EdWorkingPapers
Dual-Enrollment Dosage Design: Conceptualization and Measurement of Student Profiles and School Structures
Dual-enrollment (“DE”), in which students enroll in college-level courses and receive college credit in high school, has become one of the most prominent strategies for promoting college access and readiness. DE models range from a la carte options or "random acts of dual-enrollment" to highly structured pathways leading to associate degrees embedded in whole-school reform models. However,… more →
Are Work-Based Professional Skills Associated with Postsecondary Entrance and Persistence? Novel Evidence from the Cristo Rey Network
Professional skills such as initiative, communication, and adaptability are thought to shape postsecondary success, but most evidence comes from self- or teacher-reported measures collected in school settings. This study uses employer ratings of students’ professional skills gathered through corporate internships undertaken by economically disadvantaged high school students. After controlling… more →
The Language of Closure: Examining Racial Differences in How A Community Discusses School Closure Metrics
School closures in urban districts disproportionately affect marginalized communities, yet community input often goes unanalyzed or is reduced to simple frequency counts. This study applies BERTopic, a neural topic modeling approach, to analyze 4,159 suggestions from 2,006 community members regarding school closure metrics in a large urban district. Through extensive hyperparameter tuning… more →
Switching Schools: Effects of College Transfers
Using Texas administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, I study how transferring between colleges affects students’ earnings. I leverage applications and admissions data to uncover unpublished GPA cutoffs used for transfer student admissions at each fouryear institution, then use these cutoffs as an instrument for transfer. I do not find positive earnings returns for… more →
Testing frequency and student achievement: A systematic review
School-based testing is widely used for monitoring students’ academic progress. Proponents argue that testing ensures accountability and guides teachers and managers, whereas opponents point to adverse consequences such as teaching to the test, and frequent testing creating anxiety and stress. This review examined the effects of interventions that change how frequently primary and second-ary… more →
Not Too Young to Notice: The Early Emergence of Racial Disparities in Elementary Students’ School Climate Perceptions
Scholarship on school climate often fails to explore the perspectives of elementary-school students. To fill this gap, we use survey-data from Georgia to examine racial disparities in elementary-school students’ school climate perceptions, how they vary over time, and the factors that associate with them. We find that Black and "Other Race" students report worse school climate perceptions than… more →
Who Leaves? How Job and Teacher Characteristics Relate to Turnover in Child Care Settings
Early childhood care and education (ECCE) settings rely on teachers to support children’s development and families’ workforce participation. Yet ECCE teachers turn over at high rates, often twice as often as teachers in K-12 settings. Because large-scale ECCE workforce data are rare, little is known about how job and teacher characteristics relate to turnover. Using data on a large sample (N… more →
Raising the Floor: Teacher Retention Effects of a Statewide Minimum Salary Increase
Attracting and retaining a high-quality teacher workforce is a central challenge for education policy, and higher teacher salaries are often proposed as a solution. The LEARNS Act increased Arkansas's minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000, guaranteed all teachers a minimum raise of $2,000, and provided school districts with the flexibility to deviate from traditional, seniority-based… more →
Exploring Factors Influencing Administrative Spending in Higher Education
Despite increasing financial challenges facing much of higher education, relatively little is known about how institutions allocate resources to different activities, particularly in areas other than instruction. In this research, I used detailed personnel spending data from HelioCampus and less granular functional expenditure data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System to… more →
Examining the Role of Policy Instruments in Supporting Public HBCUs’ College Affordability
This study uses a multiple-case qualitative research design to examine the fiscal policy instruments that members of State Legislative Black Caucuses (SLBC) use to strengthen college affordability and broaden access for undergraduate low-income Black students attending public HBCUs. Guided by the Policy Design Theory, this study analyzes nine semi-structured interviews and eleven legislative… more →
Understanding High Schools’ Effects on Longer-Term Outcomes
Improving education and labor market outcomes for low-income students is critical for advancing socioeconomic mobility in the United States. We use longitudinal data on five cohorts of 9th grade students to explore how Massachusetts public high schools affect the longer-term outcomes of students, with a special focus on students from low-income families. Using detailed administrative and… more →
Scaling student support with conversational artificial intelligence
AI-enabled chatbots are increasingly used to support student success, yet evidence on their long-term sustainability and impacts remains limited. We examine the implementation of an AI-enabled text-messaging chatbot at a large, urban public university. Drawing on system observation, discussions with administrators, and a four-year randomized controlled trial, we assess institutional conditions… more →
Landscape Analysis of the Teaching Profession
The following report represents our attempt both to synthesize the current landscape of the teaching profession in the United States and to identify areas of research, policy, and practice which show promise in strengthening the profession. To guide our development of this landscape analysis, we conducted a robust review of existing research on the state of the teaching profession, as well as… more →
