K-12 Education
The (Conference) Room Where it Happens: Explaining Disproportional Representation in Gifted and Talented Education
The current study leveraged comprehensive data from a large school district to better understand the degree to which disproportional representation in gifted education can be explained by mean assessment score differences across racial and socioeconomic groups.
Addressing Threats to Validity in Supervised Machine Learning: A Framework and Best Practices for Education Researchers
Given the rapid adoption of machine learning methods by education researchers, and growing acknowledgement of their inherent risks, there is an urgent need for tailored methodological guidance on how to improve and evaluate the validity of inferences drawn from these methods. Drawing upon an… more →
How Not to Fool Ourselves About Heterogeneity of Treatment Effects
Researchers across many fields have called for greater attention to heterogeneity of treatment effects—shifting focus from the average effect to variation in effects between different treatments, studies, or subgroups. True heterogeneity is important, but many reports of heterogeneity… more →
On-the-Job Learning: How Peers and Experience Drive Productivity among Teachers
Workers learn on the job from both repetition and peers. Less understood is how specific types of experience and peer characteristics affect on-the-job learning. This likely differs by context (e.g., occupation, tasks, or roles). Absent such knowledge, it is unclear how to optimally… more →
The Differential Sorting of Disadvantaged Students in the Competitive K-12 Market
School choice options offer potential educational gains for disadvantaged students, but do they take advantage of such options? I study the sorting patterns of students with prior child welfare reports (12 percent of incoming kindergartners) across traditional public, magnet, charter, and… more →
Making the Grade: Accounting for Course Selection in High School Transcripts with Item Response Theory
We apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to high-school transcript data, treating courses as items and grades as ordered responses, to estimate student transcript strength (θ̂) and course difficulty on a common scale. IRT estimation orders courses plausibly by difficulty, differentiates… more →
The Impact of High-Impact Tutoring on Student Attendance: Evidence from a State Initiative
Student absenteeism surged during and after the pandemic, harming engagement and achievement. We evaluate the impact of Washington DC's High-Impact Tutoring (HIT) Initiative—designed to mitigate learning loss through targeted academic supports—on student absenteeism. Using daily attendance data… more →
Empty Plates, Empty Seats: Food Insecurity and Student Absence in the US and Across the Globe
Since the onset of COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant rise in student absenteeism in the US and elsewhere. Meanwhile, food insecurity remains a persistent issue across the globe, including in the US. Food insecurity shapes students’ immediate and wider contexts and may worsen school… more →
The Architecture of Expected Wage Gaps: Between- and Within-School Sources of Career Education Inequality
This study investigates how school-level variation contributes to social stratification even before labor market entry by examining Career and Technical Education (CTE) as a key mechanism for sorting students into pathways with unequal economic returns. Using Delaware administrative data and… more →
What Happens When We Pay Our Teachers More? Evidence from New Jersey Public Schools
This paper examines the impact of increasing teacher salaries on student outcomes by exploiting variation from the “50K The First Day” campaign that established a $50K salary floor for new teachers across New Jersey school districts. Using school-level data from 2003 to 2019, we employ a… more →
Measuring Conflict in Local Politics
Many of the most tangible and immediate political conflicts in Americans’ lives occur at the local level. Yet, we lack large-scale evidence on how, why, and where conflict occurs in local governments. In this paper, we present a new dataset of nearly 100,000 videos of school board meetings, and… more →
Experimental Effects of “Opportunity Gap” and “Achievement Gap” Frames
Racial equity in education is often framed around “closing the achievement gap,” but many scholars argue this frame perpetuates deficit mindsets. The “opportunity gap” (OG) frame has been offered as an alternative to focus attention on structural injustices. In a preregistered survey experiment… more →
Integrating Open Science Principles into Quasi-Experimental Social Science Research
Quasi-experimental methods are a cornerstone of applied social science, providing critical answers to causal questions that inform policy and practice. Although open science principles have influenced experimental research norms across the social sciences, these practices are rarely implemented… more →
Entering and Exiting the Foster Care System: Implications for Absenteeism Among Child Welfare Involved Youth
While foster youth miss more school versus their non-foster counterparts, their status as a foster youth is not static, with many of them entering and exiting the foster care system over time. These dynamics of entry and exit can represent particularly crucial transition periods of stability and… more →
A Bibliometric Review of Research on Inequality of Educational Achievement, 1934 to 2023
In this bibliometric review of the research landscape on achievement gaps, we analyze temporal trends and geographic distributions, identify key scholars and publications, and uncover the intellectual structure and thematic focus of achievement gap research. By examining 1,607 achievement gap… more →
The Effects of School Building HVAC System Conditions on Student Academic and Behavioral Outcomes
There is growing awareness of the importance of school building environments for student health, well-being, and even educational outcomes. We ask in this study what role school building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems play in shaping student attendance, behavior, and… more →
Measuring the Affective Language of Principals' Evaluation Feedback and Investigating Differences by Principal Gender and Race
Over the past decade, reforms to principal evaluation systems have sought to incorporate formal feedback structures as a lever for principal improvement. However, we know little about the feedback that principals receive. Using statewide administrative data from Tennessee, including principals’… more →
Exploring the Move Away from ‘Zero -Tolerance’ Policies: Evidence from Restorative Justice Practices in Texas and Michigan Schools
This study examines the impact of statewide Restorative Justice (RJ) policy reforms in Michigan and Texas on student disciplinary outcomes and behavior, in light of increasing concerns over the negative effects of zero-tolerance policies. As schools move away from exclusionary discipline… more →
Pathways to the Teaching Profession: Teaching Assistants’ and Substitute Teachers’ Transitions into the Teacher Workforce
Teacher shortages and lack of teacher diversity have led to growing efforts nationally to recruit teaching assistants (TAs) to be classroom teachers. Substitute teachers are not typically considered in these efforts. We pair longitudinal administrative data from a mid-sized urban district with… more →
Causal Mechanisms of Relative Age Effects on Adolescent Risky Behaviours
Age differences between classmates are attracting growing attention in academic research and public policy, yet their underlying mechanisms remain understudied. We examine how relative age affects adolescents’ risky behaviors across Europe. Using Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC)… more →