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School reform
The Fall of Accountability: Federal Education Politics in an Era of Polarization and Regime Decay
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Equity, School reformTwenty-five years ago, the United States was on the cusp of a major expansion of the federal government’s role in K-12 education policy. The No Child Left Behind legislation passed with bipartisan support and established standards and accountability as strategies to improve education. Until… more →
Who Leaves? Interdistrict Magnet School Openings and Enrollment Dynamics in Nearby Schools
Topics: School ChoiceConnecticut expanded interdistrict magnet schools (IMS) intending to reduce racial and socioeconomic segregation across districts, yet the potential unintended effects on student composition in nearby schools remains unclear. Leveraging the staggered rollout of IMS openings, this study finds… more →
Are Rural Republicans Different When It Comes to Public Opinion on Education Policy?
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceConservative education policy in the United States increasingly emphasizes school choice, decentralization, and parental authority. This chapter examines whether these priorities resonate equally across geographic contexts, focusing specifically on rural Republicans. Using data from the 2015–… more →
Public Opinion on Electoral Policy: Evidence from U.S. School Board Elections
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceChanges to electoral systems are relatively rare in established democracies. Conventional explanations for this stability suggest elected officials and citizens who stand to lose influence under new arrangements will oppose change. We explore the nature of public awareness and opinion regarding… more →
A Sandbox for Hard Choices: Using Simulation to Explore School Closure Scenarios and Their Consequences
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceSchool closures are often justified through seemingly neutral criteria such as enrollment or performance, but these metrics can unintentionally deepen educational disparities. This study uses a large urban district’s administrative data to simulate 5,040 closure scenarios, systematically varying… more →
School Finance in the US
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThis chapter provides an overview of K-12 public school finance in the United States by tracing how funding systems changed over time, how they operate today, and how well they advance core policy goals. Section 2 documents the long-run shift from local property tax finance toward larger state… more →
What are schools doing to improve attendance? Evidence from Michigan and Georgia
Topics: Student Well-BeingThis study presents evidence from Michigan and Georgia on the strategies that schools are using to improve attendance and how those strategies vary across contexts. We find that schools in both states rely heavily on communication-based practices aimed at changing student or parent behavior.… 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 →
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 →
Shock Absorption: Did School Turnaround Shelter Schools from the Pandemic’s Effects on Teacher Turnover?
Successful turnaround interventions should build school capacity to promote not just school improvement but also resilience to exogenous shocks that undermine schooling. While a large literature demonstrates that turnaround can improve school outcomes, little is known about whether it can help… more →
The Labor Market Impact of K-11 vs. K-12
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceIn 1945, Louisiana extended secondary education from 11 years to 12. Since many students followed diploma-based stopping rules, consecutive birth cohorts exogenously received different amounts of schooling. We use this natural experiment to evaluate the long-run labor market impact of having an… more →
The Effects of Universal School Vouchers on Private School Tuition and Enrollment: A National Analysis
Topics: School ChoiceTags: School reformThree-quarters of a century after Milton Friedman popularized the idea, universal school vouchers have suddenly become a reality in 17 states since 2021. These new policies promise to be one of the most far-reaching reforms in U.S. education history. We make two contributions to understanding… more →
Labor supply, learning time, and the efficiency of school spending: Evidence from school finance reforms
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceDoes school spending raise achievement? I show that effects, benchmarked by schools’ daily value added, are one-tenth to one-third as large as spending growth. Using school finance reforms for identification, I show that schools did not raise quality measured by value added. Instead, schools… more →
Reclaiming Educational Fraud and Waste: A Conceptual Framework to Locate the True Sources of Resource Leakage and Harm in The U.S. K-12 System
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThe recent dismantling of federal educational institutions has been legitimated under the banner of “eliminating fraud and waste.” In this paper, we reclaim these terms to locate the sources of potential fraud and waste in the U.S. K-12 education system through a novel conceptual framework that… more →
The Impact of Increased Exposure of Diversity on Suburban Students’ Outcomes: An Analysis of the METCO Voluntary Desegregation Program
Topics: School ChoiceOver sixty years following Brown vs. Board of Education, racial and socioeconomic segregation and lack of equal access to educational opportunities persist. Across the country, voluntary desegregation busing programs aim to ameliorate these imbalances and disparities. A longstanding… more →
High Turnover with Low Accountability: Local School Board Elections in 16 States
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWe analyze the most comprehensive dataset on U.S. school board elections. We find that nearly half of races go uncontested and that incumbents are reelected more than 80 percent of the time when they run. Because many incumbents retire instead of running for another term, however, turnover is… more →
Puzzling Over Declining Academic Achievement
Topics: Student LearningTags: Assessment, School reformMany are concerned about the large decline in K-12 student achievement since 2019. And rightly so, given what it signals about student learning and later life outcomes. Less noted is the pre-pandemic sustained decline in student achievement growth that followed 30 years of increases. We examine… more →
McCleary at Twelve: Examining Policy Designs Following Court-Mandated School Finance Reform in Washington State
All fifty U.S. state constitutions include language that guarantees residents’ access to a free public education. Plaintiffs in all but two states have brought litigation challenging state school finance systems, and in over half the cases, judges ruled the systems unconstitutional and mandated… more →
The Impact of School District Turnaround on Postsecondary Outcomes: Evidence from Lawrence, Massachusetts
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceLimited research examines the impact of accountability interventions on outcomes beyond test-based measures of short-term academic achievement. We examine the effects of the 2012 state takeover and districtwide turnaround of Massachusetts’ Lawrence Public Schools—a district serving a majority-… more →