IDEA-Aligned Estimates of Racial Disproportionality in Special Education versus Conventional Approaches: A cautionary note on included-variable bias when achievement and socioeconomic status proxy for special education need
Racial disproportionality in special education is a contested policy space. Federal oversight has traditionally focused on minority over-representation through IDEA’s significant disproportionality framework. However, observational studies report that Black students appear under-identified based on a canonical model that regresses special education receipt on race and controls, notably prior… more →
The Consequences of Cellphone Restrictions in Classrooms
Schools are increasingly restricting cellphones worldwide amid concerns about achievement and mental health, yet causal evidence on school-level bans remains mixed. We examine cellphone restrictions in Chile before the pandemic, where teacher discretion over cellphone use generated classroom-level variation. Using administrative and survey data, we exploit cross-cohort, within-teacher, and… more →
Cheapskin Effects? The Heterogeneous Value of Industry-Recognized Certificates Earned by High School Students
Human capital theory and signaling models posit that educational credentials convey information about workers’ skills, producing discrete labor market returns beyond years of schooling. While extensive evidence documents these “sheepskin effects” for degrees, far less is known about industry-recognized certifications (IRCs) earned in high school. Using statewide administrative data from Texas… more →
Digital Incentives in Surveys: Response Rates and Sociodemographic Effects in a Large-Scale Parental Nudge Intervention
This study examines how digital incentives influence survey participation and engagement in a large randomized controlled trial of parents across six school districts. We test how incentive amount and information about vendor options affect response behavior and explore differences by language background. Incentivized parents were more likely to engage in the program, from starting the survey… more →
Beyond the Shutdown: Tracking Language Growth in Early Head Start Children Before, During, and After COVID-19
Understanding early language outcomes for low-income children in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is an important concern for researchers, policymakers, and educators. We examined language environments and language development among infants and toddlers in Early Head Start from pre-COVID, through the pandemic peak and beyond to 2025. Study children were aged 2-43 months (N = 2,763; 47% girls… more →
From Statistical to Analytic Generalization: New Directions for Qualitative Research on Teacher Retention
Quantitative research has played a prominent role in studies and policies focused on teacher retention. However, the field would benefit from qualitative research that utilizes analytic generalization, an approach where researchers generalize from empirical data by creating theoretical propositions about how, why, and under what conditions certain phenomena occur. This essay distinguishes… more →
Is Teacher Effectiveness Fully Portable? Evidence from the Random Assignment of Transfer Incentives
We examine how performance changes when teachers transfer across very different school contexts. The Talent Transfer Initiative program created a rare natural experiment to study such transfers by randomly assigning low-achieving schools the ability to offer high-performing teachers at higher-achieving schools a $20,000 transfer stipend. Forecast tests show that these high-performing teachers… more →
Understanding How HBCUs Leverage Partnerships to Support Students’ Basic Needs
Basic needs insecurity has become a pressing equity issue in U.S. higher education, yet little research examines how historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) address students’ holistic needs. Guided by a practice-based, pragmatic analytic orientation and informed by a basic needs services implementation rubric and an HBCU-based theoretical model, this qualitative case study… more →
Capturing Voter Turnout at the School District Level: Validating a Geospatial Strategy
School boards are critical sites of education policymaking, yet scholarship on these institutions is scarce because of severe data limitations. We introduce a geospatial strategy and open-source R package, called “Query, Overlay, Recover” (QOR), that generates high-quality estimates of voter turnout in school board elections overall and for voter subgroups. We describe this process and gather… more →
Localized Teacher Recruitment through “Grow-Your-Own”: Impacts of the High School Teacher Academy of Maryland Program
Recruiting teachers via “grow-your-own” (GYO) programs is a popular, yet rarely evaluated, strategy for addressing local workforce shortages and ensuring that incoming teachers resemble, understand, and have strong connections to their communities. We provide novel evidence on the impacts of one such GYO program by exploiting the staggered rollout of the Teacher Academy of Maryland Career… more →
The Causal Effects of Federal Work-Study Offers on College Enrollment and Program Participation
Federal Work-Study (FWS) is a distinctive type of financial aid, originally intended to both reduce financial constraints and improve access to career-relevant job opportunities. Prior research on FWS has primarily focused on post-enrollment, post-program-participation outcomes, leaving potential upstream margins of impact unexplored. Using a unique administrative data source tracking FWS… more →
Disparate Pathways: Understanding Racial Disparities in Teaching
Long standing evidence on the importance of a diverse teacher workforce prompts policymakers to scrutinize existing recruitment pathways. Following Maryland public high-school students over 14 years reveals that early barriers require timely interventions, aiding Black and other students of color in achieving educational milestones that are prerequisites for teacher candidacy (high school… more →
Community College Bachelor's Degrees: How CCB Graduates' Earnings Compare to AAs and BAs
