Search and Filter
School reform
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 →
From Population Growth to Demographic Scarcity: Emerging Challenges to Global Primary Education Provision in the Twenty-first Century
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceDemographic pressures are reshaping the challenges faced by primary education systems around the world in ways that carry significant implications for the landscape of global educational inequality. We first demonstrate highly disequalizing demographic pressures on the world's educational… more →
New Places, New Players, a New Politics of Education
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: School reformIn the last decade, many political conflicts over K-12 education in the United States have increasingly divided along party lines. While it may seem like this development represents a sudden and surprising departure from a long-standing tradition of bipartisanship, I argue that the politics of… more →
A Framework for Evaluating and Reforming School Vouchers
Topics: School ChoiceTags: Equity, School reformFollowing the 2002 work of economist Henry Levin, who laid out a framework for evaluating school vouchers, we provide an updated framework involving four major goals: equity, effiency, accountability and democratic goals. We review what is known from recent research around these four major areas… more →
State Intervention and Racialized Policy Aversion in Michigan's Black School Districts
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceFor the past thirty years, Michigan has used Emergency Management (EM) and receiverships to solve city and school finance issues. The impact of these state intervention policies has been highly publicized and has led to institutional distrust among black citizens in urban communities —with the… more →
Curricular-Credential Decoupling: How Schools Respond to Career and Technical Education Policy
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThis study examines College and Career Readiness (CCR) policy implementation through the lens of decoupling. We investigate how high schools have jointly implemented Career and Technical Education (CTE) and Industry-Based Certifications (IBCs), and whether there is evidence of curricular-… more →
Framework for Evaluating & Reforming Education Finance Systems
Tags: Equity, School reformThis paper presents a comprehensive framework for evaluating and reforming education finance systems to ensure equity, adequacy, and equal opportunity in publicly funded education. We summarize decades conceptual work, explaining our evolving understanding of the role and purpose of school… more →
Exploring the Move Away from ‘Zero -Tolerance’ Policies: Evidence from Restorative Justice Practices in Texas and Michigan Schools
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThis study examines the impact of statewide Restorative Justice (RJ) policy reforms in Michigan and Texas on student disciplinary outcomes and behavior, in light of increasing concerns over the negative effects of zero-tolerance policies. As schools move away from exclusionary discipline… more →
Teacher Strikes and the Demobilization of Republican Voters
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceProtests can mobilize both supporters and opponents. Extant research suggests that disruptive protests are particularly likely to mobilize opponents, yet strikes—one of the most disruptive forms of protest—have been largely absent from this literature. We use an original dataset of 716 teacher… more →
Do the Effects Persist? An Examination of Long-term Effects After Students Leave Turnaround Schools
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWhole-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 Effects of Teacher Strikes On Compensation, Working Conditions, and Productivity
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWe examine how teacher strikes in the United States affect compensation, working conditions, and productivity with an original dataset of 745 teacher strikes between 2007 and 2024. Using an event study framework, we find that the average strike leads to a 6% ($7,629) increase in combined annual… more →
The Lasting Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on K-12 Schooling: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Teacher Survey
This paper reports findings from a nationally representative survey of K-12 teachers in May 2023 that examines the potential long-term impacts of COVID-19 on public schooling. The findings suggest fundamental ways in which school operations, instructional practice and parent-teacher interaction… more →
How do hybrid school leaders measure program success? Experimental evidence from a national sample of hybrid schools
Hybrid school enrollments are trending up and many parents express a diverse range of reasons for enrolling their children in hybrid schools. Yet little is known about the pedagogical goals pursued by hybrid schools. We aim to help close this gap in the literature with a stated preferences… more →
Beyond the silver bullet: Unveiling multiple pathways to school turnaround
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceResearch on school improvement has accumulated an extensive list of factors that facilitate turnarounds at underperforming schools. Given that contextual or resource constraints may limit the possibilities of putting all of these factors in place, an important question is what is necessary and… more →
The Long Shadow of School Closures: Impacts on Students’ Educational and Labor Market Outcomes
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceEach year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation… more →
The Effect of Taxpayer-Funded Education Savings Accounts on Private School Tuition: Evidence from Iowa
Topics: School ChoiceTags: School reformDoes state implementation of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), which are voucher-like taxpayer-funded subsidies for children to attend private schools, increase tuition prices? We analyze a novel longitudinal dataset for all private schools in Iowa and Nebraska, neighboring states that adopted… more →
Next-Generation Teacher Evaluation in Rural Missouri: Main and Moderated Effects on Student Achievement and Effects-to-Expenditure Ratios
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTags: School reform, Rural educationWe extend teacher evaluation research by estimating a reformed evaluation system's plausibly causal average effects on rural student achievement, identifying the settings where evaluation works, and incorporating evaluation expenditures. That the literature omits these contributions is… more →
How the Engagement of High-Profile Partisan Officials Affects Education Politics, Public Opinion, and Polarization
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: School reformWhat happens to public opinion when prominent partisan officials intervene in education policy debates? We analyzed the results of 18 survey experiments conducted between 2009 and 2021 with nationally representative samples of U.S. adults. Each experiment explored the effect of an endorsement of… more →
Bending Without Breaking - COVID-19 Tests the Resilience of State Education Policymaking Institutions
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Covid-19 recovery, School reformCOVID-19 upended schooling across the United States, but with what consequences for the state-level institutions that drive most education policy? This paper reports findings on two related research questions. First, what were the most important ways state government education policymakers… more →