EdWorkingPapers
High School Career and Technical Education Finance: Impact of State-Level Policy Changes
States are increasingly adopting changes to K-12 funding systems in order to promote and encourage student engagement in secondary-level career and technical education (CTE). Two of the most prevalent reforms include: a) establishing tiered weights for CTE in school funding formulas based on the connection between a program of study and workforce needs and b) incentive grant programs that… more →
Does Course Structure Increase STEM Employment for Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Technology Training Programs? Evidence from LaunchCode
We examine three coding bootcamps offered by LaunchCode (LC101, Women+, and CodeCamp) to understand if tailored structures within coding bootcamp programs—designed for underrepresented groups in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)—lead to increased program persistence for women, underrepresented minorities, and low-income individuals. We also examine if these tailored structures… more →
Leading Indicators of Long-Term Success in Community Schools: Evidence from New York City
Community schools offer supports such as health and social services, extended school days, and family education, to improve the performance of students whose learning may be disrupted by challenges related to poverty. In 2015, the New York City Community Schools Initiative was implemented in conjunction with the NYC Renewal Schools program to turnaround the city’s lowest performing schools.… more →
Distance to Opportunity: Higher Education Deserts and College Enrollment Choices
We study how geographic access to public postsecondary institutions is associated with students’ college enrollment decisions across race and socioeconomic status. Leveraging rich administrative data, we first document substantial differences in students’ local college options, with White, Hispanic, and rural students having, on average, many fewer nearby options than their Black, Asian,… more →
Teacher Effectiveness in Remote Instruction
The effect of remote learning on student performance has been a frequent topic of research and discussion in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet little is known about the impact of remote instruction on the performance of teachers. This study documents how relative effectiveness of teachers changed when moving from in-person to remote instruction and analyzes the characteristics of… more →
Using Meta-Analytic Data to Examine Fadeout and Persistence of Intervention Impacts on Constrained and Unconstrained Skills
Recent reviews of the educational intervention literature have noted patterns of intervention impact fadeout on cognitive skills, whereby skill trajectories between children in the intervention and control group converge in the years following the end of the intervention. Some early childhood education (ECE) researchers have suggested that skill type, specifically whether a skill is “… more →
What Impacts Should We Expect from Tutoring at Scale? Exploring Meta-Analytic Generalizability
U.S. public schools are engaged in an unprecedented effort to expand tutoring in the wake of the pandemic. Broad-based support for scaling tutoring emerged, in part, because of the large effects on student achievement found in prior meta-analyses. We conduct an expanded meta-analysis of 282 randomized control trials and explore how estimates change when we better align our sample with a policy… more →
Differential Responses to Teacher Evaluation Incentives: Expectancy, Race, Experience, and Task
Teacher evaluation systems and their associated incentives have produced fairly mixed results. Our analyses are motivated by theory and descriptive evidence that accountability systems are highly racialized, and that individuals are less likely to respond to incentives when they have low expectations of success (and vice versa). Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that Black… more →
The Long-Run Impacts of Universal Pre-K with Equilibrium Considerations
Since 1995, publicly funded pre-K with universal eligibility has proliferated across the U.S. Universal pre-K (UPK) operates at great scale and serves children with a wide range of alternative childcare options. Because these programs are relatively young, very little is known about their long-run impacts on children. In this paper, I use a difference-in-differences (DiD) design to estimate… more →
The Role of Comprehensive Student Support Interventions during School Turnaround
The persistence of underperformance in schools within large urban districts remains a significant challenge in the U.S. K-12 education system. Education policymakers have enacted legislation aiming at improving these schools through ``turnaround'' initiatives. However, students attending underperforming schools face multifaceted challenges that extend beyond the classroom. Therefore,… more →
I know my rights? Iowa Senate File 496, book bans, and the First and Fourteenth Amendments
This instrumental case study explores 31 Iowan educators’ and board of education members’ perceptions of the ways the state’s book ban law, Senate File 496 influenced school information systems. Mathisen’s (2015) informational justice conceptual framework guided data analysis. The three key findings of this study were Senate File 496 was imprudently discriminatory in implementation,… more →
Are Preschool Programs Becoming Less Effective?
