K-12 Education
Effect Sizes for Measuring Student and School Growth in Achievement: In Search of Practical Significance
Effect sizes in the Cohen’s d family are often used in education to compare estimates across studies, measures, and sample sizes. For example, effect sizes are used to compare gains in achievement students make over time, either in pre- and post-treatment studies or in the absence… more →
School Principal Race and the Hiring and Retention of Racially Diverse Teachers
Exploiting variation from principal and teacher transitions over long administrative data panels in Missouri and Tennessee, we estimate the effects of principal race on the hiring and turnover of racially diverse teachers. Evidence from the two states is strikingly similar. Black principals… more →
The Effect of Increased Funding on Student Achievement: Evidence From Texas's Small District Adjustment
We leverage an obscure set of rules in Texas’s school funding formula granting some districts additional revenue as a function of size and sparsity. We use variation from kinks and discontinuities in this formula to ask how districts spend additional discretionary funds, and whether these… more →
Altered Attitudes and Actions: Social-Emotional Effects of Multiple Arts Field Trips
In recent decades, institutions, teachers, and students report a decline in field trip attendance. The impact of this decline on educational and societal outcomes such as social-emotional skill acquisition is unknown. Social-emotional learning (SEL) are skills thought to be important to life and… more →
Disparities and Discrimination in Student Discipline by Race and Family Income
Black and poor students are suspended from U.S. schools at higher rates than white and non-poor students. While the existence of these disparities has been clear, the causes of the disparities have not. We use a novel dataset to examine how and where discipline disparities arise. By… more →
Spending More on the Poor? A Comprehensive Summary of State-Specific Responses to School Finance Reforms from 1990–2014
Sixty-seven school finance reforms (SFRs), a combination of court-ordered and legislative reforms, have taken place since 1990; however, there is little empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of SFR effects. In this study, we estimate the effects of SFRs on revenues and expenditures between… more →
The Play’s the Thing: Experimentally Examining the Social and Cognitive Effects of School Field Trips to Live Theater Performances
Field trips to see theater performances are a long-standing educational practice, however, there is little systematic evidence demonstrating educational benefits. This article describes the results of five random assignment experiments spanning two years where school groups were assigned by… more →
Spillover Impacts on Education from Employment Guarantees
Programs that provide lower-skill employment are a popular anti-poverty strategy in developing countries, with India's employment-guarantee program (MGNREGA) employing adults in 23% of Indian households. A potential concern is that guaranteeing lower-skill employment opportunities may… more →
Does Online Course-taking Increase High School Completion and Open Pathways to Postsecondary Education Opportunities?
Recent increases in high school graduation rates have been linked anecdotally to online course-taking for credit recovery. Online course-taking that supports high school completion could open opportunities for postsecondary education pursuits. Alternatively, poorer quality online instruction… more →
Push or Pull: School-Level Factors That Influence Teacher Mobility in Turnaround Schools
Recruiting and retaining teachers can be challenging for many schools, especially in low-performing urban schools in which teachers turn over at higher rates. In this study, we examine three types of school-level attributes that may influence teachers’ decisions to enter or transfer schools:… more →
Making a Match: How Successful High-Poverty Schools Hire Teachers
Effective teacher hiring is fundamental to improving schools and yet few studies investigate this process. In this exploratory study of six successful, high-poverty schools (three charter, three district) in one Massachusetts city, we analyze the policy contexts that influenced hiring and… more →
Peeking into the Black Box of School Turnaround: A Formal Test of Mediators and Suppressors
A growing body of research evaluates the effects of turnaround on chronically low-performing schools. We extend this research to formally test factors that either mediate or suppress the effects of two turnaround initiatives in Tennessee: the Achievement School District (ASD) and local… more →
The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers
We examine the long-run impacts of having a same-race teacher. First, we leverage data from the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment to show that black students randomly assigned to a black teacher in grades K-3 are 5 percentage points (7%) more likely to graduate from high school and 4… more →
The Formalized Processes Districts Use to Evaluate Mathematics Textbooks
Textbooks are a widely used educational intervention that can affect student achievement, and the marginal cost of choosing a more effective textbook is typically small. However, we know little about how textbooks get from the publisher to the classroom. We use a lens of institutional theory and… more →
Do Health Insurance Mandates Spillover to Education? Evidence from Michigan’s Autism Insurance Mandate
Social programs and mandates are usually studied in isolation even though they often interact closely with each other. Given the immense recent changes to health insurance systems, there is much potential for spillover effects to other systems in which health plays a large role. In this study,… more →
A Tale of Two Types of Schools: An Exploration of How School Working Conditions Influence Black Male Teacher Turnover
This phenomenological study draws on semi-structured interviews with 27 Black male teachers across 14 schools in an urban school district—seven schools with three or more Black male teachers and seven schools with one Black male teacher. Consistent with theories about teacher turnover, findings… more →
Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of Alternative Sample Selection Corrections
We use a natural experiment to evaluate sample selection correction methods' performance. In 2007, Michigan began requiring that all students take a college entrance exam, increasing the exam-taking rate from 64 to 99%. We apply different selection correction methods, using different sets of… more →
School Finance Reforms, Teachers’ Unions, and the Allocation of School Resources
School finance reforms caused some of the most dramatic increases in intergovernmental aid from states to local governments in U.S. history. We examine whether teachers’ unions affected the fraction of reform-induced state aid that passed through to local spending and the allocation of these… more →
The Unwavering SES Achievement Gap: Trends in U.S. Student Performance
Concerns about the breadth of the U.S. income distribution and limited intergenerational mobility have led to a focus on educational achievement gaps by socio-economic status (SES). Uintertemporally linked assessments from NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA, we trace the achievement of U.S.
The Effect of the Community Eligibility Provision on the Ability of Free and Reduced-Price Meal Data to Identify Disadvantaged Students
The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program that allows schools serving low-income populations to classify all students as eligible for free meals, regardless of individual circumstances. This has implications for the… more →