University of Pittsburgh
Nowcasting Teacher Turnover
Policymakers need timely, local information about teacher turnover to make informed decisions, yet turnover data are typically several years out of date and lack the context to assess whether a district's turnover is high or low relative to similar districts. We assemble district-level teacher… more →
The Impact of Tutor Gender Match on Girls’ STEM Interest, Engagement, and Performance
Gender disparities in STEM persist despite girls performing as well as boys academically, suggesting girls may benefit from role models who shape their perceptions of STEM. We examine whether female math tutors influence girls’ STEM interest, attendance, and performance. We randomly assigned 422… more →
Capturing Voter Turnout at the School District Level: Validating a Geospatial Strategy
School boards are critical sites of education policymaking, yet scholarship on these institutions is scarce because of severe data limitations. We introduce a geospatial strategy and open-source R package, called “Query, Overlay, Recover” (QOR), that generates high-quality estimates of voter… more →
Leveraging Quarterly Workforce Indicators to Analyze Teacher Labor Market Dynamics: Inequitable Trends in Educator Turnover
Educator labor markets vary considerably across the country and can change quickly during recessions. We use data from the Quality Workforce Indicators (QWI) on educators in Elementary and Secondary Schools from 2000-01 to 2022-23. We demonstrate how to transform the quarter-level data in the… more →
How State Takeovers of School Districts Affect Education Finance, 1990 to 2019
State takeover of school districts—a form of political centralization that shifts decision-making power from locally elected leaders to the state—has increased in recent years, often with the purported goal of improving district financial condition. Takeover has affected millions of students… more →
Taking Teacher Evaluation to Scale: The Effect of State Reforms on Achievement and Attainment
Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting their staggered implementation across… 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 →
Subtraction by Addition: Do Private Scholarship Awards Lead to Financial Aid Displacement?
Award displacement occurs when one type of financial aid award directly contributes to the change in the quantity of another award. We explore whether postsecondary institutions displaced awards in response to the Pittsburgh Promise scholarship by capitalizing on the doubling of the maximum… more →
New Schools and New Classmates: The Disruption and Peer Group Effects of School Reassignment
Policy makers periodically consider using student assignment policies to improve educational outcomes by altering the socio-economic and academic skill composition of schools. We exploit the quasi-random reassignment of students across schools in the Wake County Public School System to estimate… 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 effects of default choice on student loan borrowing: Experimental evidence from a public research university
We explore the role of defaults and choice architecture on student loan decision-making, experimentally testing the impact pre-populating either decline or accept decisions compared to an active choice, no pre-population, decision. We demonstrate that the default choice presented does influence… more →
A Strengths-Based, Culturally Responsive Family Intervention Improves Latino Kindergarteners’ Vocabulary and Approaches to Learning
Food routines play a special role in Latino families. Using a cluster randomized trial with 248 children (M age = 67 months) from 13 schools, this study investigated the impact of a four-week family program designed to capitalize on food routines in improving Latino kindergarteners’ outcomes in… more →
Disproportionate Burden: Estimating the Cost of FAFSA Verification for Public Colleges and Universities
Verification is a federally mandated process that requires selected students to further attest that the information reported on their FAFSA is accurate and complete. In this brief, we estimate institutional costs of administrating the FAFSA verification mandate and consider variation in costs by… more →
Matching Methods for Clustered Observational Studies in Education
Many interventions in education occur in settings where treatments are applied to groups. For example, a reading intervention may be implemented for all students in some schools and withheld from students in other schools. When such treatments are non-randomly allocated, outcomes across the… more →
The Design of Clustered Observational Studies in Education
Clustered observational studies (COSs) are a critical analytic tool for educational effectiveness research. We present a design framework for the development and critique of COSs. The framework is built on the counterfactual model for causal inference and promotes the concept of… more →
Proactive student support using artificially intelligent conversational chatbots: The importance of targeting the technology
We examine through a field experiment whether outreach and support provided through an AI-enabled chatbot can reduce summer melt and improve first-year college enrollment at a four-year university and at a community college. At the four-year college, the chatbot increased overall success with… more →
Effects of the shift to English-only instruction on college outcomes: Evidence from Central Asia
English-only college education in non-English speaking countries is a rapidly growing phenomenon that has been dubbed as the most important trend in higher education internationalization. Despite worldwide popularity, there is little empirical evidence about how the transition to English-only… more →
Government Privatization and Political Participation: The Case of Charter Schools
Governments around the world have privatized public services in the name of efficiency and citizen empowerment, but some argue that privatization could also affect citizen participation in democratic governance. We explore this possibility by estimating the impact of charter schools (which are… more →