Search and Filter
Equity
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
Topics: MethodsTags: Equity, Students with disabilitiesRacial 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 →
Understanding How HBCUs Leverage Partnerships to Support Students’ Basic Needs
Topics: Student Well-BeingBasic needs insecurity has become a pressing equity issue in U.S. higher education, yet little research examines how historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) address students’ holistic needs. Guided by a practice-based, pragmatic analytic orientation and informed by a basic needs… more →
Is Teacher Effectiveness Fully Portable? Evidence from the Random Assignment of Transfer Incentives
Tags: Equity, Returns to education and skills, School climate and culture, Teacher hiring and retentionWe examine how performance changes when teachers transfer across very different school contexts. The Talent Transfer Initiative program created a rare natural experiment to study such transfers by randomly assigning low-achieving schools the ability to offer high-performing teachers at higher-… more →
Making the Implicit Explicit: An Experiment with Implicit Gender Stereotypes and College Major Choice
We study whether making college students aware of their implicit gender–STEM stereotypes affects their pursuit of a STEM degree. In a field experiment at a large, selective U.S. university, over 800 undergraduates completed a gender–STEM Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a detailed survey on… more →
Who Is Newly Absent? Racial Inequities in Post-Pandemic Transitions into Chronic and Severe Absence in Georgia
Topics: Student LearningTags: Absenteeism, EquityChronic absenteeism rose sharply following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and has declined only modestly since, yet most evidence remains cross-sectional and cannot distinguish persistence from redistribution in absence behavior. Using a cohort transition framework, the analysis compares… more →
The Effect of Air Pollution on Student Achievement: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence
Topics: Student LearningAir pollution is one of the most pressing global public health challenges of the 21st century. This article presents a systematic review and meta-analysis of the best available evidence of the effect of air pollution on student achievement. A meta-analysis of 28 causal studies around the world… 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
Topics: School ChoiceWe 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 →
Fast Track to Success? A Mixed Methods Evaluation of Condensed Course Formats at Tennessee Community Colleges
Kaylee T. Matheny, Madison Dell, Gus Gluek, Rachel Baker, Eric Bettinger, Alex Monday, Hidahis Mesa.As colleges face increasing pressure to improve student outcomes, one solution gaining traction is the adoption of condensed courses (i.e., shortened academic terms). We employ quasi-experimental methods to estimate the effect of enrolling in a condensed course on course- and student-level… more →
Removing Barriers to College Credits: Where and for Whom AP Exam Fee Waivers Work
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceDo policies that broaden educational access also foster success? We study this question in the context of North Carolina’s universal Advanced Placement (AP) exam fee waiver policy. Using student-course level administrative data, we exploit within-student variation on a sample of students who… more →
Schools Never Die: Toward a Dynamic Systems Theory of School Closure
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceEducational researchers and policymakers typically treat school closures as discrete administrative decisions with clear endpoints. This paper challenges that assumption by applying Dynamic Systems Theory to school closure policy and research. We argue that schools function as adaptive… more →
Sibling Spillovers and Free Schooling
Topics: Families and CommunitiesWe use administrative data to measure sibling spillovers on academic performance before and after the introduction of Free Secondary Education (FSE) in Tanzania. Prior to FSE, students whose older siblings narrowly passed the secondary school entrance exam were less likely to go to secondary… more →
Right to Education (RTE) Act’s Influence on Caste-based Enrollment Gaps and Segregation in India
Topics: School ChoiceSection 12(1)(c) of the Right to Education (RTE) Act of India expanded affirmative action to primary schooling by requiring non-government-funded private schools to reserve 25% of their admissions for students from marginalized castes and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Using variation… more →
School Bathrooms: Perspectives on Safety, Surveillance, and Privacy in the Restroom
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceSchools are increasing surveillance in bathrooms in response to concerns about student behaviors in the restroom such as vaping, drug use, and vandalism. This study investigates how schools secure and surveil bathrooms and how stakeholders perceive these interventions. We situate school… more →
The Effect of College Entrance Exam Policies on Test Preparation and Tutoring Services
Multiple studies suggest that policies mandating college entrance exams can have positive impacts on college outcomes, especially for students who would otherwise not sit for the exam. Less understood is how families react to this increased competition for college admissions. Our study estimates… more →
Beg to DIFfer: Resolving Statistical Complications of Intersectional DIF Analyses
Topics: MethodsTags: Assessment, EquityModern test developers conduct differential item functioning (DIF) analyses to ensure fairness in educational and psychological testing. To address previously unrecognized biases, researchers have recently demonstrated the importance of conducting intersectional DIF analyses that attend to the… more →
Contemporary Child Labor and Declining School Attendance in the U.S.
Topics: Families and CommunitiesThe United States has experienced a 400% increase in reported child labor violations over the past decade, coinciding with declines in K-12 school attendance and enrollment. We examine the causal relationships between these patterns with microdata from the American Community Survey (ACS) from… more →
Improving Student-Teacher Relationships Through Feedback: The Development and Evaluation of the Stanford/Leading Educators Wise Feedback Professional Development Learning Series
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentHigh-quality academic feedback, especially feedback that highlights errors, mistakes, misunderstandings and shortcomings, is one of the most valuable tools teachers have for promoting student growth and learning. It is how teachers help students go beyond what they could accomplish on their own… more →
Controlling For Measurement Error in Evaluation Models When Treatment Group Assignment is Based on Noisy Measures: Evaluation of an Achievement Gap-Closing Initiative
Topics: MethodsTags: Assessment, EquityThis paper develops new models to evaluate the effects of interventions and intervention-by-site heterogeneity when treatment group assignment is based on a fallible variable and the outcome of interest is determined in part by the corresponding true control variables (measured without error).… more →
The impact of increasing school resources on peer victimization: Evidence from targeted funding on low-income families in Chile
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWhile a large body of literature has examined the impact of school spending on academic outcomes, far less is known about its effect on students’ socioemotional development and school experiences. This study contributes to narrowing this gap by evaluating the impact of a nationwide school… more →
Democracy For What and For Whom?: The Possibilities and Challenges of K-12 School Boards
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceLocal 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 →