K-12 Education
Teacher Skill Development: Evidence from Performance Ratings by Principals
We examine the dynamic nature of teacher skill development using panel data on principals’ subjective performance ratings of teachers. Past research on teacher productivity improvement has focused primarily on one important but narrow measure of performance: teachers’ value-added to student… more →
Turnover at the Top: Estimating the Effects of Principal Turnover on Student, Teacher, and School Outcomes
One in five schools loses its principal each year. Despite the prevalence of principal turnover, little empirical research has examined its effects on school outcomes. Because principal turnover may occur in response to or contemporaneous with a downturn in student achievement, the effect of a… more →
English Learner Labeling: How English Learner Status Shapes Teacher Perceptions of Student Skills & the Moderating Role of Bilingual Instructional Settings
Prior research has shown that EL classification is consequential for students, however, less is known about how EL classification impacts students’ outcomes. In this study, we examine one hypothesized mechanism: teacher perceptions. Using nationally-representative data (ECLS-K:2011), we use… more →
The Added Value of Latinx and Black Teachers for Latinx and Black Students: Implications for the Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act
A research synthesis points to the added-value—benefits to social and emotional development, as well as learning outcomes—for students of color taught by teachers of color. Given ongoing education debates, policymakers can use this evidence base to craft legislation aimed at… more →
Reforming Teacher Pension Plans: The Case of Kansas, the 1st Teacher Cash Balance Plan
The ongoing crisis in teacher pension funding has led states to consider various reforms in plan design, to replace the traditional benefit formulas, based on years of service and final average salary (FAS). One such design is a cash balance (CB) plan, long deployed in the private sector,… more →
Social Returns to Private Choice? Effects of Charter Schools on Behavioral Outcomes, Arrests, and Civic Participation
The vast majority of literature on school choice, and charter schools in particular, focus on attending an elementary or middle school grades and often focus on test scores or other proximal outcomes. Much less is known about the long-term effects of attending a charter school in 9th grade. It… more →
The Effects of Student Growth Data on School District Choice: Evidence from a Survey Experiment
We conduct an online survey experiment in which participants are asked to imagine that they are parents moving to a new metropolitan area. They then choose between the five largest school districts in that area. All participants receive demographic data for each district. In addition, some… more →
The Effects of Special Education on the Academic Performance of Students with Learning Disabilities
In the forty plus years since passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), special education has grown in the number of students and amount spent on services. Despite this growth, the academic performance of students with disabilities (SWDs) remains troubling low… more →
Are Schools Deemed Effective Based on Overall Student Growth Also Closing Achievement Gaps? Examining the Black-White Gap in Schools
Research has begun to investigate whether teachers and schools are as effective with certain student subgroups as they are with the overall student population. Most of this research has examined the issue by trying to produce causal estimates of school contributions to short-term student… more →
School's Out: The Role of Summers in Understanding Achievement Disparities
Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and SES only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work… more →
Horizontal Differentiation and the Policy Effect of Charter Schools
While school choice may enhance competition, incentives for public schools to raise productivity may be muted if public education is viewed as imperfectly substitutable with alternatives. This paper estimates the aggregate effect of charter school expansion on education quality while accounting… more →
School Boards and Education Production: Evidence from Randomized Ballot Order
We examine the causal influence of educators elected to the school board on local education production. The key empirical challenge is that school board composition is endogenously determined through the electoral process. To overcome this, we develop a novel research design that leverages… more →
Experimentally Estimated Impacts of School Voucher on Educational Attainments of Moderately and Severely Disadvantaged Students
Estimates of school voucher impacts on educational attainment have yet to explore heterogeneities in socioeconomic status among disadvantaged minority students. We theorize reasons for these heterogeneities and then estimate experimentally the differential impacts of voucher offers on college… more →
Restorative for All? Racial Disproportionality and School Discipline Under Restorative Justice
The well-documented racial disparities in school discipline have led many school districts in the U.S. to adopt restorative justice practices. The restorative justice philosophy differs from traditional disciplinary action by placing an emphasis on restitution and improving behavior rather than… more →
Class Rank and Long-Run Outcomes
This paper considers an unavoidable feature of the school environment, class rank. What are the long-run effects of a student’s ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data on all public-school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third-grade academic rank,… more →
Stress in Boom Times: Understanding Teachers’ Economic Anxiety in a High Cost Urban District
Despite growing concern over teachers’ ability to live comfortably where they work, we know little about the systematic impacts of affordability on teachers’ well-being, particularly in high-cost urban areas. We use novel survey data from San Francisco Unified School District to identify the… more →
Using a Text-as-Data Approach to Understand Reform Processes: A Deep Exploration of School Improvement Strategies
Although program evaluations using rigorous quasi-experimental or experimental designs can inform decisions about whether to continue or terminate a given program, they often have limited ability to reveal the mechanisms by which complex interventions achieve their effects. To illuminate these… more →
Will Mentoring a Student Teacher Harm My Evaluation Scores? Effects of Serving as a Cooperating Teacher on Evaluation Metrics
Growing evidence suggests that preservice candidates receive better coaching and are more instructionally effective when they are mentored by more instructionally effective cooperating teachers (CTs). Yet, teacher education program leaders indicate it can be difficult to recruit instructionally… more →
How important are beliefs about gender differences in math ability? Transmission across generations and impacts on child outcomes
We study the transmission of beliefs about gender differences in math ability from adults to children and how this affects girls’ academic performance relative to boys. We exploit randomly assigned variation in the proportion of a child’s middle school classmates whose parents believe boys are… more →
Beyond tracking and detracking: The dimensions of organizational differentiation in schools
Schools utilize an array of strategies to match curricula and instruction to students’ heterogeneous skills. While generations of scholars have debated “tracking” and its consequences, the literature fails to account for diversity of school-level sorting practices.