K-12 Education
Overcoming the Protestor’s Dilemma: How Teacher Strikes Demobilize Opponents
The “Protestor’s Dilemma” refers to the paradox faced by protestors where their disruptive actions, while necessary to gain public attention and support, could potentially provoke backlash and weaken the very support they seek to gain. How can protestors overcome this dilemma? Teacher strikes… more →
High School Career and Technical Education Finance: Impact of State-Level Policy Changes
States are increasingly adopting changes to K-12 funding systems in order to promote and encourage student engagement in secondary-level career and technical education (CTE). Two of the most prevalent reforms include: a) establishing tiered weights for CTE in school funding formulas based on the… more →
Teacher Effectiveness in Remote Instruction
The effect of remote learning on student performance has been a frequent topic of research and discussion in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet little is known about the impact of remote instruction on the performance of teachers. This study documents how relative effectiveness of… more →
Using Meta-Analytic Data to Examine Fadeout and Persistence of Intervention Impacts on Constrained and Unconstrained Skills
Recent reviews of the educational intervention literature have noted patterns of intervention impact fadeout on cognitive skills, whereby skill trajectories between children in the intervention and control group converge in the years following the end of the intervention. Some early childhood… more →
Differential Responses to Teacher Evaluation Incentives: Expectancy, Race, Experience, and Task
Teacher evaluation systems and their associated incentives have produced fairly mixed results. Our analyses are motivated by theory and descriptive evidence that accountability systems are highly racialized, and that individuals are less likely to respond to incentives when they have low… more →
The Role of Comprehensive Student Support Interventions during School Turnaround
The persistence of underperformance in schools within large urban districts remains a significant challenge in the U.S. K-12 education system. Education policymakers have enacted legislation aiming at improving these schools through ``turnaround'' initiatives. However, students attending… more →
Do Innovative Career Pathways in Massachusetts High Schools Promote Equitable Access to Higher Education?
Two persistent shortcomings of the American labor market are the wage gaps and unequal unemployment rates that exist between racial groups. More specifically, Black and Latinx high school graduates earn less and are more likely to be unemployed than their White counterparts, on average. Likewise… more →
I know my rights? Iowa Senate File 496, book bans, and the First and Fourteenth Amendments
This instrumental case study explores 31 Iowan educators’ and board of education members’ perceptions of the ways the state’s book ban law, Senate File 496 influenced school information systems. Mathisen’s (2015) informational justice conceptual framework guided data analysis. The three key… more →
Expanding School Counseling: The Impacts of California Funding Changes
Counselors are a common school resource for students navigating complicated and consequential education choices. However, most students have limited access to school counselors. We study one of the largest U.S. policies to increase access to school counselors - California's Supplemental School… more →
What’s the Goal Here? Educator’s Perspectives of Iowa’s Senate File 496 on School Mental Health Systems
Iowa's Senate File 496 requires parent permission to formally survey students about their mental health, bans the discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in schools before 7th grade, mandates schools obtain parental permission to use a nick name, and bans any books that depict or… more →
Same Idea, Shifting Standards: An Experimental Study of Racial-Ethnic Biases in Ambitious Math Teaching
Teacher expectations and judgments about student capabilities are predictive of student achievement, yet such judgments may be influenced by salient dimensions of student identity and invite biases. Moreover, ambitious math teaching may also invite teacher biases due to the emphasis on student-… more →
Overpoliced? A Descriptive Portrait of School-Based Targeted Police Interventions in New York City
This study provides a descriptive analysis of police intervention as a response to student behavior in New York City public schools. We find that between the 2016/17 and 2021/22 academic years, arrests and juvenile referrals decreased while non-detainment-based and psychiatric police… more →
Tutor CoPilot: A Human-AI Approach for Scaling Real-Time Expertise
Generative AI, particularly Language Models (LMs), has the potential to transform real-world domains with societal impact, particularly where access to experts is limited. For example, in education, training novice educators with expert guidance is important for effectiveness but expensive,… more →
Unpacking the Impacts of a Youth Behavioral Health Intervention: Experimental Evidence from Chicago
Racial disparities in violence exposure and criminal justice contact are a subject of growing policy and public concern. We conduct a large-scale, randomized controlled trial of a six-month behavioral health intervention combining intensive mentoring and group therapy designed to reduce criminal… more →
Falling Behind as Peers Age Up: The Effects of Peer Age on Student Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Outcomes
Understanding the factors that influence student outcomes is crucial for both parents and schools when designing effective educational strategies. This paper explores the impact of peer age on both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes using a randomized sample of middle school students. By… more →
Does Charter School Autonomy Improve Matching of Teacher Attributes with Student Needs?
We examine the efficiency of traditional school districts versus charter schools in providing students with teachers who meet their demographic and education needs. Using panel data from the state of Michigan, we estimate the relationship between enrollment of Black, Hispanic, special education… more →
Framing the pandemic: Tracking educational problem formulation, Spring 2020-Fall 2021
We use data from the applications North Carolina public school districts and charter schools submitted for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) to investigate the sense that educational leaders made of the pandemic as it unfolded. LEAs understood the pandemic as a… more →
Understanding the Association Between Educational Experiences and Economic and Social Mobility: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997
Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, we examine differences in educational experiences and in social and economic mobility for youths experiencing poverty relative to their more affluent peers. We also explore the extent to which different educational experiences are… more →
How and Why Racial Isolation Affects Education Costs & the Provision of Equal Educational Opportunity
This article provides a review of prior empirical work exploring whether and to what extent school district racial composition affects the costs associated with providing equal educational opportunity to achieve a common set of outcomes. This prior work mainly involves education cost function… more →
Using Gaussian Process Regression in Two-Dimensional Regression Discontinuity Designs
Sometimes a treatment, such as receiving a high school diploma, is assigned to students if their scores on two inputs (e.g., math and English test scores) are above established cutoffs. This forms a multidimensional regression discontinuity design (RDD) to analyze the effect of the educational… more →