K-12 Education
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 →
Parent Engagement Interventions are Not Costless: Opportunity Cost and Crowd Out of Parental Investment
Many educational interventions encourage parents to engage in their child’s education as if parental time and attention is limitless. Sadly, though, it is not. Successfully encouraging certain parental investments may crowd out other productive behaviors.
The Importance of Cognitive Domains and the Returns to Schooling in South Africa: Evidence from Two Labor Surveys
Numerous studies have considered the important role of cognition in estimating the returns to schooling. How cognitive abilities affect schooling may have important policy implications, especially in developing countries during periods of increasing educational attainment. Using two longitudinal… more →
Average and heterogeneous effects of political party on education finance and outcomes: Regression discontinuity evidence from U.S. states across election cycles
In the U.S., state politicians directly influence legislation and budget decisions that can substantially affect public education spending and students. Does the political party of elected officials matter for these outcomes? We use a regression discontinuity design to analyze close house and… more →
Sustaining a Sense of Success: The Protective Role of Teacher Working Conditions During the COVID-19 Pandemic
COVID-19 shuttered schools across the United States, upending traditional approaches to education. We examine teachers’ experiences during emergency remote teaching in the spring of 2020 using responses to a working conditions survey from a sample of 7,841 teachers across 206 schools and 9… more →
Test-Based Accountability and the Effectiveness of School Finance Reforms
A recent literature provides new evidence that school resources are important for student outcomes. In this paper, we show that school finance reform-induced increases in student performance are driven by those states that had test-based accountability policies in place at the time. By… more →
Ready to Lead on Day One: Predicting Novice Principal Effectiveness with Information Available at Time of Hire
High rates of principal turnover nationally mean that school districts constantly are called on to recruit and select new principals. The importance of a school’s principal makes choosing candidates who will be effective paramount, yet we have little evidence linking information known to school… more →
Assistant Principal Mobility and its Relationship with Principal Turnover
Assistant principals are important education personnel, both as essential members of school leadership teams and apprentice principals. However, empirical evidence on their career outcomes remains scarce. Using statewide administrative data from Tennessee and Missouri, we provide the first… more →
Improving Low-Performing Schools: A Meta-Analysis of Impact Evaluation Studies
The public narrative surrounding efforts to improve low-performing K-12 schools in the U.S. has been notably gloomy. Observers argue that either nothing works or we don’t know what works. At the same time, the federal government is asking localities to implement evidence-based interventions. But… more →
Sins of the Past, Present, and Future: Alternative Pension Funding Policies
Our goal in this paper, presented at the 2020 Brookings Municipal Finance Conference, is to better understand teacher pension funding dynamics with a focus on sustainability and intergenerational… more →
Using Behavioral Insights to Improve School Administrative Communications: The Case of Truancy Notifications
Many states mandate districts or schools notify parents when students have missed multiple unexcused days of school. We report a randomized experiment (N = 131,312) evaluating the impact of sending parents truancy notifications modified to target behavioral barriers that can… more →
Online Course-Taking and Expansion of Curricular Options in High Schools
A common rationale for offering online courses in K-12 schools is that they allow students to take courses not offered at their schools; however, there has been little research on how online courses are used to expand curricular options when operating at scale. We assess the extent to which… more →
The Impressive Effects of Tutoring on PreK-12 Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence
Tutoring—defined here as one-on-one or small-group instructional programming by teachers, paraprofessionals, volunteers, or parents—is one of the most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools in use today. Within the past decade, dozens of preK-12 tutoring experiments have been… more →
Sibling Effects on High School Exam Taking and Performance
Younger siblings take more advanced high school course end of year exams when their older siblings perform better in those same exams. Using a regression discontinuity and data from millions of siblings who take Advanced Placement (AP) exams, we show that younger siblings with older siblings who… more →