We provide the first national descriptive analysis of the economic value of Community College Baccalaureate (CCB) degrees by examining graduates’ early-career earnings, the costs of completing these programs, and the alignment between field of study and subsequent employment. Using administrative data and controlling for institution and field, we find that CCB graduates earn $4,000 to $9,000… more →
Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India: Evidence from 1.5m Neighborhoods
We study residential segregation and access to public services across 1.5 million urban and rural neighborhoods in India. Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards, and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the U.S. Within cities, public facilities and infrastructure are systematically less available in Muslim and Scheduled Caste neighborhoods.… more →
The Effects of Teacher Strikes On Compensation, Working Conditions, and Productivity
We examine how teacher strikes in the United States affect compensation, working conditions, and productivity with an original dataset of 745 teacher strikes between 2007 and 2024. Using an event study framework, we find that the average strike leads to a 6% ($7,629) increase in combined annual wages and benefits and a 0.5 student (3.2%) decline in pupil-teacher ratios after five years. There… more →
Strategic Decision-Making in Higher Education: State Legislators and Affordability Policy for Public HBCUs
This study uses a multiple-case qualitative research design to explores how power dynamics creates challenges and opportunities for SLBCs and their constituent members working to broaden college affordability and access for undergraduate low-income Black students attending public HBCUs. Guided by the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and the Black Utility Heuristic (BUH), the study analyzed… more →
Classroom Composition Affects Teacher Performance Ratings
Teacher evaluations should reflect teaching performance rather than the characteristics of the students assigned to a teacher. Exploiting naturally occurring year-to-year variation in classroom composition within teachers, this paper examines whether teacher performance ratings assigned by evaluators and students are influenced by classroom context. We find that teachers with higher-achieving… more →
School-based language, math, and reading interventions for executive functions in children and adolescents: A systematic review
Executive functions are a set of cognitive skills and processes used when directing behaviour towards the attainment of a certain goal. A large literature has documented positive associations between executive functions and a variety of desirable outcomes throughout life, including academic achievement. However, training executive functions appears to have limited effects on academic… more →
Making the Implicit Explicit: An Experiment with Implicit Gender Stereotypes and College Major Choice
We study whether making college students aware of their implicit gender–STEM stereotypes affects their pursuit of a STEM degree. In a field experiment at a large, selective U.S. university, over 800 undergraduates completed a gender–STEM Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a detailed survey on major preferences and beliefs. Students were randomly assigned to receive feedback about their IAT… more →
Why Fadeout is (Probably) Worse Than We Think: Adjusting for Correlated Sampling Error in Meta-Analyses of Behavioral Interventions
The extent to which intervention effects persist or fade over time is an important question in the behavioral sciences. In meta-analysis, persistence is typically assessed by meta-regressing effect sizes at followup on effect sizes at endline. While common, the standard meta-regression does not adjust for the shared sampling error between effect sizes across time points. We show that in… more →
College Enrollment Patterns After SFFA v. Harvard
We study how U.S. high school students’ patterns of college entry changed in the first year after the Supreme Court’s 2023 SFFA v. Harvard ruling. Drawing on a rich dataset linking more than 12 million domestic PSAT, SAT, and AP takers in the 2021-2024 high school graduation cohorts to their college enrollment records, we examine post-SFFA changes both in students’ college destinations and in… more →
U.S. Schools’ Proximity to Environmental Hazard Sites: A National Analysis
We conduct a nationwide assessment of U.S. PreK-12 public and private schools’ proximity to known environmental hazard sites tracked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Superfund sites, Brownfields, and Toxics Release Inventory facilities. Prior research documents a range of negative health and academic consequences for youth exposed to pollution and legacy contaminants released by… more →
Who Is Newly Absent? Racial Inequities in Post-Pandemic Transitions into Chronic and Severe Absence in Georgia
Chronic absenteeism rose sharply following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and has declined only modestly since, yet most evidence remains cross-sectional and cannot distinguish persistence from redistribution in absence behavior. Using a cohort transition framework, the analysis compares students' typical absence profiles across pre-pandemic and post-pandemic periods. The results show… more →
What are schools doing to improve attendance? Evidence from Michigan and Georgia
This study presents evidence from Michigan and Georgia on the strategies that schools are using to improve attendance and how those strategies vary across contexts. We find that schools in both states rely heavily on communication-based practices aimed at changing student or parent behavior. Practices focused on removing barriers or improving student experiences in school are less common. We… more →
The lasting impact of youth bullying exposure on adult labor market outcomes: An inter-disciplinary review of the literature
Higher direct and indirect exposure to bullying has been linked to long-term increases in healthcare costs, worse mental health, and poorer social relationships as well as a reduction in human capital accumulation and economic productivity. Consequently, preventing and mitigating the long-lasting negative effects of bullying has become a worldwide challenge for school and health policies. This… more →
