K-12 Education
The Effects of An Automatic Notification Tool to Increase Participation in Advanced High School Courses: Results from a Large-Scale Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial
Taking advanced courses in high school is associated with many positive high school and college outcomes. States and school districts are increasingly interested in more systematic approaches to identify qualified students for advanced course work. We developed an automatic notification tool,… more →
Math coursetaking trajectories in high school during the COVID-19 disruptions to schooling
Using student-level transcript data and information about instructional mode among public high school students in Massachusetts, this study examines the impact of disruptions to in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ math coursetaking trajectories. We find that rates of… more →
The Language of Closure: Examining Racial Differences in How A Community Discusses School Closure Metrics
School closures in urban districts disproportionately affect marginalized communities, yet community input often goes unanalyzed or is reduced to simple frequency counts. This study applies BERTopic, a neural topic modeling approach, to analyze 4,159 suggestions from 2,006 community members… more →
Are Work-Based Professional Skills Associated with Postsecondary Entrance and Persistence? Novel Evidence from the Cristo Rey Network
Professional skills such as initiative, communication, and adaptability are thought to shape postsecondary success, but most evidence comes from self- or teacher-reported measures collected in school settings. This study uses employer ratings of students’ professional skills gathered through… more →
Testing frequency and student achievement: A systematic review
School-based testing is widely used for monitoring students’ academic progress. Proponents argue that testing ensures accountability and guides teachers and managers, whereas opponents point to adverse consequences such as teaching to the test, and frequent testing creating anxiety and stress.… more →
Not Too Young to Notice: The Early Emergence of Racial Disparities in Elementary Students’ School Climate Perceptions
Scholarship on school climate often fails to explore the perspectives of elementary-school students. To fill this gap, we use survey-data from Georgia to examine racial disparities in elementary-school students’ school climate perceptions, how they vary over time, and the factors that associate… more →
The Consequences of Cellphone Restrictions in Classrooms
Schools are increasingly restricting cellphones worldwide amid concerns about achievement and mental health, yet causal evidence on school-level bans remains mixed. We examine cellphone restrictions in Chile before the pandemic, where teacher discretion over cellphone use generated classroom-… more →
Cheapskin Effects? The Heterogeneous Value of Industry-Recognized Certificates Earned by High School Students
Human capital theory and signaling models posit that educational credentials convey information about workers’ skills, producing discrete labor market returns beyond years of schooling. While extensive evidence documents these “sheepskin effects” for degrees, far less is known about industry-… more →
Digital Incentives in Surveys: Response Rates and Sociodemographic Effects in a Large-Scale Parental Nudge Intervention
This study examines how digital incentives influence survey participation and engagement in a large randomized controlled trial of parents across six school districts. We test how incentive amount and information about vendor options affect response behavior and explore differences by language… more →
From Statistical to Analytic Generalization: New Directions for Qualitative Research on Teacher Retention
Quantitative research has played a prominent role in studies and policies focused on teacher retention. However, the field would benefit from qualitative research that utilizes analytic generalization, an approach where researchers generalize from empirical data by creating theoretical… more →
IDEA-Aligned Estimates of Racial Disproportionality in Special Education versus Conventional Approaches: A cautionary note on included-variable bias when achievement and socioeconomic status proxy for special education need
Racial disproportionality in special education is a contested policy space. Federal oversight has traditionally focused on minority over-representation through IDEA’s significant disproportionality framework. However, observational studies report that Black students appear under-identified based… more →
Is Teacher Effectiveness Fully Portable? Evidence from the Random Assignment of Transfer Incentives
We examine how performance changes when teachers transfer across very different school contexts. The Talent Transfer Initiative program created a rare natural experiment to study such transfers by randomly assigning low-achieving schools the ability to offer high-performing teachers at higher-… more →
Capturing Voter Turnout at the School District Level: Validating a Geospatial Strategy
School boards are critical sites of education policymaking, yet scholarship on these institutions is scarce because of severe data limitations. We introduce a geospatial strategy and open-source R package, called “Query, Overlay, Recover” (QOR), that generates high-quality estimates of voter… more →
Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India: Evidence from 1.5m Neighborhoods
We study residential segregation and access to public services across 1.5 million urban and rural neighborhoods in India. Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards, and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the U.S. Within cities, public facilities… more →
Classroom Composition Affects Teacher Performance Ratings
Teacher evaluations should reflect teaching performance rather than the characteristics of the students assigned to a teacher. Exploiting naturally occurring year-to-year variation in classroom composition within teachers, this paper examines whether teacher performance ratings assigned by… more →
Why Fadeout is (Probably) Worse Than We Think: Adjusting for Correlated Sampling Error in Meta-Analyses of Behavioral Interventions
The extent to which intervention effects persist or fade over time is an important question in the behavioral sciences. In meta-analysis, persistence is typically assessed by meta-regressing effect sizes at followup on effect sizes at endline. While common, the standard meta-regression does not… more →
Who Is Newly Absent? Racial Inequities in Post-Pandemic Transitions into Chronic and Severe Absence in Georgia
Chronic absenteeism rose sharply following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and has declined only modestly since, yet most evidence remains cross-sectional and cannot distinguish persistence from redistribution in absence behavior. Using a cohort transition framework, the analysis compares… more →
What are schools doing to improve attendance? Evidence from Michigan and Georgia
This 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 lasting impact of youth bullying exposure on adult labor market outcomes: An inter-disciplinary review of the literature
Higher direct and indirect exposure to bullying has been linked to long-term increases in healthcare costs, worse mental health, and poorer social relationships as well as a reduction in human capital accumulation and economic productivity. Consequently, preventing and mitigating the long-… more →
Transitioning Teacher Talent: An Ethnoracial Descriptive Portrait of the Paraprofessional-to-Teacher Pipeline in New York City Public Schools
Districts nationwide seek to diversify the educator workforce, yet pathways for paraprofessionals—typically more ethnoracially and linguistically diverse than the general teacher pipeline—remain understudied. Using administrative data from New York City Public Schools (NYCPS), this study… more →