show that item-level data and… more →
What we teach about race and gender: Representation in images and text of children’s books
Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data and apply them, along with text analysis methods, to measure the representation of skin color, race, gender, and age in award-winning children’s books widely read in homes, classrooms, and… more →
Structured Choice: School Segregation at the Intersection of Policy and Preferences
This paper conceptualizes segregation as a phenomenon that emerges from the intersection of public policy and individual decision-making. Contemporary scholarship on complex decision-making describes a two-step process—1) Editing and 2) Selection— and has emphasized the individual decision-maker’s agency in both steps. We build on this work by exploring, both theoretically and empirically, how… more →
How and Why Do Estimates of US Education Finance Progressivity Change with School-Level Finance Data?
How progressive is school spending when spending is measured at the school-level, instead of the district-level? We use the first dataset on school-level spending across schools throughout the United States to ask to what extent progressivity patterns previously examined across districts are amplified, nullified, or reversed, upon disaggregation to schools. We find that progressivity is… more →
Democracy and the Politicization of Education
Challenging the conventional wisdom that the spread of democracy was a leading driver of the expansion of primary schooling, recent studies show that democratization in fact did not lead to an average increase in primary school enrollment rates. One reason for this null effect is that there was already considerable provision of primary education before democratization. Still, it is possible… more →
Out of Sight, Out of Mind? The Gap between Students’ Test Performance and Teachers’ Estimations in India and Bangladesh
This is one of the first studies of the mismatch between students’ test scores and teachers’ estimations of those scores in low- and middle-income countries. Prior studies in high-income countries have found strong correlations between these metrics. We leverage data on actual and estimated scores in math and language from India and Bangladesh and find that teachers misestimate their students… more →
Funding Shocks and University Behavior: A synthetic control evaluation of Colorado's College Opportunity Fund
Discussion of the rising price of higher education and associated student debt in America has been a key feature of political discourse in recent memory, with renewed interest sparked by the announcement of the student loan forgiveness plan. Federal student debt has increased by 756% since 1995, and total student debt tripled from 2007 to 2022. Concurrently, state support for public… more →
Ahead of the Game? Course-Taking Patterns under a Math Pathways Reform
A controversial, equity-focused mathematics reform in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) featured delaying Algebra I until ninth grade for all students. This descriptive study examines student-level longitudinal data on mathematics course-taking across successive cohorts of SFUSD students who spanned the reform’s implementation. We observe large changes in ninth and tenth grades… more →
In School, Engaged, On-track? The Effect of the Pandemic on Student Attendance, Course Grades, and Grade Retention in North Carolina
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ experiences in school were widespread. Early research show reductions in test scores across grade levels and student groups. This study extends research evidence to additional student outcomes – absences, course grades, and grad retention – and to examine how pandemic effects are distributed across students. Using a combination of descriptive… more →
Could shifting the margin between community college and university enrollment expand and diversify university degree production in STEM fields?
We examine the potential to expand and diversify the production of university STEM degrees by shifting the margin of initial enrollment between community colleges and 4-year universities. Our analysis is based on statewide administrative microdata from the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development covering enrollees in all public postsecondary institutions statewide. We… more →
Forging a path to college persistence: An experimental evaluation of the Detroit Promise Path program
Detroit students who obtain a college degree overcome many obstacles to do so. This paper reports the results of a randomized evaluation of a program meant to provide support to low-income community college students. The Detroit Promise Path (DPP) program was designed to complement an existing College Promise scholarship, providing students with coaching, summer engagement, and financial… more →
Where are the Gifted English Learners and Students with Disabilities?
Prior research has documented substantial inequity across, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines within the population of students identified as gifted. Less attention has paid to the equity of gifted identification for student learning English or those with disabilities and what effect state policies toward gifted education might have on these rates. This paper attempted to fill that void… more →
Online tutoring works: Experimental evidence from a program with vulnerable children
We provide evidence from a randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of a novel, 100-percent online math tutoring program, targeted at secondary school students from highly disadvantaged neighborhoods. The intensive, eight-week-long program was delivered by qualified math teachers in groups of two students during after-school hours. The intervention significantly increased standardized… more →
How Context Shapes the Relationship between School Autonomy and Test-Scores: An Explanatory Analysis using PISA 2015
School autonomy has been and continues to be one of the most important education reform strategies around the world despite ambiguity about its theoretical and empirical effects on students learning. We use international data from PISA to test three country-level factors that might account for inconsistent results in prior literature: (1) the selective implementation of school autonomy based… more →
Comparing the School Readiness Skills of Public Pre-Kindergarten and Head Start Participants: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
A systematic review of the literature (1965–2022) and meta-analysis were undertaken to compare the school readiness skills of children participating in public pre-kindergarten (pre-K) or Head Start. Seven quasi-experimental studies met the inclusion criteria for the meta-analysis and 38 effect sizes were analyzed. Results indicated no reliable meta-analytic effect in relation to children’s… more →
Student Demand For Relative Performance Feedback: Evidence from a Field Experiment
We administer a survey to study students' preferences for relative performance feedback in an introductory economics class. To do so, we elicit students' willingness to pay for/avoid learning their rank on a midterm exam. Our results show that 10% of students are willing to pay to avoid learning their rank. We also find that female students are willing to pay $1 more than male students. We… more →
Uncovering the sources of gender wage gaps among teachers: The role of compensation off the salary schedule
Public teacher compensation is largely determined by fixed salary schedules that were designed to avoid payment inequalities based on demographic characteristics. Yet, recent research shows female teachers earn less than their male peers after controlling for experience, education, and school characteristics. Building on this literature, this paper examines teacher salaries to provide… more →
Educational Consequences of a Sibling’s Disability: Evidence from type 1 diabetes
While there is a growing literature on family health spillovers, questions remain about how sibling disability status impacts educational outcomes. As disability is not randomly assigned this is an empirical challenge. In this paper we use Danish administrative data and variation in the onset of type 1 diabetes to compare education outcomes of focal children with a disabled sibling to outcomes… more →
The Advanced Placement Program and Educational Inequality
The Advanced Placement (AP) program is nearly ubiquitous in American high schools and is often touted as a way to close racial and socioeconomic gaps in educational outcomes. Using administrative data from Michigan, I exploit variation within high schools across time in AP course offerings to identify the causal effect of AP course availability on college choice and degree attainment. I find… more →
Does School Funding Matter In a Pandemic? COVID-19 Instructional Models and School Funding Adequacy
The factors that influenced school districts’ decisions to offer virtual, hybrid, or in-person instruction during the 2020-21 school year—the first full school year after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic—have been the focus of a large body of research in recent years. Some of this research examines the influence of school spending, among other factors; however, these studies do not… more →
Revisiting Ethnic Differences in In-Person Learning During 2021-2022
During the 2020-21 school year, Black and Hispanic students were less likely to attend school in-person than white students. Prior research indicated multiple factors helped explain this gap. In this study, we revise these observed racial gaps in in-person learning to examine whether the relationship between these gaps and explanatory factors observed earlier in the pandemic changed during the… more →