Leveraging Large Language Models to Assess Short Text Responses
Educational practitioners and researchers often score short, unstructured text for the presence or strength of domain-specific constructs. Manual scoring, however, faces limitations, including time- and labor-intensiveness. Large language models (LLMs) offer an automated alternative to manual scoring, yet questions remain regarding LLM implementation and performance when scoring text requires… more →
Transitioning Teacher Talent: An Ethnoracial Descriptive Portrait of the Paraprofessional-to-Teacher Pipeline in New York City Public Schools
Districts nationwide seek to diversify the educator workforce, yet pathways for paraprofessionals—typically more ethnoracially and linguistically diverse than the general teacher pipeline—remain understudied. Using administrative data from New York City Public Schools (NYCPS), this study examines paraprofessionals’ demographics and factors predicting their transition to teaching or exit from… more →
The Economics of Age at School Entry: Insights from Evidence and Methods
This article reviews the growing literature on age at school entry and its effects across the life course. Age at school entry affects a broad range of outcomes, including education, labor-market performance, health, social relationships, and family formation. We synthesize the evidence using a conceptual framework that distinguishes four empirically intertwined components of age-at-school-… more →
School-Based Disability Identification Varies by Student Family Income
Currently, 18 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive additional supports through the identification of a disability. Socioeconomic status is viewed as central to understanding who gets identified as having a disability, yet limited large-scale evidence examines how disability identification varies for students from different income backgrounds. Using unique data linking… more →
Remote Learning in 2020-21 and Student Attendance Since the COVID-19 Pandemic
Student attendance declined during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains lower than pre-pandemic levels. This study examines the role of remote learning in these post-pandemic declines in student attendance. I find that remote learning in 2020-21 led to persistent declines in post-pandemic attendance, with generally larger negative effects for students exposed to longer periods of remote learning… more →
Gifted Identification Across the Distribution of Family Income
Currently, 6.1 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive gifted education. Using education and IRS data that provide information on students and their family income, we show pronounced differences in who schools identify as gifted across the distribution of family income. Under 4 percent of students in the lowest income percentile are identified as gifted, compared with 20 percent… more →
The Effect of Air Pollution on Student Achievement: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence
Air pollution is one of the most pressing global public health challenges of the 21st century. This article presents a systematic review and meta-analysis of the best available evidence of the effect of air pollution on student achievement. A meta-analysis of 28 causal studies around the world yielding 62 effect sizes estimates that air pollution, across many contexts and pollutants, decreases… more →
A Longitudinal Study of External Contract Teacher Employment in Washington State School Districts
This study examines the phenomenon of external teacher contracting in Washington State schools. Using administrative data, we analyze shifting patterns of employment among external contract teachers. External contract teachers now represent a significant portion of the workforce in a few districts, but a very small portion statewide. These districts have formed robust online programs that may… more →
The Chronic(les) of Absenteeism Measurement: Unpacking the Many Measures of Attendance and Evidence for a Lower Chronic Absenteeism Threshold
Chronic absenteeism has surged in recent years, drawing growing policy and research attention. However, a complicating factor often overlooked is that the measurement of absenteeism is inconsistent, with substantial researcher degrees of freedom. This study investigates how researchers’ measurement choices shape predictions of academic risk and how absenteeism can be more effectively… more →
The Trade-off between Quality and Quantity: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Tutoring
High-dosage tutoring has the potential to substantially raise adolescent academic achievement. However, at scale, schools may not have the financial ability to deliver small-group tutoring frequently. In this paper, I test the relative importance of group size (quality) versus tutoring frequency (quantity). I evaluate the impact of an in-school math tutoring program in a middle school in the… more →
The Nation’s Achievement Inequality Report Card: An Assessment of Test Score and Equality Trends in Traditional Public, Charter, Catholic, and Department of Defense Schools
We present a descriptive comparison of trends in achievement and inequality in traditional public, public charter, Catholic, and Department of Defense schools in the U.S. Our sample includes 6,155,570 observations for 4th and 8th graders in math and reading between 2005 and 2024. We focus on changes in the 90th and 10th percentile scores of the students in those school sectors on the National… more →
COVID-19, School District Operations, and Student Academic Performance in Virginia
We use longitudinal student-level data and interrupted time series methods to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mathematics achievement among 3rd-8th grade students in Virginia, a state that offered particularly low levels of access to in-person learning in the school reopening period. We find notably large negative initial effects on math in 2020-21, much greater in magnitude… more →