Northwestern University
The Labor Market Value of Community College Bachelor’s Degrees: Initial Evidence from a Resume Audit Study in Early Childhood Education
Community colleges are more financially, academically, and geographically accessible than four-year colleges. Despite most community college students intending to earn a bachelor’s degree, few transfer to a four-year institution and even fewer earn bachelor’s degrees, leading policymakers to… more →
Towards a Developmental Model of Democratic Family Rights Policy Regimes: Tracing Federal Literacy Policy, 1968-1990
By excavating submerged dynamics underlying literacy accountability policy, this historical case study conceptualizes its institutional logic and political drivers. Bridging and extending theorization in American political development and racial political behavior, I contribute an original… 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… more →
The impact of increasing school resources on peer victimization: Evidence from targeted funding on low-income families in Chile
While a large body of literature has examined the impact of school spending on academic outcomes, far less is known about its effect on students’ socioemotional development and school experiences. This study contributes to narrowing this gap by evaluating the impact of a nationwide school… 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… more →
Neighbors' Spillovers on High School Choice
Do residential neighbors affect each others' schooling choices? We exploit oversubscription lotteries in Chile's centralized school admission system to identify the effect of close neighbors on application and enrollment decisions. A student is 5-7% more likely to rank a high school as their… more →
Racialized Reactivity: How Metrics-Formation Contributed to a Racialized Organizational Order in Medical Education
A common point of contention across education policy debates is whether and how facially race-neutral metrics of quality produce or maintain racialized inequities. Medical education is a useful site for interrogating this relationship, as many scholars point to the 1910, Carnegie-funded Flexner… more →
The Ups and Downs of Classroom Quality Over the Preschool Year and Relations to Children’s School Readiness
Despite considerable evidence on the links between average classroom quality and children’s learning, the importance of variation in quality is not well understood. We examined whether three measures of variation in observed classroom quality over the school year – overall variation in quality,… more →
Investigating the “Draw of Home” and Teachers’ Career Decisions
Research shows that teachers seek out jobs close to home, but previous studies have been unable to test whether proximity to home is related to retention in the teaching profession. We leverage a unique dataset from Teach For America (TFA) linking individuals’ preferred teaching locations,… more →
When Does School Autonomy Improve Student Outcomes?
This paper presents new evidence on the benefits of decentralization in public education, focusing on a Chicago policy that granted school principals more control over budgeting and operations. Meta-analysis of similar policies shows a small average effect with significant… more →
Who Benefits From Attending Effective Schools?
We estimate the longer-run effects of attending an effective high school (one that improves a combination of test scores, survey measures of socio-emotional development, and behaviors in 9th grade) for students who are more versus less educationally advantaged (i.e., likely to attain more years… more →
The Rise of (E)quality Politics: The Political Development of Higher Education Policy, 1969-1999
Public discussions of racial inclusion and equal opportunity initiatives in the U.S. are often met with claims that expanding access to an institution, space, or public good is likely to diminish its quality. Examples of this pattern include: anticipated (and real) property value declines when… more →
The Distribution of School Spending Impacts
We examine all known "credibly causal" studies to explore the distribution of the causal effects of public K-12 school spending on student outcomes in the United States. For each of the 31 included studies, we compute the same marginal spending effect parameter estimate. Precision-weighted… more →
Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students
We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among… more →
The Impressive Effects of Tutoring on PreK-12 Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence
Tutoring—defined here as one-on-one or small-group instructional programming by teachers, paraprofessionals, volunteers, or parents—is one of the most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools in use today. Within the past decade, dozens of preK-12 tutoring experiments have been… more →