K-12 Education
Racial, linguistic, and economic diversity across schools with two-way dual language immersion programs: Evidence from Los Angeles Unified School District
Two-way dual language immersion programs (TWDL) aim to integrate English speakers and speakers of a partner language in the same classroom to receive content instruction in both languages. Stated goals include bilingualism and biliteracy, high academic achievement, and sociocultural competence.… more →
Experimental education research: clarifying why, how and when to use random assignment
Over the last twenty years, education researchers have increasingly conducted randomised experiments with the goal of informing the decisions of educators and policymakers. Such experiments have generally employed broad, consequential, standardised outcome measures in the hope that this would… more →
The Stickiness of Pandemic-Driven Disenrollment from Public Schools
The extent to which pandemic-induced public school enrollment declines will persist is unclear. Student-level data from Michigan through fall 2021 yields three relevant findings. First, relative to pre-pandemic trends, fall 2021 enrollment had partially recovered for low-income, Black, and… more →
Educational Spillover Effects of New English Learners in a New Destination State
The number of English learners enrolled in public schools has grown substantially in the United States over the past two decades. The growth is especially large in states in the South and Midwest that have not been traditional destinations for recent immigrants. In this study, we examine the… more →
The Role of School Climate in School Turnaround
School climate is critical to school effectiveness, but there is limited large-scale data available to examine the magnitude and nature of the relationship between school climate and school improvement. Drawing on statewide administrative data linked with unique teacher survey data in Michigan,… more →
"Trial and error" and "trudging up a hill": Superintendents' beliefs about and engagement in state education policymaking
This mixed methods research study explores superintendents’ beliefs about and engagement in state education policymaking processes. Through interviews with 58 superintendents and a national survey of superintendents, I find that many superintendents feel that their voices have value in state… more →
Should I Stay or Should I Go (Later)? Teacher Intentions and Turnover in Low-Performing Schools and Districts Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Teacher turnover is a perennial concern that became more salient during the COVID-19 pandemic as teacher-reported intentions to leave teaching escalated. The extent to which these teacher reports may translate into actual turnover remains an open question—especially given the pandemic context.… more →
School Turnaround in a Pandemic: An Examination of the Outsized Implications of COVID-19 for Low-Performing Schools and Their Communities
Turnaround schools and districts that were charged with making rapid and dramatic improvements before the COVID-19 pandemic struck faced considerable challenges carrying out improvement efforts during pandemic schooling. Using survey and administrative data collected during the pandemic, we… more →
The Effects of At-Scale Career Pathway Investments on the Transition from High School to College
In this study, we examine an at-scale effort to encourage the formation of career pathways in California, with the goal of estimating the initiative’s causal effects on community college enrollment. We leverage a discontinuous assignment rule used to award grant funds to obtain credibly causal… more →
Breaking Bad/GoodPatterns and Consequences of Public School Teachers’ Multiple Jobholding
Stagnating teacher salaries and the widening gap between public school teachers and similar workers have led to growing concerns that teachers will seek out additional employment—possibly impacting their instructional practice in the process. Using data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and… more →
Dual Language Program Expansion and Dispersion in the Context of Neighborhood Change, School Choice, and Enrollment Decline
Purpose. Bilingual programs in the United States, particularly two-way dual language immersion (TWDL) programs, have been implemented since the 1960s to support the education of English Learner-classified (EL-classified) and language minoritized students. Over the past decade, TWDL programs have… more →
When Does School Autonomy Improve Student Outcomes?
This paper presents new evidence on the benefits of decentralization in public education, focusing on a Chicago policy that granted school principals more control over budgeting and operations. Meta-analysis of similar policies shows a small average effect with significant … more →
Who Benefits from Remote Schooling? Self-Selection and Match Effects
We study the distributional effects of remote learning. Our approach combines newly collected data on parental preferences with administrative data from Los Angeles. The preference data allow us to account for selection into remote learning while also studying selection patterns and treatment… more →
COVID-19 and the Mental Health of Adolescents in British Columbia
We use linked individual-level data on school enrollment, physician services received, and prescription medications to measure the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated disruptions on mental health treatment received by adolescents in British Columbia. We also investigate whether these… more →
An Improved Method for Estimating School-Level Characteristics from Census Data
We propose a new method for estimating school-level characteristics from publicly available census data. We use a school’s location to impute its catchment area by aggregating the nearest n census block groups such that the number of school-aged children in those n block groups is just over the… more →
The Peer Effect of Persistence on Student Achievement
Little is known about the impact of peer personality on human capital formation. The paper studies the impact of peers’ persistence, a personality trait reflecting perseverance in the face of challenges and setbacks, on student achievement. Exploiting student-classroom random assignments in middle… more →
Implementation Matters: Generalizing Treatment Effects in Education
Targeted instruction is one of the most effective educational interventions in low- and middle-income countries, yet reported impacts vary by an order of magnitude. We study this variation by aggregating evidence from prior randomized trials across five contexts, and use the results to inform a… more →
Sibling Spillovers May Enhance the Efficacy of Targeted School Policies
Public policies often target individuals but within-family externalities of such interventions are understudied. Using a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of… more →
A Global Regression Discontinuity Design: Theory and Application to Grade Retention Policies
We use a marginal treatment effect (MTE) representation of a fuzzy regression discontinuity setting to propose a novel estimation approach. The estimator can be thought of as extrapolating a traditional fuzzy regression discontinuity estimate or as an observational study that adjusts for… more →
The Heterogeneous and Longer-Term Effects of the Great Recession on Public School District Finances
During the Great Recession and in the years that immediately followed, previous research has well-documented that U.S. public school districts receiving larger shares of their funding from state governments experienced larger declines in expenditures per student, as the GR impacted state tax… more →