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Equity
The Role of Comprehensive Student Support Interventions during School Turnaround
Topics: MethodsThe persistence of underperformance in schools within large urban districts remains a significant challenge in the U.S. K-12 education system. Education policymakers have enacted legislation aiming at improving these schools through ``turnaround'' initiatives. However, students attending… more →
Overpoliced? A Descriptive Portrait of School-Based Targeted Police Interventions in New York City
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThis study provides a descriptive analysis of police intervention as a response to student behavior in New York City public schools. We find that between the 2016/17 and 2021/22 academic years, arrests and juvenile referrals decreased while non-detainment-based and psychiatric police… more →
How and Why Racial Isolation Affects Education Costs & the Provision of Equal Educational Opportunity
This article provides a review of prior empirical work exploring whether and to what extent school district racial composition affects the costs associated with providing equal educational opportunity to achieve a common set of outcomes. This prior work mainly involves education cost function… more →
What Impacts Should We Expect from Tutoring at Scale? Exploring Meta-Analytic Generalizability
Topics: MethodsU.S. public schools are engaged in an unprecedented effort to expand tutoring in the wake of the pandemic. Broad-based support for scaling tutoring emerged, in part, because of the large effects on student achievement found in prior meta-analyses. We conduct an expanded meta-analysis of 282… more →
Charter School Expansion, Catholic School Enrollment, & the Equity Implications of School Choice
Topics: School ChoiceTags: Equity, Charter schoolsCatholic schools have seen more than a 30% decline in enrollment over the past 20 years. While some of the decline in enrollment may have been spurred by secular trends or the Church abuse scandal, the increase in schools of choice, principally public charter schools, may explain at least some… more →
Early Life Health Conditions and Racial Gaps in Education
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceRacial disparities in infant health conditions have persisted for decades. However, there is surprisingly limited evidence regarding the long-term consequences of these disparities. Using novel linked administrative data from Texas and the shift to Medicaid Managed Care (MMC), I show that MMC-… more →
The Racial Gap in Friendships Among High-Achieving Students
Topics: Student LearningHigh-achieving minority students have fewer friends than their majority counterparts. Exploring patterns of friendship formation in the Add Health data, we find strong racial homophily in friendship formations as well as strong achievement homophily within race. However, we find that achievement… more →
When Money Matters Most: Unpacking the Effectiveness of School Spending
Tags: Equity, School districtsTargeted school funding is a potentially valuable policy lever to increase educational equality by race, ethnicity, and income, but it remains unclear how to target funds most effectively. We use a regression discontinuity approach to compare districts that narrowly passed or failed a school… more →
Impact of States' Adoption of Response to Interventions (RTI) on the Identification and Placement of Students in Special Education
Topics: Student LearningTags: Students with disabilities, EquityThis study investigates the impact of states' adoption of Response to Interventions (RTI) on the identification and placement of students in special education. RTI, adopted by the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 2004, is designed to improve the… more →
The Impact of Additional Funding on Student Outcomes: Evidence from an Urban District Using Weighted Student Funding and Site-based Budgeting
Tags: EquityThis 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 →
Accelerating Opportunity: The Effects of Instructionally Supported Detracking
Topics: Student LearningThe pivotal role of Algebra in the educational trajectories of U.S. students continues to motivate controversial, high-profile policies focused on when students access the course, their classroom peers, and how the course is taught. This random-assignment partnership study examines an innovative… more →
Experimental Evidence of the Impact of Re-Enrollment Campaigns on Long-Term Academic Outcomes
Tags: Higher education, EquityMost students who begin at a community college do not complete their desired credential. Many former students fail to graduate due to various barriers rather than their academic performance. To encourage previously successful non-completers to re-enroll and eventually graduate, a growing number… more →
Integrating Minorities in the Classroom: The Role of Students, Parents, and Teachers
Topics: Families and CommunitiesWe develop a multi-agent model of the education production function where investments of students, parents, and teachers are linked to the presence of minorities in the classroom. We then test the key implications of this model using rich survey data and a mandate to randomly assign students to… more →
Inequity and College Applications: Assessing Differences and Disparities in Letters of Recommendation from School Counselors with Natural Language Processing
Brian Heseung Kim, Julie J. Park, Pearl Lo, Dominique J. Baker, Nancy Wong, Stephanie Breen, Huong Truong, Jia Zheng, Kelly Ochs Rosinger, OiYan Poon.Letters of recommendation from school counselors are required to apply to many selective colleges and universities. Still, relatively little is known about how this non-standardized component may affect equity in admissions. We use cutting-edge natural language processing techniques to… more →
Constrained Agency and the Architecture of Educational Choice: Evidence from New York City
Topics: School ChoiceTags: EquityMany school districts consider family preferences in allocating students to schools. In theory, this approach provides traditionally disadvantaged families greater access to high-quality schools by weakening the link between residential location and school assignment. We leverage data on the… more →
Transitional Kindergarten: The New Kid on the Early Learning Block
Jordan S. Berne, Katia Cordoba Garcia, Brian A. Jacob, Tareena Musaddiq, Samuel Owusu, Anna Shapiro, Christina Weiland.Topics: Student LearningTags: Early childhood education, EquityIn recent years, several states have expanded a new publicly funded learning option: Transitional Kindergarten (TK). TK programs bridge prekindergarten and kindergarten in their eligibility, requirements, and design. We use Michigan’s TK program as a case study on the fit of this new entrant in… more →
ESSER-ting Preferences: Examining School District Preferences for Using Federal Pandemic Relief Fundings
We analyzed the proposed spending data for the American Recovery Plan’s Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief III (ESSER III) fund from the spring of 2021 of nearly 3,000 traditional public-school districts in the United States to (1) identify trends in the strategies adopted and (2) to test… 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 →
On the Margin: Who Receives a Juvenile Referral in School and What Effect Does It Have?
Topics: Student Well-BeingInvolvement with the juvenile justice system carries immense consequences both to detained youth and to society more broadly. Extant research on the “school-to-prison pipeline” often focuses on school disciplinary practices such as suspension with less attention on understanding the impact of… more →
Making Moves: The Role of Demotion in School Leadership
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTags: Principals, EquityThis study examines the experience of demotion from a principalship to an assistant principalship and how race and gender can differentially impact career trajectories. Using administrative state dataset of 10,946 observations at the principal level, we used probit regression to determine the… more →