K-12 Education
Resegregated Schools, Racial Attitudes, and Long-Run Partisanship: Evidence for White Backlash
Brown v. Board (1954) catalyzed a nationwide effort by the federal judiciary to desegregate public schools by court order, representing a major achievement for the U.S. civil rights movement. Four decades later, courts began dismissing schools from desegregation decrees in a staggered fashion,… more →
The Effects of Teacher-Student Demographic Matching on Social-Emotional Learning
A growing body of research shows that students benefit when they demographically match their teachers. However, little is known about how matching affects social-emotional development. We use student-fixed effects to exploit changes over time in the proportion of teachers within a school grade… more →
Connected Networks in Principal Value-Added Models
A growing literature uses value-added (VA) models to quantify principals' contributions to improving student outcomes. Principal VA is typically estimated using a connected networks model that includes both principal and school fixed effects (FE) to isolate principal effectiveness from fixed… more →
Choosing Alone? Peer Similarity in High School Choices
We provide a descriptive analysis of within-school and neighborhood similarity in high school applications in New York City. We depart from prior work by examining similarity in applications to specific schools rather than preferences for school characteristics. We find surprisingly low… more →
Health Equity, Schooling Hesitancy, and the Social Determinants of Learning
At least 25 million K-12 students in the U.S.—disproportionately children of color from low-income families—have been physically out of school for a full year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These children are at risk of significant academic, social, mental, and physical harm now and in the long-… more →
Understanding Performance in Test Taking: The Role of Question Difficulty Order
Standardized assessments are widely used to determine access to educational resources with important consequences for later economic outcomes in life. However, many design features of the tests themselves may lead to psychological reactions influencing performance. In particular, the level of… more →
The Populist-Burkean Dimension in U.S. Public Opinion
Scholars differ as to whether populist beliefs are a discourse or an ideology resembling conservatism or liberalism. Research has shown that a belief in popular sovereignty and a distrust of public officials are core components of populism. Its antithesis is defined as Burke’s claim that… more →
Inequality in Public School Spending Across Space and Time
This paper takes a novel time series perspective on K-12 school spending. About half of school spending is financed by state government aid to local districts. Because state aid is generally income conditioned, with low-income districts receiving more aid, state aid acts as a mechanism for risk… more →
The Returns to Public Library Investment
Local governments spend over 12 billion dollars annually funding the operation of 15,000 public libraries in the United States. This funding supports widespread library use: more than 50% of Americans visit public libraries each year. But despite extensive public investment in libraries,… more →
High-Impact Tutoring: State of the Research and Priorities for Future Learning
Research consistently demonstrates that tutoring interventions have substantial positive effects on student learning. As a result, tutoring has emerged as a promising strategy for addressing COVID-related learning loss and affording greater educational opportunities for students living in… more →
Equal Time for Equal Crime? Racial Bias in School Discipline
Well-documented racial disparities in rates of exclusionary discipline may arise from differences in hard-to-observe student behavior or bias, in which treatment for the same behavior varies by student race or ethnicity. We provide evidence for the presence of bias using statewide administrative… more →
The Impact of Summer Programs on Student Mathematics Achievement: A Meta-Analysis
We present results from a meta-analysis of 37 contemporary experimental and quasi-experimental studies of summer programs in mathematics for children in Grades pre-K-12, examining what resources and characteristics predict stronger student achievement. Children who participated in summer programs… more →
Charter Schools and the Segregation of Students by Income
The segregation of students by socioeconomic status has been on the rise in American public education between schools during the past several decades. Recent work has demonstrated that segregation is also increasing within schools at the classroom level. In this paper, we contribute to our… more →
Unequal Opportunity Spreaders: Higher COVID-19 Deaths with Later School Closure in the U.S.
Mixed evidence on the relationship between school closure and COVID-19 prevalence could reflect focus on large-scale levels of geography, limited ability to address endogeneity, and demographic variation. Using county-level CDC COVID-19 data through June 15, 2020, two matching strategies address… more →
Public Investments and Class Gaps in Parents’ Developmental Expenditures
Families and governments are the primary sources of investment in children, proving access to basic resources and other developmental opportunities. Recent research identifies significant class gaps in parental investments that contribute to high levels of inequality by family income and… more →
Determinants of Ethnic Differences in School Modality Choices during the COVID-19 Crisis
A growing body of research and popular reporting shows racial differences in school modality choices during the COVID-19 crisis, with white students more likely to attend school in person. This in-person learning gap raises serious equity concerns. We use unique panel survey data to… more →
Intersecting Inequalities: Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Differences in Math Achievement and School Contexts in California
Past research extensively documents inequalities in educational opportunity and achievement by students’ race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status (SES). Less scholarship focuses on how race/ethnicity and SES interact and jointly contribute to educational inequalities. We advance this burgeoning… more →
Measuring Teaching Practices at Scale: A Novel Application of Text-as-Data Methods
Valid and reliable measurements of teaching quality facilitate school-level decision-making and policies pertaining to teachers. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of 4th- and 5th-grade English language arts classes, we apply novel text-as-data methods to develop automated measures… more →
Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students
We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among… more →
Kumon In: The Recent, Rapid Rise of Private Tutoring Centers
The increasing prevalence of private tutoring has received minimal scholarly attention in the United States. We use over 25 years of geocoded data on the universe of U.S. private tutoring centers to estimate the size and growth of this industry and to identify predictors of tutoring center… more →