University of Delaware
Assessment Design and Course Grades: Evidence from Linked College Syllabi and Grade Records
Grade inflation is of increasing concern on college campuses, yet little is known about the course-level practices associated with higher grades. We examine one such practice: assessment design. Using syllabi from more than 400 undergraduate courses at four public universities, we identify… more →
Shine a Light: The U.S. Federal Government Should Increase Access to Educational Administrative Data
The Institute of Educational Sciences invested substantial resources into the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grant program. These grants helped states convert their educational records to longitudinal datasets for research and evaluation. However, external researchers still have unreliable… more →
The Access–Enrollment Disconnect in Corequisite Math Reform: Causal Evidence and Stakeholder Perspectives from a Community College
This study examines a statewide developmental education reform in Virginia that allows students who would have been placed in standalone remedial math to enroll directly in college-level math with corequisite support. Although corequisite support has been widely adopted and generally promising,… more →
Distinguishing Burdens from Benefits in Early Care and Education Policy
Contemporary policy conversations discuss burdens imposed by regulations, describing when they render government functions ineffective and inefficient. But one can mislabel the core purposes and benefits of a policy’s existence as burdens. Applying the administrative burden framework to early… more →
A Systematic Review of Research Designs Used to Evaluate State and Locally Funded Pre-K Programs
Expansions of state and locally funded pre-k programs in recent decades have been promoted by advocates citing strong research support. However, questions have been raised about how supportive the research base actually is. We conducted a systematic review of pre-k evaluation studies (from 2000… more →
“Can we fight this fight?”: How Racial Politics Shape the Implementation of Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education Teaching Standards
In this study, we investigate the role of teacher education (TE) programs in filtering the implementation of Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education teaching guidelines in Pennsylvania. Drawing on a comparative case study of three TE programs across diverse institutional and political… more →
Beyond School Police Officers: Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Exposure to a Fuller Range of School Security Personnel
Using data from the 2017–18 and 2020–21 Civil Rights Data Collection, we document dispari-ties in exposure to security personnel across US high schools and geographic levels. We dis-tinguish between law enforcement officers (LEOs) and school security guards (SSGs) to cap-ture variation in how… more →
School Finance in the US
This chapter provides an overview of K-12 public school finance in the United States by tracing how funding systems changed over time, how they operate today, and how well they advance core policy goals. Section 2 documents the long-run shift from local property tax finance toward larger state… more →
Hold Harmless for Whom? The Impact of COVID Era Policies on School Funding, Teachers, and Students
This study evaluates the fiscal and academic consequences of New York City’s hold harmless policy during COVID-19, which aimed to stabilize school expenditures amid unexpected enrollment declines by restoring schools’ funding up to initial levels. We examine how school racial composition… more →
IDEA-Aligned Estimates of Racial Disproportionality in Special Education versus Conventional Approaches: A cautionary note on included-variable bias when achievement and socioeconomic status proxy for special education need
Racial disproportionality in special education is a contested policy space. Federal oversight has traditionally focused on minority over-representation through IDEA’s significant disproportionality framework. However, observational studies report that Black students appear under-identified based… more →
The Architecture of Expected Wage Gaps: Between- and Within-School Sources of Career Education Inequality
This study investigates how school-level variation contributes to social stratification even before labor market entry by examining Career and Technical Education (CTE) as a key mechanism for sorting students into pathways with unequal economic returns. Using Delaware administrative data and… more →
Policy Impacts of Reimbursement Rate Reform: Evidence from the Child Care and Development Fund
The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) subsidizes child care costs for families with low-incomes. Reimbursements for cost-subsidized care are paid to child care providers but are extremely low compared with market rates and actual cost of care. We examine how the 2014 congressional… more →
"Send Them Home?" Rethinking What Public Education Owes to Flourishing Children
This essay asks what justice requires for children who are already thriving in school and argues that the dominant frameworks in educational philosophy do not answer the question. Priority, equality of opportunity, adequacy, and capabilities treat public education chiefly as redistribution to… more →
Democracy For What and For Whom?: The Possibilities and Challenges of K-12 School Boards
Local school boards have historically played a major role in the functioning and character of US schools, providing fiscal oversight, shaping policy, and creating avenues for community voice, representation, and accountability. As such, school boards have regularly served as critical sites for… more →
Reclaiming Educational Fraud and Waste: A Conceptual Framework to Locate the True Sources of Resource Leakage and Harm in The U.S. K-12 System
The recent dismantling of federal educational institutions has been legitimated under the banner of “eliminating fraud and waste.” In this paper, we reclaim these terms to locate the sources of potential fraud and waste in the U.S. K-12 education system through a novel conceptual framework that… more →
From Funds to Frameworks: How States Operationalize Title II Education Funding
This study employs a document analysis of Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans from 2017 to 2022 to examine Title II, Part A, implementation across all states. We analyzed state-level fund allocation, leadership development activities, and discrepancies between planned and actual spending.… more →
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 →
Making the Grade: Accounting for Course Selection in High School Transcripts with Item Response Theory
We apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to high-school transcript data, treating courses as items and grades as ordered responses, to estimate student transcript strength (θ̂) and course difficulty on a common scale. IRT estimation orders courses plausibly by difficulty, differentiates… more →
Disentangle the Curriculum and Structural Effects of Math Pathway Reforms: Evidence from Maryland Community College System
This study evaluates the impact of Maryland's Mathematics Reform Initiative (MMRI), which sought to improve student success in developmental and college-level math through comprehensive curriculum and structural reforms. Launched in 2015, the MMRI developed and implemented non-algebra math… more →
Who Leads During and After a Crisis? The Pandemic’s Role in Diversifying School Leadership
Organizational crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, influence the appointment of leaders from underrepresented groups, including women and people of color. This study examines the relationship between the pandemic, school organizational characteristics, and the appointment of women and people… more →