K-12 Education
Moving On Up? A Virtual School, Student Mobility, and Achievement
Virtual charter schools provide full-time, tuition-free K-12 education through internet-based instruction. Although virtual schools offer a personalized learning experience, most research suggests these schools are negatively associated with achievement. Few studies account for differential… more →
The Effect of Charter Schools on School Segregation
We conduct a comprehensive examination of the causal effect of charter schools on school segregation, using a triple differences design that utilizes between-grade differences in charter expansion within school systems, and an instrumental variable approach that leverages charter school opening… more →
Using a Factorial Design to Maximize the Effectiveness of a Parental Text Messaging Intervention
Parental text messaging interventions are growing in popularity to encourage at-home reading, school-attendance, and other educational behaviors. These interventions, which often combine multiple components, frequently demonstrate varying amounts of effectiveness, and researchers often cannot… more →
Politics, Markets, and Pandemics: Public Education’s Response to COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to examine how local governments respond to a public health crisis amid high levels of partisan polarization and an increasing tendency for local issues to become nationalized. As an arena that has, in recent years, been relatively separate… more →
Did Spending Cuts During the Great Recession Really Cause Student Outcomes to Decline?
Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong (2020a, JWX) provide evidence that education spending reductions following the Great Recession had widespread negative impacts on student achievement and attainment. This paper describes our process of duplicating JWX and highlights a variety of tests we employ to… more →
An Evaluation of Credit Recovery as an Intervention for High School Students Who Fail Courses
Credit recovery (CR) refers to online courses that high school students take after previously failing the course. Many have suggested that CR courses are helping students to graduate from high school without corresponding increases in academic skills. This study analyzes administrative data from… more →
Dual Language Education and Academic Growth
This paper reports math and reading academic achievement and growth in grades 2 to 8 for Hispanic participants and nonparticipants of a Spanish-English dual language program. I apply a piecewise multilevel growth model to administrative data from a large school district that enrolls a… more →
Education Leaders’ Knowledge of Causal Research Design: A Measurement Challenge
Federal policy has both incentivized and supported better use of research evidence by educational leaders. However, the extent to which these leaders are well-positioned to understand foundational principles from research design and statistics, including those that underlie the What Works… more →
The Dynamic Effects of a Summer Learning Program on Behavioral Engagement in School
The evidence that student learning declines sharply (or stagnates) during the summer has motivated a substantial interest in programs that provide intensive academic instruction during the summer. However, the existing literature suggests that such programs, which typically focus on just one or… more →
Promises and limitations of nudging in education
This article takes stock of where the field of behavioral science applied to education policy seems to be at, which avenues seem promising and which ones seem like dead ends. I present a curated set of studies rather than an exhaustive literature review, categorizing interventions by whether… more →
The role of student effort on performance in PISA: Revisiting the gender gap in achievement
International assessments are important to benchmark the quality of education across countries. However, on low-stakes tests, students’ incentives to invest their maximum effort may be minimal. Research stresses that ignoring students’ effort when interpreting results from low-stakes assessments… more →
The Economic Impacts of Learning Losses
The worldwide school closures in early 2020 led to losses in learning that will not easily be made up for even if schools quickly return to their prior performance levels. These losses will have lasting economic impacts both on the affected students and on each nation unless they are effectively… more →
Dual Identification? The Effects of EL Status on SPED Placement in an Equity-Focused District
This study examines the effects of English Learner (EL) status on subsequent Special Education (SPED) placement. Through a research-practice partnership, we link student demographic data and initial English proficiency assessment data across seven cohorts of test takers and observe EL and SPED… more →
How Can Released State Test Items Support Interim Assessment Purposes in an Educational Crisis?
State testing programs regularly release previously administered test items to the public. We provide an open-source recipe for state, district, and school assessment coordinators to combine these items flexibly to produce scores linked to established state score scales. These would enable… more →
Can Community Crime Monitoring Reduce Student Absenteeism?
In this paper we study the impact on student absenteeism of a large school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during students’ travel to and from school. We find that the program resulted in a 0.78… more →
Are Power Plant Closures a Breath of Fresh Air? Local Air Quality and School Absences
In this paper we study the effects of three large, nearly-simultaneous coal-fired power plant closures on school absences in Chicago. We find that the closures resulted in a 7 percent reduction in absenteeism in nearby schools relative to those farther away following the closures. For the… more →
Comprehensive Support and Student Success: Can Out of School Time Make a Difference?
StudentU is a comprehensive program that provides education, nutrition, and social support services to disadvantaged students outside of the regular school day. In this paper I investigate the effects of this multi-year program on the early high school outcomes of participating students by… more →
What Factors Drive Individual Misperceptions of the Returns to Schooling in Tanzania? Some Lessons for Education Policy
Evidence on educational returns and the factors that determine the demand for schooling in developing countries is extremely scarce. We use two surveys from Tanzania to estimate both the actual and perceived schooling returns and subsequently examine what factors drive individual misperceptions… more →
An Experimental Evaluation of Arts Field Trips
This paper presents results of a multi-visit, longitudinal experiment on the academic and social-emotional effects of arts-based field trips. We randomly assign fourth and fifth grade students to receive arts-based field trips throughout the school year or to serve as a control. Treatment… more →
Design Philanthropy: Challenges and Opportunities in the Evolution of Philanthropic Giving
Philanthropic investment in education has evolved considerably over the past several decades. This paper provides early evidence of another distinct adaptation, which we dub design philanthropy. In contrast to the macro-level structural reforms recently supported by large foundations,… more →