K-12 Education
Teacher-Mediated Multimodal Platform and Math Achievement: Evidence from Goblins' Yearlong District Implementation
Despite the rapid adoption of AI-powered learning tools in K–12 classrooms, there is limited evidence about their effectiveness in improving student learning. This paper examines the usage of Goblins—a teacher-mediated multimodal AI math platform that allows students to type, draw, and speak… more →
Career ready or not? The relationship of WorkKeys scores, ACT scores, and high school GPAs with college and early-career outcomes
Growing efforts to ensure that students graduate high school both college- and career-ready raise a need for better understanding and measures of “career readiness.” We leverage data from one state (North Carolina) where nearly half of students take a college entrance exam (the ACT) in 11th… more →
The Impact of Exam Schools on Disadvantaged Students: Evidence from NYC’s Discovery Program
This paper studies the New York City Department of Education's Discovery Program, an affirmative action policy implemented to increase access to some of New York City’s most elite public high schools. The Discovery Program allocates reserve seats at New York City’s exam schools to disadvantaged… more →
Beyond the Special Education Gap: Differences in Special Education Expenditures Between Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools
Researchers and policymakers have long noted differences in disability enrollment and placement between charter schools and traditional public schools (TPSs), yet little is known about whether these differences correspond to special education expenditures. Using Texas administrative and… more →
Defaults, Discretion, and Local Capacity: District Leaders’ Accounts of Automatic English Learner Reclassification
Automatic policies, which produce a preferred outcome unless implementers act otherwise, are rare in K-12 education and have been studied almost entirely using quantitative methods. In 2019, Michigan replaced its district-led procedure for reclassifying students out of English learner (EL)… more →
Human-, GRM-, and LLM-Generated School-Improvement Leadership Scores from Missouri: Structural Bias and Concurrent and Predictive Validity
Head or assistant principal evaluation systems are widely deployed but rarely examined for validity, and AI scoring tools have entered K–12 workflows ahead of the evidence. We examine human supervisor ratings, Graded Response Model (GRM) rescaling, and large language model (LLM) scoring of 1,385… more →
Why Does Education Policy so Frequently Disappoint? Lessons from Teacher Evaluation
Decades of K–12 education reform — much of it focused on teaching — have produced a persistent paradox: policies grounded in strong evidence disappoint when scaled, even as some implementations achieve striking success. Teacher evaluation is the clearest case. Cincinnati, Dallas, Chicago, and… more →
A National Measure of School District Partisanship for the 2016 to 2024 Presidential Elections
Scholars increasingly interested in the governance of local school districts, which invites curiosity about the partisanship of their voting constituencies. Presently, researchers have to translate precinct-level or county-level votes to school district geographies using imprecise imputation… more →
Staffing, Retention, and Expenditures in the Four-Day School Week
School districts across the United States are increasingly adopting the four-day school week, often in the hope of addressing teacher staffing challenges. We examine the effects of the four-day week on non-teacher staffing and recruitment, and schoolwide expenditures in Missouri, where three in… more →
High School College-Conduciveness and Its Association with the Top Ten Percent Students’ Academic Profiles
High school college-conducive resources shape students’ college readiness, which may explain the relative disadvantage racialized minority and low-income students face in accessing selective universities. Texas Top Ten Percent Plan (TTP) aims to bridge this gap by conditioning admission on class… more →
Estimating the Expenditures Associated with Special Education: Evidence from Michigan
Using a 13-year panel of school districts in Michigan, this paper estimates the average expenditures associated with different disability category labels. Increasing the number of students with disabilities by 1 student in the average school district is associated with an increase in… more →
Tutor Traits and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
Tutors are increasingly central to school-based instruction, with the potential to personalize learning at scale. Little is known about which tutor characteristics predict effectiveness, limiting providers' and schools' recruiting, hiring, and retention strategies. Using random assignment of… more →
Do Civic Infrastructures Predict Student Outcomes? Comparing Grassroots and Professional Education Nonprofits
Local civic infrastructures—the networks of organizations, relations, and community resources supporting schools—can shape education policy and practice, yet evidence of their relationship to student outcomes remains limited. We examine this relationship using a novel panel dataset of US… more →
Why aren’t online learning programs working better in schools: Maybe they need to be more integrated with what is actually taught during whole classroom instruction?
Computer-assisted learning (CAL)—educational software providing instruction to help students learn concepts and skills—is ubiquitous in US schools. Despite meta-analyses suggesting benefits, national test scores have declined during rapid CAL adoption. This may reflect insufficient research on… more →
Assistant Principals’ Career Aspirations: Exploring the Supply Side of the School Leadership Pipeline
Most assistant principals (APs) seek to become principals in the future. However, little is known about why some APs aspire to the principalship while others wish to remain in the AP role. This study examines the factors that predict APs’ aspirations to the principalship, which is key to… more →
Revisiting Why Superintendents Turn Over: Understanding Pathways Out of School District Leadership
Research has examined many facets of superintendent turnover but offers an incomplete understanding of superintendents’ pathways out of the role. We pair administrative data on Tennessee superintendents over 15 years with hand-collected information about the reported reasons for their departures… more →
Superintendent (In)Stability and Student Achievement in the United States
Superintendents shape conditions for teaching and learning, yet the limited studies of their impact—concentrated in a few states and focused on superintendent turnover—find small or null effects on student achievement. Using more than 37,000 district-year records from national superintendents… more →
(How) Do We Teach Emotions?
Emotional intelligence constitutes a key component of human capital, shaped partially by educational materials. Using machine learning and generative AI tools, we examine emotional content in public-school textbooks and children’s literature. A stark mismatch emerges: text exposes children to a… more →
"How You Spend Your Money is Your Strategy": Education Spending and the Academic Achievement of Students with and without Disabilities in Virginia, 2018-2025
Virginia experienced a boost in federal and state education funding from 2020-2025 and launched the Virginia Literacy Act in 2023. These policy events prompted our study of the impact of education spending by school divisions on growth in academic pass rates in reading and mathematics for… more →
Can Early Exposure to the Teaching Profession Increase Teacher Supply and Diversity? New Evidence on the Teacher Pipeline
We examine whether early exposure to the teaching career has the potential to expand the size and diversity of new teacher supply. Exploiting the staggered expansion of high school education courses across Texas, we find little evidence that these courses increased new teacher supply or… more →