University of Arkansas
Increasing Take-Up of Literacy Tutoring: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
Government programs often experience low take-up, limiting their potential positive impact. We examine whether reducing registration frictions can increase participation in a state-financed literacy intervention program. In a randomized field experiment, families received either encouragement… more →
Aligned Pathways, Unequal Earnings: Gendered Transitions from Community College to Work
States increasingly use financial aid policy to steer students into designated high-demand workforce fields, yet evidence on whether these fields offer stronger labor-market pathways remains limited. We study Virginia's Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead (G3) initiative, which provides tuition… more →
Designing Effective Public-Private Partnerships in Education
Publicly funded school choice is examined as a form of education public-private partnership (PPP), with cross-national differences interpreted through institutional design rather than private provision alone. A novel theoretical framework derives two indicators – alignment and coherence – from a… more →
Returns to Education in the United States: A Comparison of OLS and Double Machine Learning Methods
This study examines the economic returns to education in the U.S. using 2024 CPS data and compares Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression with a Double Machine Learning (DML) framework incorporating models such as random forests, boosted trees, lasso, GAMs, and neural networks (MLP). Results… more →
Raising the Floor: Teacher Retention Effects of a Statewide Minimum Salary Increase
Attracting and retaining a high-quality teacher workforce is a central challenge for education policy, and higher teacher salaries are often proposed as a solution. The LEARNS Act increased Arkansas's minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000, guaranteed all teachers a minimum raise of $2… more →
The Nation’s Achievement Inequality Report Card: An Assessment of Test Score and Equality Trends in Traditional Public, Charter, Catholic, and Department of Defense Schools
We present a descriptive comparison of trends in achievement and inequality in traditional public, public charter, Catholic, and Department of Defense schools in the U.S. Our sample includes 6,155,570 observations for 4th and 8th graders in math and reading between 2005 and 2024. We focus on… more →
Resilience and Transformation: The Pandemic’s Effects on Texas Community Colleges
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted higher education, particularly community colleges serving significant proportions of traditionally disadvantaged students. This mixed methods study examines how Texas community colleges responded to the crisis and the extent to which they institutionalized… more →
Examining Racial Disparities in School Discipline Throughout the Pandemic
This study explores trends and disparities in school discipline during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the persistence of racial gaps in exclusionary practices. Using student-level data from Arkansas from 2017/18 to 2022/23, we study how disciplinary outcomes relate to student race while… more →
Investing in Human Capital During Wartime: Experimental Evidence from Ukraine
This paper provides insights into human capital investments during wartime by presenting evidence from three experiments of an online tutoring program for Ukrainian students amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Conducted between early 2023 and mid-2024, the experiments reached nearly 10,000… more →
The Effect of Raising School Quality on Earnings
The evidence underscores the need to shift attention from school attainment to actual learning. While the average global return to an additional year of schooling is about 10 percent, a one standard deviation increase in test scores raises earnings by 15 percent. Studies show that including… more →
Teaching Practices and the Persistence of School-Entry Age Effects
We consider the effect of teaching practices on the persistence of school-entry age effects caused by rigid cutoff dates for school eligibility in Spain. We document significant school-entry age effects for the same cohort of students when they were in elementary and secondary school. Then, we… more →
Costly Withdrawals Reduce Future College-Going for Low-Income Students: Evidence from Return of Title IV Funds
Governments must strike a balance between promoting access to financial aid while at the same time remaining good stewards of taxpayer funds by preventing fraudulent access. This paper focuses on one of the largest-scale and most consequential policies determining whether students maintain… more →
Unlocking College Potential: The Role of Student Expectations and Non-Cognitive Skills in College Success
Attending college is a significant human capital investment but only about 60% of those who start college will have a completed degree six years later. This makes identifying the skills associated with college success an important policy concern.
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… 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… more →
Teacher Retention and Quality in the Four-Day School Week
The four-day school week is a school calendar that has become increasingly common following the COVID-19 pandemic. Proponents of the calendar often claim that offering teachers a regular 3-day weekend will help schools better retain existing teachers and recruit new teachers to their district… more →
The Notorious SBG: Administrators’ Perceptions of Standards-Based Grading Practices
This mixed-methods study synthesizes Standards-Based Grading (SBG) literature, analyzes 249 Arkansas administrators' survey responses using OLS regressions, and identifies themes through in-vivo coding of qualitative feedback. Results show more SBG support among liberal, elementary-level… more →
Toward An Economic Reformulation of Public Pension Funding Policy
We propose an economic reformulation of contribution policy integrating: (1) formalization of sustainability as the steady-state contribution rate, incorporating both the expected return on risky assets and a low-risk discount rate for liabilities; (2) derivation of contribution adjustment… more →
Teacher Turnover During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Teachers' levels of stress and burnout have been high throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, raising concerns about a potential increase in teacher turnover and future teacher shortages. We examine how the COVID-19 pandemic affected teacher turnover in Arkansas from 2018-19 to 2022-23 using… more →
Revisiting Ethnic Differences in In-Person Learning During 2021-2022
During the 2020-21 school year, Black and Hispanic students were less likely to attend school in-person than white students. Prior research indicated multiple factors helped explain this gap. In this study, we revise these observed racial gaps in in-person learning to examine whether the… more →