Inequality
- .Categories: Student Well-Being and Mental Health
Tags: Equity, Juvenile justice, Student disciplineInvolvement 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 →
- .Categories: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
Tags: Instructional technology, High schools, Science educationThis study provides the first causal analysis of the impact of expanding Computer Science (CS) education in U.S. K-12 schools on students’ choice of college major and early career outcomes. Utilizing rich longitudinal data from Maryland, we exploit variation from the staggered rollout of CS… more →
- .Categories: Student Well-Being and Mental Health
Tags: Student discipline, Students with disabilitiesAcross the United States, suspension bans have become a popular policy response to address excessive and inequitable use of suspension in schools. However, there is little research that examines what strategies school staff employ when suspension is no longer permitted. I examine the effect of New… more → - .Categories: Staffing, Finance, and Operations
Tags: Efficacy, Returns to education and skillsThis paper identifies which investments in school facilities help students and are valued by homeowners. Using novel data on school district bonds, test scores, and house prices for 29 U.S. states and a research design that exploits close elections with staggered timing, we show that increased… more →
- .Categories: Student Learning
Tags: Early childhood education, TutoringThis paper presents the results from a randomized controlled trial of Chapter One, an early elementary reading tutoring program that embeds part-time tutors into the classroom to provide short bursts of 1:1 instruction. Eligible kindergarten students were randomly assigned to receive… more →
- .Categories: Standards, Assessment, and Curriculum
Tags: Career and technical educationCareer and Technical Education (CTE) prepares students for life beyond high school by providing practical labor skills, workforce credentials, and early post-secondary credits. States are required to report the number of CTE concentrators to receive federal Perkins funding, but systems of… more →
- .Categories: Policy, Politics, and Governance
Tags: School districts, School reformLimited scholarship examines districtwide turnaround reforms beyond the first few years of implementation or efforts to replicate successes in new contexts. We study Massachusetts, home to a state takeover of the Lawrence school district that led to academic gains in early reform years, and… more →
- .Categories: Student Learning
Tags: Mathematics education, High schools, Ability groupingAlthough existing research suggests that students benefit on a range of outcomes when they enroll in early algebra classes, policy efforts that accelerate algebra enrollment for large numbers of students often have negative effects. Explanations for this apparent contradiction often emphasize… more →
- .Categories: Student Learning
Tags: Mathematics education, International and comparative, Instructional practicesThis study reports the findings from a year-long randomized evaluation assessing the impact of assigning 62 classrooms in Nigeria to receive either blocked or interleaved math problem sets. Blocked practice sessions focused on a single skill at a time. Interleaved problem sets alternated between… more →
- .Categories: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
Tags: Student supports, Student engagementRecent work highlights the challenge of scaling evidence-based educational programs. We report on a randomized controlled trial of a financial incentive program designed to increase the efficacy of a national remote college advising initiative for high-achieving students. We find substantial… more →
- .Categories: Methods
Tags: Assessment, Learning environmentsLongitudinal studies can produce biased estimates of learning if children miss tests. In an application to summer learning, we illustrate how missing test scores can create an illusion of large summer learning gaps when true gaps are close to zero. We demonstrate two methods that reduce bias by… more →
- .Categories: Policy, Politics, and Governance
Tags: School reformThe Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) began a new wave of school accountability under which states draw on multiple measures to assess school quality. States have options in terms of how to weight components in their school quality indices and how many years of data to use to determine school… more →
- .Categories: Student Well-Being and Mental Health
Tags: Student discipline, Learning environmentsSchool districts historically approached conflict-resolution from a zero-sum perspective: suspend students seen as disruptive and potentially harm them, or avoid suspensions and harm their classmates. Restorative practices (RP) -- focused on reparation and shared ownership of disciplinary… more →
- .Categories: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
Tags: College readinessStudents’ college choices can affect their chances of earning a degree, but many lack the support to navigate the opaque college application and admissions process. This paper evaluates whether guaranteeing four-year college admissions based on transparent academic standards affected community… more →
- .Categories: Staffing, Finance, and Operations
Tags: Equity, School districtsSchool districts across the U.S. have adopted funding policies designed to distribute resources more equitably across schools. However, schools are also increasing external fundraising efforts to supplement district budget allocations. We document the interaction between funding policies and… more →
- .Categories: Methods
Tags: Teacher hiring and retention, Equity, Race, ethnicity, and educationDoes student-teacher match quality exist? Prior work has documented large disparities in teachers' impacts across student types but has not distinguished between sorting and causal effects as the drivers of these disparities. I propose a disparate value-added model and derive a novel measure of… more →
- .Categories: Student Learning
Tags: Early childhood education, Rural education, Child developmentPrior research has clearly established the substantial expected payoffs to investments in early childhood education. However, the ability to deliver early childhood programs differs across communities with access to high quality programing especially hard to establish in rural communities. We… more →
- .Categories: Student Well-Being and Mental Health
Tags: Student discipline, Equity, Race, ethnicity, and educationWe examine the impact of local labor market shocks and state unemployment insurance (UI) policies on student discipline in U.S. public schools. Analyzing school-level discipline data and firm-level layoffs in 23 states, we find that layoffs have little effect on discipline rates on average. However… more → - .Categories: Standards, Assessment, and Curriculum
Tags: Human capital, Assessment, College readinessIn response to widening achievement gaps and increased demand for post-secondary education, local and federal governments across the US have enacted policies that have boosted high school graduation rates without an equivalent rise in student achievement, suggesting a decline in academic… more →
- .Categories: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
Tags: College readiness, Equity, Higher educationComplexity and uncertainty in the college application process contribute to longstanding racial and socioeconomic disparities in enrollment. We leverage a large-scale experiment that combines an early guarantee of college admission with a proactive nudge, fee waiver, and structural application… more →