K-12 Education
The Contributions of School and Neighborhood Factors to Student Attendance Following the COVID-19 Pandemic
Student attendance remains well below pre-COVID pandemic levels, yet districts lack evidence about which levers are most influential. Whether school and neighborhood contexts still account for meaningful variation in attendance, especially for students with weaker attendance histories, is an… more →
From the Right to Education to the Distribution of Resources: Testing U.S. School Finance Equity Metrics in Mexico, Brazil and France
Most national constitutions and international treaties guarantee a right to education, and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has warned that sharp geographic disparities in spending may constitute discrimination. Yet rights monitoring rarely tests whether resources within a… more →
School Impacts on Absenteeism in the High School Grades following the COVID-19 Pandemic: Identifying School Factors and Strategies for Improvement
Chronic absenteeism has increased sharply in U.S. high schools following the COVID-19 pandemic, with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) mirroring national trends. Although student attendance has long been recognized as a critical factor in academic success, persistently high chronic absenteeism rates… more →
Cost Efficiency of U.S. School Districts: Stochastic Frontier Evidence from the National Education Cost Model
I estimate the technical efficiency of U.S. school districts in producing middle-grades achievement with a stochastic frontier model built on the National Education Cost Model (NECM), which measures each district’s spending relative to the predicted cost of national-average outcomes. Because… more →
More than Just Suspension: Informal Discipline in K-12 Schools
In this paper we document the prevalence and distribution of informal disciplinary consequences in K-12 public schools and examine how they contribute to disparities in school discipline. Using administrative data from North Carolina, we first describe the landscape of informal consequences… more →
The Effects of Four-Day School Weeks in Texas
Four-day school weeks (FDSWs) have expanded rapidly in Texas in recent years. Districts cite teacher retention and recruitment as the primary motivation, though little is known about the impacts of FDSWs in this context. We study the effects of FDSW adoption on students and teachers in Texas… more →
Fathers as Caregivers: Peer Exposure to Household Gender Roles and Girls’ Beliefs and Achievement
Gender roles are shaped within families, but whether family gender-role arrangements extend beyond households and influence other children remains unclear. This paper studies whether exposure to peers from father-dominant caregiving households affects students’ gender beliefs and educational… more →
The Returns to Private Tutoring Centers
Private tutoring centers have expanded rapidly across the United States, yet there is little evidence on whether these centers improve student outcomes. Using business records on tutoring establishments linked to administrative data covering over five million public school students in Texas,… more →
How Much Do Principals Matter When Politicians Choose Them? Evidence from Dated Successions and Close Elections in Brazil
Estimates of how much school principals matter differ by an order of magnitude, in part because conventional estimators require principal identifiers and absorb sampling noise into the estimated dispersion. We identify the variance of principal-by-school effects without identifiers, using… more →
Legislating Literacy: Estimating the Impact of State-Level Science of Reading Reforms on Reading Test Scores
This study examines the extent to which state adoption of Science of Reading (SoR)-aligned policies was associated with changes in fourth-grade reading achievement. Using longitudinal state-level panel data from 2003-2024 and quasi-experimental difference-in-differences (DiD) methods, the study… more →
Screen or Barrier? Science of Reading Certification Exams and Teacher Supply in Texas
Twenty states now require prospective teachers to pass a standalone Science of Reading (SOR) exam. These exams restrict teacher supply as a barrier, and whether they are worth that cost depends on whether they also screen on teaching quality. This paper explores this tension in Texas' SOR exam,… more →
Integrated vs. Separated Schooling for Refugee Children: Long-Term Effects on Education and Assimilation
Does direct integration into native schools or temporary placement in separate schools better promote the education and cultural assimilation of refugee children? In the Netherlands, primary-school-aged refugee children are placed in either integrated or separated schools depending on their… more →
Designing Effective Public-Private Partnerships in Education
Publicly funded school choice is examined as a form of education public-private partnership (PPP), with cross-national differences interpreted through institutional design rather than private provision alone. A novel theoretical framework derives two indicators – alignment and coherence – from a… more →
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 →
Nowcasting Teacher Turnover
Policymakers need timely, local information about teacher turnover to make informed decisions, yet turnover data are typically several years out of date and lack the context to assess whether a district's turnover is high or low relative to similar districts. We assemble district-level teacher… more →