Policy, Politics, and Governance
Exploring Test-Optional Admissions Policies: Patterns in Applications, Enrollment, and Diversity During the COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many aspects of higher education, including college admissions processes. Since 2020, numerous universities and colleges have adopted test-optional policies, allowing applicants to decide whether to submit standardized test scores. Although such policies have been… more →
Bureaucracy and Burden: Understanding Take-up of a Need-Based Financial Aid Program
Social welfare programs, including college financial aid, often only reach a fraction of eligible beneficiaries. We examine this problem through the lens of Michigan’s Tuition Incentive Program (TIP), a state need-based grant aid program. We conduct a large-scale mixed-methods study using data… more →
Democracy For What and For Whom?: The Possibilities and Challenges of K-12 School Boards
Local school boards have historically played a major role in the functioning and character of US schools, providing fiscal oversight, shaping policy, and creating avenues for community voice, representation, and accountability. As such, school boards have regularly served as critical sites for… more →
Causal Returns to Education
Using 182 estimates from 140 studies in 55 countries, this paper compares ordinary least squares (OLS) and instrumental variables (IV) estimates of the private returns to schooling. IV returns average 9.7 percent—38 percent higher than OLS—and exceed OLS in nearly 80 percent of cases, with the… more →
Reclaiming Educational Fraud and Waste: A Conceptual Framework to Locate the True Sources of Resource Leakage and Harm in The U.S. K-12 System
The recent dismantling of federal educational institutions has been legitimated under the banner of “eliminating fraud and waste.” In this paper, we reclaim these terms to locate the sources of potential fraud and waste in the U.S. K-12 education system through a novel conceptual framework that… more →
Absent and Afraid? Immigration Enforcement and Student Attendance in the Second Trump Administration
Intensified immigration enforcement activity under the second Trump administration has increased anxiety for immigrants in the United States, including many families with school-age children. This study provides early evidence on the effects of the second Trump presidency on the attendance of… more →
High School Effects on Civic Engagement
Preparing young people for citizenship is a foundational purpose of public education, yet little is known about whether or how K-12 schools impact civic engagement. Using education, birth, and voting records for nine cohorts of students in Indiana, I estimate and assess the validity of high… more →
From Rural Schools to City Factories: Assessing the Quality of Chinese Rural Schools
The changing pattern of quality in China’s rural schools across time and province is extracted from the differential labor market earnings of rural migrant workers. Variations in rates of return to years of schooling across migrant workers working in the same urban labor market but having… more →
Exploring Claims of Critical Race Theory, Divisive Topics, and Indoctrination in the Classroom
Critical race theory (CRT) and claims of political indoctrination in K-12 classrooms are at the forefront of the ongoing culture wars surrounding public education. Despite a wave of legislative action targeting CRT-related instruction, little systematic evidence documents the extent to which… more →
Tabling Debate: How Local Officials Use Agenda Control to Stifle Conflict
Public officials influence policymaking by deciding which items receive attention and action — and which do not. Accounts from national legislatures typically explain agenda control in terms of party leadership and discipline. But, do politicians exert agenda control outside highly… more →
Education and Climate Change: Synthesizing the Evidence to Guide Future Research
The effects of climate change are becoming increasingly visible across all aspects of the U.S. PreK-12 education system. Schools are both vulnerable to climate change and uniquely positioned to be part of the solution. We synthesize interdisciplinary research and data to illustrate the bi-… more →
Politics of the professoriate: Longitudinal evidence from a state public university system’s universe of faculty
Over the past decade, Democrats and Republicans have grown increasingly polarized in their views of American higher education. Republicans in particular have become far more critical of the political and social views of faculty. In this paper, we thus investigate whether the commonly held belief… more →
Assessing Permanent School Closures: A Conceptual Framework
Amid widespread declining enrollment, the expiration of COVID-19 ESSER funding, and looming uncertainty in federal P-12 education involvement, many school districts may soon consider permanent school closures. While extant permanent school closure literature provides a starting point for future… more →
Behind the Push for Licensure Reform: How Beliefs About the Teaching Profession Unite and Divide Coalitions
A long history of scholarship on teacher professionalism documents how different narratives about teaching animate education policy and practice. We bridge the Advocacy Coalition Framework with institutional logics to examine how beliefs about teaching unite and divide a state-level coalition… more →
High Turnover with Low Accountability: Local School Board Elections in 16 States
We analyze the most comprehensive dataset on U.S. school board elections. We find that nearly half of races go uncontested and that incumbents are reelected more than 80 percent of the time when they run. Because many incumbents retire instead of running for another term, however, turnover is… more →
Portraying Governance: Demographic Misalignment in University Board Representation
Higher education governing boards are important bodies with far-reaching powers over the institutions they oversee. Yet little is known about individual board members, how the composition of boards varies across institutions, or whether boards are at all representative of their institutional… more →
Deeper Roots Before the Storm: Utilizing Machine Learning to Alert School Districts of Permanent School Closures
The increasing rate of permanent school closures in U.S. public school districts presents unprecedented challenges for administrators and communities alike. This study develops an early-warning indicator model to predict mass closure events - defined as a district closing at least 10% of its… more →
Recent Immigration Raids Increased Student Absences
Local immigration raids expanded dramatically across the U.S. during the first two months of 2025. Anecdotal accounts suggest that these raids increased student absences from schools because parents fear being separated from their children. This study evaluates this claim using a daily times… more →
The Politics of Commencement Speakers: Organizational Contexts of Speech on College Campuses, 1989–2024
Conflicts over the politics of speech have been a persistent challenge in U.S. higher education. Public narratives portray universities as antagonistic toward conservative speakers, yet empirical evidence remains limited. To address this gap, we analyze the political orientations of 1,875… more →
The Impact of School District Turnaround on Postsecondary Outcomes: Evidence from Lawrence, Massachusetts
Limited research examines the impact of accountability interventions on outcomes beyond test-based measures of short-term academic achievement. We examine the effects of the 2012 state takeover and districtwide turnaround of Massachusetts’ Lawrence Public Schools—a district serving a majority-… more →