Policy, Politics, and Governance
The Burden of Waiting: Temporal Administrative Burden and Limbo in Student Loan Repayment
Research on administrative burden establishes that interactions with government impose learning, compliance, and psychological costs. However, less is known about how these costs persist or reemerge after an administrative encounter has seemingly ended. Drawing on interviews with 72 student loan… more →
How Much Do Principals Matter When Politicians Choose Them? Evidence from Dated Successions and Close Elections in Brazil
Estimates of how much school principals matter differ by an order of magnitude, in part because conventional estimators require principal identifiers and absorb sampling noise into the estimated dispersion. We identify the variance of principal-by-school effects without identifiers, using… more →
Legislating Literacy: Estimating the Impact of State-Level Science of Reading Reforms on Reading Test Scores
This study examines the extent to which state adoption of Science of Reading (SoR)-aligned policies was associated with changes in fourth-grade reading achievement. Using longitudinal state-level panel data from 2003-2024 and quasi-experimental difference-in-differences (DiD) methods, the study… more →
The Time Costs of Academic Credit Hours
Do students give up free time with added classes? We estimate the effect of additional credits on leisure using campus departure logs linked to academic records of U.S. Air Force Academy students and two natural experiments. Leveraging pre-assigned schedules, each credit reduces leisure by 7… more →
Defaults, Discretion, and Local Capacity: District Leaders’ Accounts of Automatic English Learner Reclassification
Automatic policies, which produce a preferred outcome unless implementers act otherwise, are rare in K-12 education and have been studied almost entirely using quantitative methods. In 2019, Michigan replaced its district-led procedure for reclassifying students out of English learner (EL)… more →
Early Evidence on Employer Responses to College Student Use of Generative AI
We conduct a survey experiment on professionals with hiring experience to investigate how employers respond to students' use of generative AI in higher education. Prior to respondents reviewing two resumes, they were randomized into a control group or one of two treatment groups. One treatment… more →
Why Does Education Policy so Frequently Disappoint? Lessons from Teacher Evaluation
Decades of K–12 education reform — much of it focused on teaching — have produced a persistent paradox: policies grounded in strong evidence disappoint when scaled, even as some implementations achieve striking success. Teacher evaluation is the clearest case. Cincinnati, Dallas, Chicago,… more →
A National Measure of School District Partisanship for the 2016 to 2024 Presidential Elections
Scholars increasingly interested in the governance of local school districts, which invites curiosity about the partisanship of their voting constituencies. Presently, researchers have to translate precinct-level or county-level votes to school district geographies using imprecise imputation… more →
One Fell Through the Safety Net: Embeddedness and Take Up of Social Benefits
The U.S. social safety net comprises a patchwork quilt of welfare programs, but not all eligible beneficiaries receive aid. Incomplete take-up suggests that some children and families are not receiving access to the education, healthcare, housing, and income needed to break the cycle of poverty… more →
Superintendent (In)Stability and Student Achievement in the United States
Superintendents shape conditions for teaching and learning, yet the limited studies of their impact—concentrated in a few states and focused on superintendent turnover—find small or null effects on student achievement. Using more than 37,000 district-year records from national superintendents… more →
Off the Books: School-Based Informal Diversion and Student and Community Outcomes
Efforts to reduce school-based arrest may reshape policing beyond school doors, yet their downstream effects are largely unknown. We study a New York City policy that encouraged informal diversion in place of arrest, using a difference-in-differences strategy. The probability of a juvenile crime… more →
The Access–Enrollment Disconnect in Corequisite Math Reform: Causal Evidence and Stakeholder Perspectives from a Community College
This study examines a statewide developmental education reform in Virginia that allows students who would have been placed in standalone remedial math to enroll directly in college-level math with corequisite support. Although corequisite support has been widely adopted and generally promising,… more →
How Colleges and Universities are Adopting AI in Higher Education: A Global Comparative Analysis
Artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI have become central strategic priorities for universities worldwide, yet the extent to which institutions formally embed AI into their governance, academic, and policy structures remains unclear. This study examines the institutionalization of AI… more →
The Post-Pandemic “Attendance Crisis” in Historical Perspective
School attendance rates in the United States are lower now than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This rise in absenteeism has often been characterized as a crisis; but whether it amounts to a broader breakdown in norms depends on the historical baseline against which it is judged. The recent… more →
Distinguishing Burdens from Benefits in Early Care and Education Policy
Contemporary policy conversations discuss burdens imposed by regulations, describing when they render government functions ineffective and inefficient. But one can mislabel the core purposes and benefits of a policy’s existence as burdens. Applying the administrative burden framework to early… more →
Expanded High-Speed Broadband Internet Access at Home and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Federal Subsidy Program
Policymakers have argued that expanding home broadband would improve educational outcomes. However, prior studies report mixed, null, or negative effects on achievement, with limited post-pandemic evidence. Using district-level achievement and enrollment data from a national broadband subsidy… more →
What’s in Play: The Strategic and Symbolic Use of Racial Equity Frames When Racial Politics Shift
Shifting racial politics place substantial pressures on organizations to navigate whether and how to sustain DEI commitments. In this study, I examine how partnerships between public school districts and private school improvement organizations (SIOs) responded to shifting environmental… more →
Estimating the Overall Effects of Statewide Early Literacy Policies: Evidence from Michigan
This paper evaluates the impacts of Michigan's statewide early literacy reform using a synthetic difference-in-differences approach. We estimate the policy’s effects on student achievement and grade retention and compare them to statewide literacy reforms in South Carolina and Mississippi. We… more →
“Can we fight this fight?”: How Racial Politics Shape the Implementation of Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education Teaching Standards
In this study, we investigate the role of teacher education (TE) programs in filtering the implementation of Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education teaching guidelines in Pennsylvania. Drawing on a comparative case study of three TE programs across diverse institutional and political… more →
23 Years of State Pre-K Expansion: How States Balance Investment, Access, and Quality in the Modern Era
We describe state-funded pre-kindergarten (pre-K) expansion in the modern era from 2002 to 2024, documenting patterns of investment and reach. Although spending and enrollment increased substantially, states pursued widely varying expansion strategies. A 200% increase in pre-K enrollment did not… more →