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School reform
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 →
Separation of Church and State Curricula? Public Standards, Private Values, and Textbook Content
Tags: Belonging, Culturally responsive schooling, Curriculum, Elementary schools, Equity, Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education, Human capital, Instructional design, Instructional practices, Instructional technology, LGBTQIA+ students, Parenting, Race, ethnicity, and education, Reading and literacy education, School reform, Science education, Social studies educationCurricula are a critical site of cultural transmission, yet we know little about the values conveyed in textbooks across educational settings or the forces that shape them. We examine textbooks from Texas and California public schools and religious-private and home schools spanning 1980-2022,… 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 →
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 →