High-quality preschool programs are heralded as an effective policy tool to promote the development and life-long wellbeing of children from low-income families. Yet evaluations of recent preschool programs produce puzzling findings, including negative impacts, and divergent, weaker results than were shown in demonstration programs implemented in the 1960s and 70s. We provide potential… more →
Expanding School Counseling: The Impacts of California Funding Changes
Counselors are a common school resource for students navigating complicated and consequential education choices. However, most students have limited access to school counselors. We study one of the largest U.S. policies to increase access to school counselors - California's Supplemental School Counseling Program. The program increased the average number of counselors per high school by 0.7 and… more →
Do Pensions Enhance Worker Effort and Selection? Evidence from Public Schools
Why do employers offer pensions? We empirically explore two theoretical rationales, namely that pensions may improve worker effort and worker selection. We examine these hypotheses using administrative measures on effort and output in public schools around the pension-eligibility notch. When workers cross the notch their effective compensation falls significantly, but we… more →
Are Community College Students Increasingly Choosing High-Paying Fields of Study? Evidence from Massachusetts
The labor-market payoff to workers with associate degrees in healthcare and STEM occupations is very high in Massachusetts. We examine whether this induced a growing proportion of students in MA community colleges (MACCs) to earn an associate degree (AD) in one of these fields. We do this by using multinomial logit analysis to compare trends across 12 cohorts of MACC entrants in the proportion… more →
The Long-Term Effect of North Carolina’s Pre-Kindergarten Program is Larger in School Districts with Lower Rates of Growth in Academic Achievement
Prior research has found that public investments in North Carolina’s pre-kindergarten program—NC Pre-K—generated positive effects on student reading and math achievement through eighth grade (Bai et al., 2020). This study examined whether the effect of NC Pre-K funding exposure is moderated by the educational environments children subsequently experience during elementary and middle school.… more →
The Returns to Education over time and the Effect of COVID-19
This paper examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the returns to education in the United States. Using data from the Current Population Survey 2011-2022, the analysis reveals that, after a period of decline, returns to education increased significantly because of COVID, particularly for men and those with university education. The returns to university for men increased by 1… more →
Same Idea, Shifting Standards: An Experimental Study of Racial-Ethnic Biases in Ambitious Math Teaching
Teacher expectations and judgments about student capabilities are predictive of student achievement, yet such judgments may be influenced by salient dimensions of student identity and invite biases. Moreover, ambitious math teaching may also invite teacher biases due to the emphasis on student-generated inputs and ideas. In this pre-registered audit experiment, we investigate teacher biases in… more →
What’s the Goal Here? Educator’s Perspectives of Iowa’s Senate File 496 on School Mental Health Systems
Iowa's Senate File 496 requires parent permission to formally survey students about their mental health, bans the discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in schools before 7th grade, mandates schools obtain parental permission to use a nick name, and bans any books that depict or describe sex acts in schools. This exploratory case study explores educators’ (n = 20) perceptions of… more →
Overpoliced? A Descriptive Portrait of School-Based Targeted Police Interventions in New York City
This study provides a descriptive analysis of police intervention as a response to student behavior in New York City public schools. We find that between the 2016/17 and 2021/22 academic years, arrests and juvenile referrals decreased while non-detainment-based and psychiatric police interventions increased. However, Black students, especially those enrolled in schools located in predominantly… more →
Tutor CoPilot: A Human-AI Approach for Scaling Real-Time Expertise
Generative AI, particularly Language Models (LMs), has the potential to transform real-world domains with societal impact, particularly where access to experts is limited. For example, in education, training novice educators with expert guidance is important for effectiveness but expensive, creating significant barriers to improving education quality at scale. This challenge disproportionately… more →
Distance to Degrees: How College Proximity Shapes Students’ Enrollment Choices and Attainment Across Race-Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Status
Leveraging rich data on the universe of Texas high school graduates, we estimate how the relationship between geographic access to public two- and four-year postsecondary institutions and postsecondary outcomes varies across race-ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We find that students are sensitive to the distance they must travel to access public colleges and universities, but there are… more →
Accelerating Opportunity: The Effects of Instructionally Supported Detracking
The pivotal role of Algebra in the educational trajectories of U.S. students continues to motivate controversial, high-profile policies focused on when students access the course, their classroom peers, and how the course is taught. This random-assignment partnership study examines an innovative district-level reform—the Algebra I Initiative—that placed 9th-grade students with prior math… more →
The Reform Logics of Teaching: How Institutionalized Conceptions of Teaching Shape Teacher Professional Identity
Teachers’ professional identities are the foundation of their practice. Previous scholarship has largely overlooked the extent to which the broader institutional environment shapes teachers’ professional identities. In this study, I bridge institutional logics with theory on teacher professional identity to empirically examine the deeply institutionalized, taken-for-granted ways American… more →
The Politics of Teachers' Union Endorsements
