Stanford University
A Critical Appraisal of the Evidence on Racial Disproportionality in Special Education
This essay provides a two-pronged critical assessment of a subset of the literature on racial disproportionality in special education: that which aims to estimate racial disparities among otherwise similar children. This body of research has shown that Black students are less likely than… more →
Recent Immigration Raids Increased Student Absences
Local immigration raids expanded dramatically across the U.S. during the first two months of 2025. Anecdotal accounts suggest that these raids increased student absences from schools because parents fear being separated from their children. This study evaluates this claim using a daily times… more →
Deeper Roots Before the Storm: Utilizing Machine Learning to Alert School Districts of Permanent School Closures
The increasing rate of permanent school closures in U.S. public school districts presents unprecedented challenges for administrators and communities alike. This study develops an early-warning indicator model to predict mass closure events - defined as a district closing at least 10% of its… more →
From Sentence-Corrections to Deeper Dialogue: Qualitative Insights from LLM and Teacher Feedback on Student Writing
Effective writing feedback is a powerful tool for enhancing student learning, encouraging revision, and increasing motivation and agency. Yet, teachers face many challenges that prevent them from consistently providing effective writing feedback. Recent advances in generative artificial… more →
Understanding and Meeting the Needs of Part-time Community College Students: A Mixed Methods Analysis of Community College Administrator Perspectives and State-Wide Administrative Data
While most community college students enroll part-time, there is little evidence on how to effectively improve college attainment of part-time students. This mixed methods study, situated in Texas, addresses this research gap by developing a more complete understanding of the part-time student… more →
Scaffolding Middle-School Mathematics Curricula With Large Language Models
Despite well-designed curriculum materials, teachers often face challenges implementing them due to diverse classroom needs. This paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can support middle school math teachers by helping create highquality curriculum scaffolds, which we define as… more →
Does Increased Agency Improve the Effectiveness of Self-Directed Professional Learning for Educators?
The role of teacher agency in professional learning has been the subject of several qualitative studies but has not yet been tested in an experimental setting. To provide causal evidence of the impact of teacher agency on the effectiveness of professional learning, we conducted a preregistered… more →
Educator Attention: How computational tools can systematically identify the distribution of a key resource for students
Educator attention is critical for student success, yet how educators distribute their attention across students remains poorly understood due to data and methodological constraints. This study presents the first large-scale computational analysis of educator attention patterns, leveraging over… more →
Exploring the Potentials of Outcomes-Based Contracting: Findings from Initial Implementations
Outcomes-Based Contracting (OBC) ties vendor payments to performance metrics, aiming to enhance accountability in public education. This study examines its implementation in tutoring services through the Southern Education Foundation pilot program. Interviews with district leaders and vendors… more →
Practice-Based Teacher Education Pedagogies Improve Responsiveness: Evidence from a Lab Experiment
Given the limited time available during teacher preparation, teacher educators must make zerosum choices about the pedagogies they choose to prepare pre-service teachers. Yet the field lacks rigorous causal evidence regarding the relative efficacy of different pedagogies to inform teacher… more →
Peer Income Exposure Across the Income Distribution
Children from families across the income distribution attend public schools, making schools and classrooms potential sites for interaction between more- and less-affluent children. However, limited information exists regarding the extent of economic integration in these contexts. We merge… more →
The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms
While legislators have implemented many “science of reading” initiatives in the last two decades, the evidence on the impact of these reforms at scale is limited. In this pre-registered, quasi-experimental study, we examine California’s recent initiative to improve early literacy across the… more →
The Correlated Proxy Problem: Why Control Variables can Obscure the Contribution of Selection Processes to Group-Level Inequality
Whether selection processes contribute to group-level disparities or merely reflect pre-existing inequalities is an important societal question. In the context of observational data, researchers, concerned about omitted-variable bias, assess selection-contributing inequality via a kitchen-sink… more →
Integrating Open Science Principles into Quasi-Experimental Social Science Research
Quasi-experimental methods are a cornerstone of applied social science, providing critical answers to causal questions that inform policy and practice. Although open science principles have influenced experimental research norms across the social sciences, these practices are rarely implemented… more →
A Scalable Approach to High-Impact Tutoring for Young Readers: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial
This paper presents the results from a randomized controlled trial of Chapter One, an early elementary reading tutoring program that embeds part-time tutors into the classroom to provide short bursts of 1:1 instruction. Eligible kindergarten students were randomly assigned to receive… more →
The Effects of Virtual Tutoring on Young Readers: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial
In-person tutoring has been shown to improve academic achievement. Though less well-researched, virtual tutoring has also shown a positive effect on achievement but has only been studied in grade five or above. We present findings from the first randomized controlled trial of virtual tutoring… 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… 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… more →
A Quantitative Study of Mathematical Language in Upper Elementary Classrooms
This study provides the first large-scale quantitative exploration of mathematical language use in upper elementary U.S. classrooms. Our approach employs natural language processing techniques to describe variation in teachers’ and students’ use of mathematical language in 1,657 fourth and fifth… more →
When Money Matters Most: Unpacking the Effectiveness of School Spending
Targeted school funding is a potentially valuable policy lever to increase educational equality by race, ethnicity, and income, but it remains unclear how to target funds most effectively. We use a regression discontinuity approach to compare districts that narrowly passed or failed a school… more →