K-12 Education
Expanded High-Speed Broadband Internet Access at Home and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Federal Subsidy Program
Policymakers have argued that expanding home broadband would improve educational outcomes. However, prior studies report mixed, null, or negative effects on achievement, with limited post-pandemic evidence. Using district-level achievement and enrollment data from a national broadband subsidy… more →
When Youth Enter The Chat: An Epistemic Shift in the Validation of LLM-Based Measures of Student Talk
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used increasingly to measure aspects of student discourse (e.g. talk moves, collaboration, equity of voice) at scale. Typically, LLM-based measures of student talk use transcriptions of classroom conversations that only include verbal contributions, which… more →
What’s in Play: The Strategic and Symbolic Use of Racial Equity Frames When Racial Politics Shift
Shifting racial politics place substantial pressures on organizations to navigate whether and how to sustain DEI commitments. In this study, I examine how partnerships between public school districts and private school improvement organizations (SIOs) responded to shifting environmental… more →
Helping the Many by Tutoring the Few: The Social Multiplier of Early Literacy Instruction
Tutoring is almost always evaluated by randomizing students within schools, a design that differences out any spillover onto classmates. We instead randomize 81 Danish schools and 2,583 kindergartners, tutoring a few children in each and testing all. Decoding improved 0.38 standard deviations… more →
Local Signals in a Global Tournament: Information Frictions, Optimism, and College Completion
Families frequently receive local signals about children’s skills, such as class rank in high school, yet the college market in which most students ultimately compete is much broader. Using nationally-representative data, we show that student effort, parental investment, and beliefs about… more →
An Untappable Pipeline? Examining Why Many Educators with Administrative Licenses Do Not Pursue School Leadership
States' licensure requirements typically mean that new school principals and assistant principals must come from the pool of educators holding an administrative license. Yet if many license- holders are uninterested in leadership positions, even districts with large numbers of licensed educators… more →
The Effects of State-Level Loan Forgiveness Policies on Teacher Supply
The waning prestige of the teaching profession has fueled a decline in the number of aspiring teachers entering preparation programs, compounding staffing challenges already inherent to many schools. In this paper, I show that state-level loan forgiveness policies modestly increase the number of… more →
Unpacking Racial Disparities in School Spending: Why “progressiveness” and “comparability” are not enough
Studies of racial and economic disparities in school funding typically rely on simple spending comparisons or "progressiveness" measures that ignore variation in the cost of achieving common educational outcomes. This article argues that such approaches essentially ignore how much it costs… more →
Remediation or Roadblock? The Effects of Failing Virginia's Accountability Exams
Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL) system requires students to pass end-of-course exams to earn verified credits needed for high school graduation. Scoring below the passing cutoff may create a barrier to completing a high school degree, but it also triggers state-mandated remediation, which… more →
Estimating the Overall Effects of Statewide Early Literacy Policies: Evidence from Michigan
This paper evaluates the impacts of Michigan's statewide early literacy reform using a synthetic difference-in-differences approach. We estimate the policy’s effects on student achievement and grade retention and compare them to statewide literacy reforms in South Carolina and Mississippi. We… more →
Bidirectional associations between executive function and social behavior across childhood: A registered report using a nationally representative sample
Executive function (EF) refers to a set of cognitive skills involved in deliberate, goal-oriented behavior. Although research has established links between children’s EF and aspects of their social skills, it remains unclear how EF skills are related to specific social behaviors, such as… more →
Parents’ Biased Beliefs and Competitive Investments in Education: A Field Experiment
Using a field experiment in China, we demonstrate that parental investment decisions are affected by their beliefs about their peers’ investment levels, and that they often hold biased beliefs about these levels. When provided information about the true distribution of tutoring hours invested… more →
Virtual Tutoring with Computer-Assisted Learning: An Experiment in Take-Up and Learning
We explore the efficacy of an online after-school tutoring program that complements teacher-provided computer-assisted learning practice. The aim is to scaffold students struggling with online Khan Academy practice at school with low-cost, one-on-one virtual supervision for about an hour a week… more →
Making AI Tutoring Productive: Evidence from a Mastery-Based Math Practice Experiment
Large language models (LLMs) can make tutoring more scalable, but only if students use them to reason through mistakes rather than avoid effort. We study this question in a randomized field experiment with more than 6,000 middle-school students in Hamilton County Schools using NUMI, a research-… more →
One Click Away: AI Tutoring with Khanmigo in a Two-Year School Experiment
Generative AI has been promoted as the technology that could transform education by providing every student a personal tutor. We provide some of the first large-scale experimental evidence, from a two-year cluster randomized trial in 18 Tennessee middle schools in which randomly assigned… more →
Ethnic Studies Courses Across California High Schools: A Mixed-Method Analysis of Teacher-Intended Curricula
Ethnic Studies courses, which center the counternarratives of racialized communities, are rapidly expanding across California in advance of a high school graduation requirement for the class of 2029-30. However, content and pedagogical guidance for practitioners remains limited. To learn how… more →
The Role of Career Advising in High School in Shaping the Aspirations of First-Generation Students
College aspirations often form by 8th grade, yet first-generation students—those whose parents lack post-secondary education—miss out on resources continuing-generation peers use to make informed decisions about their futures. School-based career advising can help fill this gap. Using 2018 PISA… more →
Translating Policy into Opportunity: School Counselors and the Implementation of CTE-Focused Dual Enrollment Pathways
Dual enrollment programs have expanded rapidly in the United States as a mechanism to improve college readiness, accelerate time to credential, and support postsecondary transitions. Yet empirical research on dual enrollment has largely centered on academic coursework offered through community… more →
A Systematic Review of Research Designs Used to Evaluate State and Locally Funded Pre-K Programs
Expansions of state and locally funded pre-k programs in recent decades have been promoted by advocates citing strong research support. However, questions have been raised about how supportive the research base actually is. We conducted a systematic review of pre-k evaluation studies (from 2000-… more →
Who Belongs in Math? Gendered Peer Math Beliefs and Girls' Gender Beliefs, Math Beliefs, and Achievement
This paper studies how exposure to gendered peer math beliefs shapes girls' gender-math beliefs, their own math beliefs, and mathematics achievement. I exploit quasi-random variation in girls' exposure to peer math beliefs generated by random classroom assignment at entry into Chinese middle… more →