Brown University
Navigating Conflicting Pressures: How Districts Spend Federal COVID-19 Relief Funds
Federal COVID-19 relief funds provided a large increase in school district revenue, with fewer requirements than usual. Districts received widespread criticism, based on little systematic evidence, for spending federal funds slowly or ineffectively. Institutional theories predict a common… more →
A National Measure of School District Partisanship for the 2016 to 2024 Presidential Elections
Scholars increasingly interested in the governance of local school districts, which invites curiosity about the partisanship of their voting constituencies. Presently, researchers have to translate precinct-level or county-level votes to school district geographies using imprecise imputation… more →
Staffing, Retention, and Expenditures in the Four-Day School Week
School districts across the United States are increasingly adopting the four-day school week, often in the hope of addressing teacher staffing challenges. We examine the effects of the four-day week on non-teacher staffing and recruitment, and schoolwide expenditures in Missouri, where three in… more →
Can Early Exposure to the Teaching Profession Increase Teacher Supply and Diversity? New Evidence on the Teacher Pipeline
We examine whether early exposure to the teaching career has the potential to expand the size and diversity of new teacher supply. Exploiting the staggered expansion of high school education courses across Texas, we find little evidence that these courses increased new teacher supply or… more →
Immigration Enforcement Actions and Empty Desks: Persistent and Acute Attendance Effects
How do changes in immigration policy affect student attendance? We use student-by-day administrative records from a mid-sized school district to estimate the causal effect of heightened federal immigration enforcement following the January 2025 presidential inauguration on student attendance… more →
"How You Spend Your Money is Your Strategy": Education Spending and the Academic Achievement of Students with and without Disabilities in Virginia, 2018-2025
Virginia experienced a boost in federal and state education funding from 2020-2025 and launched the Virginia Literacy Act in 2023. These policy events prompted our study of the impact of education spending by school divisions on growth in academic pass rates in reading and mathematics for… more →
An Untappable Pipeline? Examining Why Many Educators with Administrative Licenses Do Not Pursue School Leadership
States' licensure requirements typically mean that new school principals and assistant principals must come from the pool of educators holding an administrative license. Yet if many license- holders are uninterested in leadership positions, even districts with large numbers of licensed educators… more →
Equity in context: Institutional agency in targeting student supports in Massachusetts community colleges
How do related, but independent community colleges operationalize and implement an equity-oriented initiative? In 2021, Massachusetts established the SUCCESS initiative to provide non-financial student supports in all 15 of the state’s public community colleges. This paper draws on 35 interviews… more →
The Role of Career Advising in High School in Shaping the Aspirations of First-Generation Students
College aspirations often form by 8th grade, yet first-generation students—those whose parents lack post-secondary education—miss out on resources continuing-generation peers use to make informed decisions about their futures. School-based career advising can help fill this gap. Using 2018 PISA… more →
Do Faculty Affect Student Partisanship?
We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We then use student transcripts from one flagship to estimate… more →
Sustaining AI-Enabled Student Support: A Four-Year Implementation and Impact Study
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… more →
Examining the Relationship Between Randomization Strategies and Contamination in Higher Education Interventions
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the reference method for causal inference. To conduct field experiments in educational settings, study design must balance statistical power with the risk of treatment-control contamination. This study investigates both crossover and spillover… more →
Let’s Chat: Leveraging Chatbot Outreach for Improved Course Performance
This study provides pre-registered, experimental evidence on the use of non-generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to support students in large-enrollment undergraduate courses. We find the chatbot messaging increased students’ final grades and engagement with academic supports, such… more →
The Effect of School-Based Health Centers on Adolescent Mental Health and Behavior
Adolescent mental health has experienced significant declines in the past decade, yet take-up of mental health services has remained low among adolescents. This paper examines whether localized access to mental health services has meaningful impacts on adolescent mental health and behavior. I… more →
The Politics of Administrative Ease: Public Access to Local Special Education Information
What political and administrative resources contribute to the realization of rights in the United States? We examine this puzzle in the context of rights to education for students with disabilities by measuring the administrative ease of accessing local special education information: the extent to… more →
A Degree of Choice: Educational Decision-Making after College
Despite the growing share of college-educated adults returning to higher education, we know little about how individuals weigh the consequential decision to go to graduate school. In this paper, we ask how individuals decide to pursue a particular graduate program within a field of study. We… 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… 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… 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… 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… more →