K-12 Education
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 →
What can we learn from the research on public school reopening decisions in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Background: After the 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. As school reopening plans and data sets aggregating reopening… 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 →
Promises, Pitfalls, and Tradeoffs in Identifying Gifted Learners: Evidence from a Curricular Experiment
Disparities in gifted representation across demographic subgroups represents a large and persistent challenge in U.S. public schools. In this paper, we measure the impacts of a school-wide curricular intervention designed to address such disparities. We implemented Nurturing for a Bright… more →
How States Prioritize Educational Needs during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Assessing the Distribution of the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress in 2020 included significant aid to state education systems. These included direct aid to K-12 districts and higher education institutions, and funds to be used at the discretion of Governors through the Governor’s… more →
Does Teacher Professional Development Improve Student Learning? Evidence from Leading Educators’ Fellowship Model
Teachers are the most important school-specific factor in student learning. Yet, little evidence exists linking teacher professional development programs and the strategies or activities that comprise them to student achievement. In this paper, we examine a fellowship model for professional… more →
Racial Category Usage in Education Research: Examining the Publications from AERA Journals
How scholars name different racial groups has powerful salience for understanding what researchers study. We explored how education researchers used racial terminology in recently published, high-profile, peer-reviewed studies. Our sample included all original empirical studies published in the… more →
Variation in the Relationship between School Spending and Achievement: Progressive Spending Is Efficient
The equity-efficiency tradeoff and cumulative return theories predict larger returns to school spending in areas with higher previous investment in children. Equity – not efficiency – is therefore used to justify progressive school funding: spending more in communities with fewer financial… more →
Challenges and Tradeoffs of “Good” Teaching: The Pursuit of Multiple Educational Outcomes
The pursuit of multiple educational outcomes makes teaching a complex craft subject to potential conflicts and competing commitments. Using a dataset in which teachers were randomly assigned to students paired with videotapes of instruction, we both document and unpack such a tradeoff. Upper-… more →