School board candidates supported by local teachers' unions overwhelmingly win and we examine the causes and consequences of the "teachers' union premium" in these elections. First, we show that union endorsement information increases voter support. Although the magnitude of this effect varies across ideological and partisan subgroups, an endorsement never hurts a candidate's prospects among… more →
Unpacking the Impacts of a Youth Behavioral Health Intervention: Experimental Evidence from Chicago
Racial disparities in violence exposure and criminal justice contact are a subject of growing policy and public concern. We conduct a large-scale, randomized controlled trial of a six-month behavioral health intervention combining intensive mentoring and group therapy designed to reduce criminal justice and violence involvement among Black and Latinx youth in Chicago. Over 24 months, youth… more →
Credit Loss, Institutional Retention, and Postsecondary Persistence Among Vertical Transfer Students
Although community colleges have served as a gateway to universities for millions of students—disproportionately so for students from populations historically underrepresented in higher education—prior research has demonstrated that the majority of vertical transfer students lose at least some of their pretransfer credits. However, researchers examining how credit loss relates to subsequent… more →
Falling Behind as Peers Age Up: The Effects of Peer Age on Student Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Outcomes
Understanding the factors that influence student outcomes is crucial for both parents and schools when designing effective educational strategies. This paper explores the impact of peer age on both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes using a randomized sample of middle school students. By analyzing how exogenous variations in peer age affect students' academic performance, self-expectations… more →
Toward a Comprehensive Model Predicting Credit Loss in Vertical Transfer
A growing body of research has documented extensive credit loss among transfer students. However, the field lacks theoretically driven and empirically supported frameworks that can guide credit loss research and reforms. We develop and then test a comprehensive framework designed to address this gap using novel administrative credit loss data from Texas. Our results demonstrate how the… more →
Applying to Lead: A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Prospective Principals’ Job Application Strategies in Two Urban Districts
Purpose: Urban school districts often face challenges in filling principal vacancies with effective leaders, especially in high-needs schools. Prospective principals’ engagement with the job application process may contribute to these challenges. The goal of this study is to better understand the job search strategies and behaviors of prospective principals and how their… more →
Does Charter School Autonomy Improve Matching of Teacher Attributes with Student Needs?
We examine the efficiency of traditional school districts versus charter schools in providing students with teachers who meet their demographic and education needs. Using panel data from the state of Michigan, we estimate the relationship between enrollment of Black, Hispanic, special education, and English learner students and the presence of Black, Hispanic, Special Education, and ESL… more →
Local Labor Market Alignment of Short-Term Certificate Programs
Short-term certificate (STC) programs at community colleges represent a longstanding policy priority to align accelerated postsecondary credentials with job opportunities in local labor markets. Despite large investments in developing STCs, little evidence exists about where and when STCs are opened and whether community colleges open new programs of study in coordination with labor market… more →
Framing the pandemic: Tracking educational problem formulation, Spring 2020-Fall 2021
We use data from the applications North Carolina public school districts and charter schools submitted for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) to investigate the sense that educational leaders made of the pandemic as it unfolded. LEAs understood the pandemic as a multifaceted problem. Nearly all applications addressed four problems: (1) public health, (2) academics and… more →
Human Capital at Home: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in the Philippines
Children spend most of their time at home in their early years, yet efforts to promote human capital at home in many low- and middle-income settings remain limited. We conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate an intervention which encourages parents and caregivers to foster human capital accumulation among their children between ages 3 and 5, with a focus on math and phonics skills.… more →
Understanding the Association Between Educational Experiences and Economic and Social Mobility: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997
Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, we examine differences in educational experiences and in social and economic mobility for youths experiencing poverty relative to their more affluent peers. We also explore the extent to which different educational experiences are associated with greater mobility for students experiencing poverty. We find that youths from poverty… more →
How and Why Racial Isolation Affects Education Costs & the Provision of Equal Educational Opportunity
This article provides a review of prior empirical work exploring whether and to what extent school district racial composition affects the costs associated with providing equal educational opportunity to achieve a common set of outcomes. This prior work mainly involves education cost function modeling, on several specific states and in an earlier version of our national education cost model.… more →
School and Crime
Criminal activity is seasonal, peaking in the summer and declining through the winter. We provide the first evidence that arrests of children and reported crimes involving children follow a different pattern: peaking during the school year and declining in the summer. We use a regression discontinuity design surrounding school start dates and an excess crime calculation to show that the school… more →
Using Gaussian Process Regression in Two-Dimensional Regression Discontinuity Designs
