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Equity
Going the Distance: Exploring Variation in Access to High-Quality PreK by Geographic Proximity, Race/Ethnicity, Family Income, and Home Language
Meghan P. McCormick, Mirjana Pralica, JoAnn Hsueh, Christina Weiland, Amanda Weissman, Samantha Xia, Anna Shapiro, Cullen MacDowell, Samuel Maves, Anne Taylor, Jason Sachs.Topics: Families and CommunitiesThis study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (PreK) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS PreK from 2012–2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups. The largest differences in… more →
Affirmative Action and Its Race-Neutral Alternatives
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Higher education, EquityAs affirmative action loses political feasibility, many universities have implemented race-neutral alternatives like top percent policies and holistic review to increase enrollment among disadvantaged students. I study these policies’ application, admission, and enrollment effects using… more →
When Girls Outperform Boys: The Gender Gap in High School Math Grades
Topics: Student LearningAcross an array of educational outcomes, evidence suggests that girls outperform boys on average. For example, in Chicago, ninth-grade girls earn math GPAs that are 0.29 points higher than boys on average. This paper examines explanations for this gap, such as girl-boy differences in academic… more →
Integrated Student Support and Student Achievement: A Replication Study
Topics: Student LearningGrowing up in poverty presents numerous nonacademic barriers that impede academic progress for economically disadvantaged students (Duncan and Murnane, 2016). Because schools alone have limited capacity to address the systemic nature of economic inequalities that directly affects student… more →
Inequality in the Classroom: Electoral Incentives and the Distribution of Local Education Spending
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Equity, School districtsLocally-elected school boards have wide discretion over allocating money among the schools in their district, yet we know relatively little about how they decide “which schools get what.” I argue that electoral incentives are one factor that can influence the distribution of resources: board… more →
“All Students Matter:” The Place of Race in Discourse on Student Debt in a Federal Higher Education Policymaking Process
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWe used Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the racial discourse within recent attempts to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. Specifically, we interrogated congressional markup hearings to understand how members frame student debt and the racialized dynamics embedded within. Our findings… more →
Washington School Finance: Exploring the History and Present-Day Challenges for Fiscal Equity
Tags: Equity, Covid-19 recoveryIn this forthcoming book chapter, the authors provide an in-depth description of the history and current issues pertaining to public school finance in Washington State, including how recent federal stimulus funding impacted resource levels. The state uses a resource-based funding model, where… more →
Human versus Machine: Do college advisors outperform a machine-learning algorithm in predicting student enrollment?
Tags: Higher education, EquityPrediction algorithms are used across public policy domains to aid in the identification of at-risk individuals and guide service provision or resource allocation. While growing research has investigated concerns of algorithmic bias, much less research has compared algorithmically-driven… more →
Who’s Matched Up? Access to Same-Race Instructors in Higher Education
Despite consistent evidence on the benefits of same-race instructor matching in K-12 settings and developing work in higher education, research has yet to conceptualize and document the incidence of same-race matching. That is, even if same-race matching produces positive effects, how likely are… more →
Preferences, Inequities, and Incentives in the Substitute Teacher Labor Market
We examine the labor supply decisions of substitute teachers – a large, on-demand market with broad shortages and inequitable supply. In 2018, Chicago Public Schools implemented a targeted bonus program designed to reduce unfilled teacher absences in largely segregated Black… more →
Stay-at-Home Peer Mothers and Gender Norms: Short-run Effects on Educational Outcomes
Topics: Families and CommunitiesIncreased exposure to gender-role information affects a girl's educational performance. Utilizing the classroom randomization in Chinese middle schools, we find that the increased presence of stay-at-home peer mothers significantly reduces a girl's performance in mathematics. This exposure also… more →
Socio-economic inequalities in opportunities and participation in in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic
Juan Pablo Valenzuela, Eduardo A. Undurraga, Danilo Kuzmanic, Andrea Canales, Susana Claro, Fernanda Cortés.The disruption of in-person schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic has affected students’ learning, development, and well-being. Students in Latin America and the Caribbean have been hit particularly hard because schools in the region have stayed closed for longer than anywhere else, with long-… more →
Variation in broadband access among undergraduate populations across the United States
Topics: Families and CommunitiesIncreasing numbers of students require internet access to pursue their undergraduate degrees, yet broadband access remains inequitable across student populations. Furthermore, surveys that currently show differences in access by student demographics or location typically do so at high levels of… more →
Who refers whom? The effects of teacher characteristics on disciplinary office referrals
Topics: Student Well-BeingTeachers affect a wide range of students’ educational and social outcomes, but how they contribute to students’ involvement in school discipline is less understood. We estimate the impact of teacher demographics and other observed qualifications on students’ likelihood of receiving a… more →
The inequity of opt-in educational resources and an intervention to increase equitable access
Topics: Student LearningTags: Equity, Student supportsBillions of dollars are invested in opt-in educational resources to support struggling students. Yet, there is no guarantee these students will use these resources. We report results from a school system’s implementation of on-demand tutoring. The take up was low. At baseline, only 19% of… more →
Mixed-Delivery Public Prekindergarten: Differences in Demographics, Quality, and Children’s Gains in Community-Based versus Public School Programs across Five Large-Scale Systems
Christina Weiland, Meghan P. McCormick, Jennifer Duer, Allison Friedman-Kraus, Mirjana Pralica, Samantha Xia, Milagros Nores, Shira Mattera.Topics: Student LearningNearly all states with public prekindergarten programs use mixed-delivery systems, with classrooms in both public schools and community-based settings. However, experts have long raised concerns about systematic inequities by setting within these public systems. We used data from… more →
Introducing a High-School Exit Exam in Science: Consequences in Massachusetts
Tags: Equity, Science educationPreparing students for science, technology, and engineering careers is an urgent state policy challenge. We examine the design and roll-out of a science testing requirement for high-school graduation in Massachusetts. While science test performance has improved over time for all demographic… more →
Cream Skimming and Pushout of Students Participating in a Statewide Private School Voucher Program
Topics: School ChoiceTags: EquityA pervasive issue in the school choice literature is whether schools of choice cream-skim students by enrolling high-achieving, less challenging, or less costly students. Similarly, schools of choice may “pushout” low-achieving, more challenging, or more costly students. Using longitudinal… more →
Not the Great Equalizer? Local Economic Mobility and Inequality Effects for the Establishment of U.S. Universities
Topics: Families and CommunitiesWe exploit historical natural experiments to test whether universities increase economic mobility and equality. We use "runner-up’" counties that were strongly considered to become university sites but were not selected for as-good-as-random reasons as counterfactuals for university counties.… more →
STEM Summer Programs for Underrepresented Youth Increase STEM Degrees
The federal government and many individual organizations have invested in programs to support diversity in the STEM pipeline, including STEM summer programs for high school students, but there is little rigorous evidence of their efficacy. We fielded a randomized controlled trial to study a… more →