K-12 Education
Peer Income Exposure Across the Income Distribution
Children from families across the income distribution attend public schools, making schools and classrooms potential sites for interaction between more- and less-affluent children. However, limited information exists regarding the extent of economic integration in these contexts. We merge… more →
The Costs and Benefits of North Carolina’s Early College High School Model
Early colleges are high schools that blend the high school and college experiences. They have been shown to increase college enrollment and completion; however less is known about the costs of the early college model relative to traditional high schools. We leverage randomized assignment of… more →
Leveraging Quarterly Workforce Indicators to Analyze Teacher Labor Market Dynamics: Inequitable Trends in Educator Turnover
Educator labor markets vary considerably across the country and can change quickly during recessions. We use data from the Quality Workforce Indicators (QWI) on educators in Elementary and Secondary Schools from 2000-01 to 2022-23. We demonstrate how to transform the quarter-level data in the… more →
Combining Early Grade Assessments to Study Literacy Skills: Addressing the Variability in Tests Taken across Schools and Students
There is considerable variability in the literacy assessments taken in Kindergarten through second grade, across schools and between multilingual learners and other students, and within students over time. This makes it difficult to study changes in students’ acquisition of ELA skills in these… more →
Improving College Readiness in Mathematics in the Context of a Comprehensive High School Reform
This mixed methods experimental study examined the impacts of the Early College High School model on students’ college readiness in mathematics measured by their success in college preparatory mathematics courses in the 9th through 11th grades, and disaggregated for academically prepared and… more →
State Intervention and Racialized Policy Aversion in Michigan's Black School Districts
For 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
This 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
This 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 →
Beyond School Police Officers: Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Exposure to a Fuller Range of School Disciplinary Personnel
Using data from the 2017–18 and 2020–21 Civil Rights Data Collection, we document dis-parities in exposure to disciplinary staff across US high schools and geographic levels. Black and Hispanic students are exposed to 1.1 and 0.8 more disciplinary personnel than White students, respectively,… more →
Results from NCME Survey on Revisions to the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing
The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing have served as a cornerstone for best practices in assessment. As the field evolves, so must these standards, with regular revisions ensuring they reflect current knowledge and practice. The National Council on Measurement in Education (… more →
The Prevalence of LGBTQ+ Teachers in the U.S.
Due to limited data, we know little about the prevalence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) educators. Using the American Community Survey and Census Pulse, we examine the representation of LGBTQ+ individuals in PK-12 teaching. We find that 3.3-3.5 percent of LGBTQ+… more →
Inequities and Impacts of Investments in New School Facilities
There is growing evidence that investment in school facilities, and new school construction in particular, can improve K-12 student outcomes, particularly for low-income students. Funding for school infrastructure, however, is inequitably distributed. Moreover, given a lack of national data on… more →
The Correlated Proxy Problem: Why Control Variables can Obscure the Contribution of Selection Processes to Group-Level Inequality
Whether selection processes contribute to group-level disparities or merely reflect pre-existing inequalities is an important societal question. In the context of observational data, researchers, concerned about omitted-variable bias, assess selection-contributing inequality via a kitchen-sink… more →
The (Conference) Room Where it Happens: Explaining Disproportional Representation in Gifted and Talented Education
The current study leveraged comprehensive data from a large school district to better understand the degree to which disproportional representation in gifted education can be explained by mean assessment score differences across racial and socioeconomic groups.
Addressing Threats to Validity in Supervised Machine Learning: A Framework and Best Practices for Education Researchers
Given the rapid adoption of machine learning methods by education researchers, and growing acknowledgement of their inherent risks, there is an urgent need for tailored methodological guidance on how to improve and evaluate the validity of inferences drawn from these methods. Drawing upon an… more →
How Not to Fool Ourselves About Heterogeneity of Treatment Effects
Researchers across many fields have called for greater attention to heterogeneity of treatment effects—shifting focus from the average effect to variation in effects between different treatments, studies, or subgroups. True heterogeneity is important, but many reports of heterogeneity… more →
On-the-Job Learning: How Peers and Experience Drive Productivity among Teachers
Workers learn on the job from both repetition and peers. Less understood is how specific types of experience and peer characteristics affect on-the-job learning. This likely differs by context (e.g., occupation, tasks, or roles). Absent such knowledge, it is unclear how to optimally… more →
The Differential Sorting of Disadvantaged Students in the Competitive K-12 Market
School choice options offer potential educational gains for disadvantaged students, but do they take advantage of such options? I study the sorting patterns of students with prior child welfare reports (12 percent of incoming kindergartners) across traditional public, magnet, charter, and… more →
School Calendars and Student Obesity
Ample evidence documents rising student obesity in summer months and falling student obesity during the school year. One theory for this pattern is that out-of-school days lack some of the structure and health-promoting behaviors that schools provide. Given this observed seasonal pattern, a… more →
Making the Grade: Accounting for Course Selection in High School Transcripts with Item Response Theory
We use student-level administrative data from Delaware for 43,767 high school students across five 12th grade cohorts from 2017 to 2021. We apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to high school transcript data, treating courses as items and grades as ordered responses, to estimate both student… more →