Vanderbilt University
High School Career and Technical Education Finance: Impact of State-Level Policy Changes
States are increasingly adopting changes to K-12 funding systems in order to promote and encourage student engagement in secondary-level career and technical education (CTE). Two of the most prevalent reforms include: a) establishing tiered weights for CTE in school funding formulas based on the… more →
Applying to Lead: A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Prospective Principals’ Job Application Strategies in Two Urban Districts
Purpose: Urban school districts often face challenges in filling principal vacancies with effective leaders, especially in high-needs schools. Prospective principals’ engagement with the job application process may contribute to these challenges. The goal of this study is to… more →
Local Labor Market Alignment of Short-Term Certificate Programs
Short-term certificate (STC) programs at community colleges represent a longstanding policy priority to align accelerated postsecondary credentials with job opportunities in local labor markets. Despite large investments in developing STCs, little evidence exists about where and when STCs are… more →
Do the Effects Persist? An Examination of Long-term Effects After Students Leave Turnaround Schools
Whole-school reforms have received widespread attention, but a critical limitation of the current literature is the lack of evidence around whether these extensive and costly interventions improve students’ long-term outcomes after they leave reform schools. Leveraging Tennessee’s statewide… more →
The Scaling Dynamics and Causal Effects of a District-Operated Tutoring Program
Public school systems across the U.S. have made major investments in tutoring to support students’ academic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We evaluate a large urban district’s efforts to design, implement, and scale a district-operated, standards-based tutoring program across… more →
The Impact of Additional Funding on Student Outcomes: Evidence from an Urban District Using Weighted Student Funding and Site-based Budgeting
This study uses a concurrent embedded mixed-methods design to assess the impact of additional funding on student outcomes in a large, urban school district in the Southeastern United States. The district implemented student-based budgeting (SBB), which allocates dollars to schools based on… more →
Should They Pay, or Should I Go? Differential Responses to Base Salary Increases
This study uses administrative data from Oregon to estimate the extent to which base salary increases reduce teacher turnover and to investigate whether these effects are heterogeneous by teacher characteristics. Using multiple sets of fixed effects to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in… more →
(Dis)connection at Work: Racial Isolation, Teachers’ Job Experiences, and Teacher Turnover
Teachers of color often work in schools with few colleagues from the same racial or ethnic background. This racial isolation may affect their work experiences and important job outcomes, including retention. Using longitudinal administrative and survey data, we investigate the degree to which… more →
Paying for School Finance Reforms: How States Raise Revenues to Fund Increases in Elementary-Secondary Education Expenditures
This study investigates how individual states raise revenue to pay for elementary-secondary education spending following school finance reforms (SFRs). We identify states that increased and sustained education expenditures after reform, search for legislative statutes that appropriated more… more →
Weighting for Progressivity? An Analysis of Implicit Tradeoffs Associated with Weighted Student Funding in Tennessee
We study the progressivity of state funding of school districts under Tennessee’s weighted student funding formula. We propose a simple definition of progressivity based on the difference in exposure to district per-pupil funding between poor and non-poor students. The realized progressivity of… more →
Teacher Shortages: A Framework for Understanding and Predicting Vacancies
We develop a unifying conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then generate and test hypotheses about geographic and subject variation in teacher shortages using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee… more →
Rural Early Childhood Programs & School Readiness: An Evaluation of the Early Steps to School Success Program
Prior research has clearly established the substantial expected payoffs to investments in early childhood education. However, the ability to deliver early childhood programs differs across communities with access to high quality programing especially hard to establish in rural communities. We… more →
A Systematic Review of Research on Tutoring Implementation: Considerations when Undertaking Complex Instructional Supports for Students
Tutoring has emerged as an especially promising strategy for supporting students academically. This study synthesizes 33 articles on the implementation of tutoring, defined as one-to-one or small-group instruction in which a human tutor supports students grades K-12 in an academic subject, to… more →
PLUS or Minus? The Effect of Graduate School Loans on Access, Attainment, and Prices
In 2006, the federal government effectively uncapped student borrowing for graduate programs with the introduction of the Graduate PLUS loan program. Access to additional federal loans increased graduate students’ borrowing and shifted the composition of their loans from private to federal debt.… more →
Choosing Alone? Peer Similarity in High School Choices
We provide a descriptive analysis of within-school and neighborhood similarity in high school applications in New York City. We depart from prior work by examining similarity in applications to specific schools rather than preferences for school characteristics. We find surprisingly low… more →
Uncovering the sources of gender wage gaps among teachers: The role of compensation off the salary schedule
Public teacher compensation is largely determined by fixed salary schedules that were designed to avoid payment inequalities based on demographic characteristics. Yet, recent research shows female teachers earn less than their male peers after controlling for experience, education, and school… more →
A Bad Commute: Does Travel Time to Work Predict Teacher and Leader Turnover and Other Workplace Outcomes?
Research suggests that longer commute times can increase employee turnover probabilities by increasing job stress and reducing job attachment and embeddedness. Using administrative data from a midsized urban school district, we test whether teachers and school leaders with longer commute times… more →
At What Cost?: Is Technical Education Worth the Investment?
Career and technical education (CTE) has existed in the United States for over a century, and only in recent years have there been opportunities to assess the causal impact of participating in these programs while in high school. To date, no work has assessed whether the relative costs of these… more →
The Enduring Struggle of Standards-Based Reform: Lessons from a National Research Center on College and Career-Ready Standards
Standards have been at the heart of state and federal efforts to improve education for several decades. Most recently, standards-based reforms have evolved with a focus on more ambitious "college- and career-ready" (CCR) standards. This paper synthesizes the results of a seven-year national… more →
What is a School Finance Reform? Uncovering the ubiquity and diversity of school finance reforms using a Bayesian changepoint estimator
School finance reforms are not well defined and are likely more prevalent than the current literature has documented. Using a Bayesian changepoint estimator, we quantitatively identify the years when state education revenues abruptly increased for each state between 1960 and 2008 and then… more →