K-12 Education
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 →
Leveraging Large Language Models to Assess Short Text Responses
Educational practitioners and researchers often score short, unstructured text for the presence or strength of domain-specific constructs. Manual scoring, however, faces limitations, including time- and labor-intensiveness. Large language models (LLMs) offer an automated alternative to manual… more →
U.S. Schools’ Proximity to Environmental Hazard Sites: A National Analysis
We conduct a nationwide assessment of U.S. PreK-12 public and private schools’ proximity to known environmental hazard sites tracked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Superfund sites, Brownfields, and Toxics Release Inventory facilities. Prior research documents a range of negative… more →
The Effect of Air Pollution on Student Achievement: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence
Air pollution is one of the most pressing global public health challenges of the 21st century. This article presents a systematic review and meta-analysis of the best available evidence of the effect of air pollution on student achievement. A meta-analysis of 28 causal studies around the world… more →
The Chronic(les) of Absenteeism Measurement: Unpacking the Many Measures of Attendance and Evidence for a Lower Chronic Absenteeism Threshold
Chronic absenteeism has surged in recent years, drawing growing policy and research attention. However, a complicating factor often overlooked is that the measurement of absenteeism is inconsistent, with substantial researcher degrees of freedom. This study investigates how researchers’… more →
The Trade-off between Quality and Quantity: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Tutoring
High-dosage tutoring has the potential to substantially raise adolescent academic achievement. However, at scale, schools may not have the financial ability to deliver small-group tutoring frequently. In this paper, I test the relative importance of group size (quality) versus tutoring frequency… more →
The Nation’s Achievement Inequality Report Card: An Assessment of Test Score and Equality Trends in Traditional Public, Charter, Catholic, and Department of Defense Schools
We present a descriptive comparison of trends in achievement and inequality in traditional public, public charter, Catholic, and Department of Defense schools in the U.S. Our sample includes 6,155,570 observations for 4th and 8th graders in math and reading between 2005 and 2024. We focus on… more →
A Longitudinal Study of External Contract Teacher Employment in Washington State School Districts
This study examines the phenomenon of external teacher contracting in Washington State schools. Using administrative data, we analyze shifting patterns of employment among external contract teachers. External contract teachers now represent a significant portion of the workforce in a few… more →
Mapping the Mechanisms of Interdisciplinary Learning Transfer from Reading to Math Achievement: Evidence from a Large-Scale Randomized Controlled Trial
Far transfer---the application of learning across distant domains---remains elusive in intervention research, and even when it is found, its mechanisms remain unclear or unexplored. This study analyzes data from the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE), a sustained content literacy intervention… more →
Gifted Identification Across the Distribution of Family Income
Currently, 6.1 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive gifted education. Using education and IRS data that provide information on students and their family income, we show pronounced differences in who schools identify as gifted across the distribution of family income. Under 4… more →
School-Based Disability Identification Varies by Student Family Income
Currently, 18 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive additional supports through the identification of a disability. Socioeconomic status is viewed as central to understanding who gets identified as having a disability, yet limited large-scale evidence examines how disability… more →
COVID-19, School District Operations, and Student Academic Performance in Virginia
We use longitudinal student-level data and interrupted time series methods to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mathematics achievement among 3rd-8th grade students in Virginia, a state that offered particularly low levels of access to in-person learning in the school reopening… more →
The Effect of Four-Day School Week Adoption on Teacher Retention and Sorting
As teacher shortages worsen across the U.S., many school districts have implemented a unique solution to attract and retain effective teachers: switching from the traditional five-day school week to a four-day school week (4DSW). I use 17 years of teacher-level employment data from Texas in a… more →