American University
Improvements in Using Distance to Predict College Enrollment
Geographic proximity to college is a widely used instrument for estimating returns to postsecondary education. Most applications rely on geodesic ("crow-flies") distance, which is easy to calculate but a poor proxy for actual travel costs when terrain, water, or congestion intervene. We show… more →
The Effect of Retention Threat on Student Learning Gains: Evidence from Ohio
Grade retention policies create incentives for students to make adequate progress ahead of evaluation. The threat of retention thus has the potential to affect all students’ academic outcomes, increasing achievement especially among students with test scores near the retention policy’s threshold… more →
The Causal Effect of Student Absences Post Pandemic: Evidence from Three School Systems
Researchers, educators, and policymakers have long worried about the consequences of student absences for educational achievement and attainment—concerns that have grown with the significant rise in absenteeism during and following the Covid-19 pandemic. Using administrative data from Maryland,… 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.
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… more →
The Effects of Daily Air Pollution on Students and Teachers
Recent empirical research shows that air pollution harms student test scores and attendance and increases office discipline referrals. However, the mechanism by which air pollution operates within schools to negatively affect student and teacher outcomes remains largely opaque. The existing… more →
On-the-Job Learning: How Peers and Experience Drive Productivity among Teachers
Workers learn on the job from both repetition and peers. Less understood is how specific types of experience and peer characteristics affect on-the-job learning. This likely differs by context (e.g., occupation, tasks, or roles). Absent such knowledge, it is unclear how to optimally… more →
How Teachers Learn Racial Competency: The Role of Peers and Contexts
This paper investigates how teachers learn about race in the school context, with a particular focus on teachers’ development of racial competency. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews we find that teachers learn through three sources: from their peers, from years of experience, and from… more →
Spillover Effects of Black Teachers on White Teachers’ Racial Competency: Mixed Methods Evidence from North Carolina
The US teaching force remains disproportionately white while the student body grows more diverse. It is therefore important to understand how and under what conditions white teachers learn racial competency. This study applies a mixed-methods approach to investigate the hypothesis that Black… more →
Who refers whom? The effects of teacher characteristics on disciplinary office referrals
Teachers affect a wide range of students’ educational and social outcomes, but how they contribute to students’ involvement in school discipline is less understood. We estimate the impact of teacher demographics and other observed qualifications on students’ likelihood of receiving a… more →
Making the Grade: The Effect of Teacher Grading Standards on Student Outcomes
Teachers are among the most important inputs in the education production function. One mechanism by which teachers might affect student learning is through the grading standards they set for their classrooms. However, the effects of grading standards on student outcomes are relatively… more →
Blurred Boundaries: A Day in the Life of a Teacher
The burnout, stress, and work-life balance challenges faced by teachers have received renewed interest due to the myriad disruptions and changes to K-12 schooling brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, even prior to the pandemic relatively little was known about teachers’ time use… more →
From Referrals to Suspensions: New Evidence on Racial Disparities in Exclusionary Discipline
We use novel data on disciplinary referrals, including those that do not lead to suspensions, to better understand the origins of racial disparities in exclusionary discipline. We find significant differences between Black and white students in both referral rates and the rate at which referrals… more →
Public Higher Education Costs and College Enrollment
How have changes in the costs of enrolling for full-time study at public 2-year and 4-year colleges have affected the decisions about whether and where to enroll in college? We exploit local differences in the growth of tuition at community colleges and public 4-year colleges to study the impact… more →
The Short- and Long-Run Impacts of Secondary School Absences
We provide novel evidence on the causal impacts of student absences in middle and high school on state test scores, course grades, and educational attainment using a rich administrative dataset that tracks the date and class period of each absence. We use two similar but distinct identification… more →
Charter Schools and the Segregation of Students by Income
The segregation of students by socioeconomic status has been on the rise in American public education between schools during the past several decades. Recent work has demonstrated that segregation is also increasing within schools at the classroom level. In this paper, we contribute to our… more →
Identifying and Producing Effective Teachers
Teachers are among the most important school-provided determinants of student success. Effective teachers improve students’ test scores as well as their attendance, behavior, and earnings as adults. However, students do not enjoy equal access to effective teachers. This article reviews some of… more →
The Segregation of Students by Income in Public Schools
Over the past three decades, children from low-income families and those from more affluent families have increasingly been attending different public schools. While recent work has helped us understand patterns of income segregation between districts and schools within districts, we know very… more →
Stress Test: Examining the Evolution of Teachers’ Mental Health Over Time
Teaching is often assumed to be a relatively stressful occupation and occupational stress among teachers has been linked to poor mental health, attrition from the profession, and decreased effectiveness in the classroom. Despite widespread concern about teachers’ mental health, however, little… more →
The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers
We examine the long-run impacts of having a same-race teacher. First, we leverage data from the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment to show that black students randomly assigned to a black teacher in grades K-3 are 5 percentage points (7%) more likely to graduate from high school and 4… more →