K-12 Education
A Multi-State, Student-Level Analysis of the Effects of the Four-Day School Week on Student Achievement and Growth
Four-day school weeks are becoming increasingly common in the United States, but their effect on students’ achievement is not well-understood. The small body of existing research suggests the four-day schedule has relatively small, negative average effects (~-0.02 to -0.09 SD) on annual,… more →
Replicating and Extending Effects of “Achievement Gap” Discourse
Scholars argue the “racial achievement gap” frame perpetuates deficit mindsets. Previously, we found teachers gave lower priority to racial equity when disparities were framed as “achievement gaps” versus “inequality in educational outcomes.” In this brief, we analyze data from two survey… more →
On the Threshold: Impacts of Barely Passing High-School Exit Exams on Post-Secondary Enrollment and Completion
Many states use high-school exit examinations to assess students’ career and college readiness in core subjects. We find meaningful consequences of barely passing the mathematics examination in Massachusetts, as opposed to just failing it. However, these impacts operate at different educational… more →
The Other Half of the Story: Does Excluding the Early Grades from School Ratings Matter?
Because high-stakes testing for school accountability does not begin until third grade, accountability ratings for elementary schools do not directly measure students’ academic progress in grades K through 2. While it is possible that children’s test scores in grades 3 and above are highly… more →
Heterogeneous Effects of Violence on Student Achievement
In this paper, I study the causal relationship between violence and human capital accumulation. Due to a power vacuum left in conflict zones of Colombia after the 2016 peace agreement, large spikes in violence were reported in the municipalities of the country dominated by the rebel group FARC.… more →
The Enduring Struggle of Standards-Based Reform: Lessons from a National Research Center on College and Career-Ready Standards
Standards have been at the heart of state and federal efforts to improve education for several decades. Most recently, standards-based reforms have evolved with a focus on more ambitious "college- and career-ready" (CCR) standards. This paper synthesizes the results of a seven-year national… more →
Rethinking Principal Effects on Student Outcomes
School principals are viewed as critical actors to improve student outcomes, but there remain important methodological questions about how to measure principals’ effects. We propose a framework for measuring principals’ contributions to student outcomes and apply it empirically using data from… more →
Modeling Item-Level Heterogeneous Treatment Effects with the Explanatory Item Response Model: Leveraging Online Formative Assessments to Pinpoint the Impact of Educational Interventions
Analyses that reveal how treatment effects vary allow researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to better understand the efficacy of educational interventions. In practice, however, standard statistical methods for addressing Heterogeneous Treatment Effects (HTE) fail to address the HTE that… more →
U.S. Middle School Mathematics Instruction, 2016
In recent decades, U.S. education leaders have advocated for more intellectually ambitious mathematics instruction in classrooms. Evidence about whether more ambitious mathematics instruction has filtered into contemporary classrooms, however, is largely anecdotal. To address this issue, we… more →
School reopening decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic: What can we learn from the emerging literature?
After near-universal school closures in the United States at the start of the pandemic, lawmakers and educational leaders made plans for when and how to reopen schools for the 2020-21 school year. Educational researchers quickly assessed how a range of public health, political, and demographic… more →
Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities
Teachers’ sense-making of student behavior determines whether students get in trouble and are formally disciplined.
Screening with Multitasking: Theory and Empirical Evidence from Teacher Tenure Reform
What happens when employers screen their employees but only observe a subset of output? We specify a model with heterogeneous employees and show that their response to the screening affects output in both the probationary period and the post-probationary period. The post-probationary impact is… more →
Linkage Between Fields of Concentration in High School Career-Technical Education and College Majors
In this descriptive study, we use longitudinal student-level administrative records from 4 cohorts of high school graduates in Kentucky to examine the extent to which students persist and attain post-secondary credentials in the CTE fields of concentration they choose in high school. To our… more →
How Much Do Early Teachers Matter?
We present new estimates of the importance of teachers in early grades for later grade outcomes, but unlike the existing literature that examines teacher “fade-out,” we directly compare the contribution of early-grade teachers to later year outcomes against the contributions of later year… more →
Out of the Gate, but Not Necessarily Teaching: A Descriptive Portrait of Early-Career Earnings for Those Who Are Credentialed to Teach
Prior work on teacher candidates in Washington State has shown that about two thirds of individuals who trained to become teachers between 2005 and 2015 and received a teaching credential did not enter the state’s public teaching workforce immediately after graduation, while about one third… more →
COVID-19, Online Learning, and Absenteeism in Detroit
How much school students attend is a powerful indicator of their well-being and a strong predictor of their future success in school. Prior research has documented the myriad in-school and out-of-school factors that contribute to high levels of student absenteeism, many emerging from the root… more →
Correspondence Measures for Assessing Replication Success
Given recent evidence challenging the replicability of results in the social and behavioral sciences, critical questions have been raised about appropriate measures for determining replication success in comparing effect estimates across studies. At issue is the fact that… more →
STEM Summer Programs for Underrepresented Youth Increase STEM Degrees
The federal government and many individual organizations have invested in programs to support diversity in the STEM pipeline, including STEM summer programs for high school students, but there is little rigorous evidence of their efficacy. We fielded a randomized controlled trial to study a… more →
Effectiveness of Tier 1 Content-Integrated Literacy Intervention on Early Elementary English Learners’ Reading Comprehension and Writing: Evidence from Randomized Controlled Trial
The current study replicated and extended the previous findings of content-integrated literacy intervention focusing on its effectiveness on first- and second-grade English learners’ (N = 1,314) reading comprehension, writing, vocabulary knowledge, and oral proficiency. Statistically significant… more →
The Politics of School Reopening during COVID-19: A Multiple Case Study of Five Urban Districts in the 2020-21 School Year
Purpose: Nearly all schools in the United States closed in spring 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze traditional public and charter school reopenings for the 2020-21 school year in five urban districts. We provide a rich and theoretically grounded… more →