K-12 Education
Effectiveness Research for Teacher Education
Despite calls for more evidence regarding the effectiveness of teacher education practices, causal research in the field remains rare. One reason is that we lack designs and measurement approaches that appropriately meet the challenges of causal inference in the context of teacher education… more →
Coal Use and Student Performance
We examine the effect of air pollution from power production on students' cognitive outcomes by leveraging year-to-year production variation, wind patterns, and plant closures. We find that every one million megawatt hours of coal-fired power production decreases student performance in schools… more →
Bricks and Mortar vs. Computers and Modems: The Impacts of Enrollment in K-12 Virtual Schools
The COVID-19 pandemic has put virtual schooling at the forefront of policy concerns, as millions of children worldwide shift to virtual schooling with hopes of “slowing the spread”. Given the emergency shift to online education coupled with the large increase in demand for virtual education over… more →
Can Greater Access to Education Be Inequitable? New Evidence from India's Right to Education Act
India took a decisive step toward universal basic education by proclaiming a constitutionally-guaranteed Right to Education (RTE) Act in 2009 that called for full access of children aged 6-14 to free schooling. This paper considers the offsetting effects to RTE from induced expansion of private… more →
The Non-Democratic Roots of Mass Education: Evidence from 200 Years
Because primary education is often conceptualized as a pro-poor redistributive policy, a common argument is that democratization increases its provision. But primary education can also serve the goals of autocrats, including redistribution, promoting loyalty, nation-building, and/or… more →
How Does Minority Political Representation Affect School District Administration and Student Outcomes?
We employ a regression discontinuity design leveraging close school board elections to investigate how the racial and ethnic composition of California school boards affects school district administration and student achievement. We find some evidence that increases in minority representation… more →
Stress Test: Examining the Evolution of Teachers’ Mental Health Over Time
Teaching is often assumed to be a relatively stressful occupation and occupational stress among teachers has been linked to poor mental health, attrition from the profession, and decreased effectiveness in the classroom. Despite widespread concern about teachers’ mental health, however, little… more →
Experimental Evidence on Teachers' Racial Bias in Student Evaluation: The Role of Grading Scales
A vast research literature documents racial bias in teachers’ evaluations of students. Theory suggests bias may be larger on grading scales with vague or overly-general criteria versus scales with clearly-specified criteria, raising the possibility that well-designed grading policies may… 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, but conventional classroom observations are costly, prone to rater bias, and hard to implement at scale. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of 4th- and 5th… more →
Status, Growth, and Perceptions of School Quality
States and districts are increasingly incorporating measures of achievement growth into their school accountability systems, but there is little research on how these changes affect the public’s perceptions of school quality. We conduct a nationally representative online survey experiment to… more →
Experimental Effects of “Achievement Gap” News Reporting on Viewers’ Racial Stereotypes, Inequality Explanations, and Inequality Prioritization
The “achievement gap” has long dominated mainstream conversations about race and education.
The Forgotten 20 Percent: Achievement and Growth in Rural Schools Across the Nation
Nearly one in five U.S. students attends a rural school, yet we know very little about achievement gaps and academic growth in rural schools. This study leverages a unique dataset that includes longitudinal test scores for more than five million 3rd to 8th grade students in approximately 17,000… more →
Matching Methods for Clustered Observational Studies in Education
Many interventions in education occur in settings where treatments are applied to groups. For example, a reading intervention may be implemented for all students in some schools and withheld from students in other schools. When such treatments are non-randomly allocated, outcomes across the… more →
The Design of Clustered Observational Studies in Education
Clustered observational studies (COSs) are a critical analytic tool for educational effectiveness research. We present a design framework for the development and critique of COSs. The framework is built on the counterfactual model for causal inference and promotes the concept of… more →
Catching up or Falling Behind: Measuring Middle School Achievement Trajectories for College Readiness
This study presents a framework that uses academic trajectories in the middle grades for identifying students in need of intervention and providing targeted support. We apply a set of academic college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students in 5900 schools… more →
The Effects of Early College Opportunities on English Learners
English Learners (ELs) lag behind their peers in postsecondary attainment. As the EL population in the U.S. continues to grow, so does concern over their underrepresentation in higher education. Research shows that Early College High Schools have a significant impact on high school and college… more →
Teacher Evaluation, Ambitious Mathematics Instruction, and Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching: Evidence from Early Career Teachers
While teacher evaluation policies have been central to efforts to enhance teaching quality over the past decade, little is known about how teachers change their instructional practices in response to such policies. To address this question, this paper drew on classroom observation and survey… more →
First Impressions: The Case of Teacher Racial Bias
We study racial bias and the persistence of first impressions in the context of education. Teachers who begin their careers in classrooms with large black-white score gaps carry negative views into evaluations of future cohorts of black students. Our evidence is based on novel data on blind… more →
The Big Problem with Little Interruptions to Classroom Learning
Narrative accounts of classroom instruction suggest that external interruptions, such as intercom announcements and visits from staff, are a regular occurrence in U.S. public schools. We study the frequency, nature, and duration of external interruptions in the Providence Public School District… more →
Projecting the potential impacts of COVID-19 school closures on academic achievement
With 55 million students in the United States out of school due to the COVID-19 pandemic, education systems are scrambling to meet the needs of schools and families, including planning how best to approach instruction in the fall given students may be farther… more →