Sometimes a treatment, such as receiving a high school diploma, is assigned to students if their scores on two inputs (e.g., math and English test scores) are above established cutoffs. This forms a multidimensional regression discontinuity design (RDD) to analyze the effect of the educational treatment where there are two running variables instead of one. Present methods for estimating such… more →
Classifying Courses at Scale: a Text as Data Approach to Characterizing Student Course-Taking Trends with Administrative Transcripts
Students’ postsecondary course-taking is of interest to researchers, yet has been difficult to study at large scale because administrative transcript data are rarely standardized across institutions or state systems. This paper uses machine learning and natural language processing to standardize college transcripts at scale. We demonstrate the approach’s utility by showing how the disciplinary… more →
Do the Effects Persist? An Examination of Long-term Effects After Students Leave Turnaround Schools
Whole-school reforms have received widespread attention, but a critical limitation of the current literature is the lack of evidence around whether these extensive and costly interventions improve students’ long-term outcomes after they leave reform schools. Leveraging Tennessee’s statewide turnaround reforms, we use difference-in-differences models to estimate the effect of attending a… more →
Foreign Student Share and Supply of STEM-Designated Economics Programs
Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in the number of U.S. institutions offering STEM-eligible degree programs in economics. This paper documents the trends in STEM-degree offerings across degree levels and examines the share of foreign students and other characteristics of institutions that offer STEM-eligible programs. Using a difference-in-differences design, this… more →
Career Sequences and Unequal Sorting of Subject Area Teachers along the Path to the Principalship
The path to becoming a school principal is characterized by a variety of trajectories that reflect the diverse experiences and backgrounds of aspiring leaders. While ideally the road to the principalship would result in a proportional and representative body of principals, research has shown this is rarely the case. To gain a better understanding of where sorting mechanisms may occur along the… more →
Changes in Kindergarten Redshirting During the COVID-19 Pandemic
This study examined the impact of COVID-19 on academic "redshirting" in kindergarten, the practice of holding a child back for a year and enrolling them in kindergarten at age 6, using student-level data on all Delaware kindergarten students from fall 2014 through fall 2022. The rate of redshirting declined by 40% in fall 2020, then increased by 44% (relative to pre-pandemic baseline) in fall… more →
Teaching Teachers to Use Computer Assisted Learning Effectively: Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Evidence
Mastery learning – the process by which students must demonstrate proficiency with a single topic before moving on – is well recognized as one of the best ways to learn, yet many teachers struggle or remain unsure about how to implement it into a classroom setting. This study leverages two field experiments to test the efficacy of a program designed to encourage greater mastery learning… more →
Disability as Discipline? Effects of the New York City Suspension Ban on Identification of Students with Disabilities
Across the United States, suspension bans have become a popular policy response to address excessive and inequitable use of suspension in schools. However, there is little research that examines what strategies school staff employ when suspension is no longer permitted. I examine the effect of New York City’s suspension ban on the use of a potential unintended substitute for suspension: special… more →
Diversity Trends Among Faculty in STEM and non-STEM Fields at Selective Public Universities in the U.S. from 2016 to 2023
During the 2015-16 academic year, racial protests swept across college campuses in the U.S. These protests were followed by large university investments in initiatives to promote diversity, which combined with existing diversity dynamics, have helped to shape recent faculty diversity trends. We document diversity trends among faculty in STEM and non-STEM fields since the protests in 2015-16.… more →
Computational Language Analysis Reveals that Process-Oriented Thinking About Belonging Aids the College Transition
Inequality in college has both structural and psychological causes; these include the presence of self-defeating beliefs about the potential for growth and belonging. Such beliefs can be addressed through large-scale interventions in the college transition (Walton & Cohen, 2011; Walton et al., 2023) but are hard to measure. In our pre-registered study, we provide the strongest evidence to… more →
Less is More: The Causal Effect of Four-Day School Weeks on Employee Turnover
The use of four-day school weeks (4dsw) in the United States has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. Previous work examines the impact of 4dsw on student outcomes, but little research to date examines the effect on school employees even though schools in some locales have adopted 4dsw to recruit and retain staff. This paper examines the effect of 4dsw adoption in Oregon, a state with… more →
Suspended from Work and School? Impacts of Layoff Events and Unemployment Insurance on Student Disciplinary Incidence
We examine the impact of local labor market shocks and state unemployment insurance (UI) policies on student discipline in U.S. public schools. Analyzing school-level discipline data and firm-level layoffs in 23 states, we find that layoffs have little effect on discipline rates on average. However, effects differ across the UI benefit distribution. At the lowest benefit level ($265/week), a mass… more →
Untapped Potential? Understanding the Paraeducator-to-Teacher Pipeline and its Potential for Diversifying the Teacher Workforce
Paraeducators are among the largest categories of public education employees and are increasingly seen as a pool of potential teachers. However, little is known about paraeducator-to-teacher transitions. Using statewide administrative data, we show that while paraeducators may be more racially/ethnically diverse than the teacher workforce, Black and Hispanic paraeducators are less likely than… more →