Policy, Politics, and Governance
The Rise of (E)quality Politics: The Political Development of Higher Education Policy, 1969-1999
Public discussions of racial inclusion and equal opportunity initiatives in the U.S. are often met with claims that expanding access to an institution, space, or public good is likely to diminish its quality. Examples of this pattern include: anticipated (and real) property value declines when… more →
Adult Culture Wars and Student Academic Achievement
How do adult "culture wars" in education affect student learning in the classroom? I explore this question by combining information on nearly 500 school district political controversies with data on state test scores. Leveraging variation in the location and timing of these events as the… more →
Indigenous Students and English Learner Identification: A Fifty-State Policy Review
English learner (EL) education is widely conceived as services for immigrant-origin students, however nearly one in ten American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students are classified in school as ELs. Title III of the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) defines EL eligibility… more →
John Serrano Did Not Vote for Proposition 13
This article reviews the development of my thesis that the California Supreme Court's Serrano decisions, which began in 1971 and sought to disconnect district school spending with local property taxes, led to the fiscal conditions that caused California voters to embrace Proposition 13 in 1978,… more →
Self-Interest in Public Service: Evidence from School Board Elections
In this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This increase is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by non-Democratic members, whose neighborhoods appreciate about 4% on average relative to those of… more →
The Long-Run Impacts of Mexican-American School Desegregation
We present the first quantitative analysis of the impact of ending de jure segregation of Mexican-American school children in the United States by examining the effects of the 1947 Mendez v. Westminster court decision on long-run educational attainment for Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites in… more →
The Impacts of School District Consolidation on Rural Communities: Evidence from Arkansas Reform
Over the past fifty years, school districts have consolidated in an effort to achieve economies of scale. While the determinants and effects of district mergers on operations have been studied (Gordon and Knight 2006; Duncombe and Yinger 2007; Jones et al 2008), the impact on communities has not… more →
Relaxing Electoral Constraints in Local Education Funding
We study a California policy that loosened constraints on some local governments by lowering the share of votes required to pass school capital improvement bond referendums. We show that the policy change yielded larger tax proposals that received less support from voters, yet led to a doubling… more →
Social Spending and Educational Gaps in Infant Health in the United States, 1998-2017
Recent expansions of child tax, food assistance and health insurance programs have made American families’ need for a robust social safety net highly evident, while researchers and policymakers continue to debate the best way to support families via the welfare state. How much do children – and… more →
Can Schools Change Religious Attitudes? Evidence from German State Reforms of Compulsory Religious Education
We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students' religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that abolishing… more →
Whose Turn Now? The Enactment & Expansion of Private School Choice Programs across the US
Private school choice policies have been enacted and expanded across the United States since the 1990s. By January 2021, 30 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico hosted 67 distinct private school choice policies. Why have some states adopted and expanded this education reform… more →
Elevating Education in Politics: How Teacher Strikes Shape Congressional Election Campaigns
Teacher strikes have gained national attention with the “#RedforEd” movement. Such strikes are polarizing events that could serve to elevate education as a political priority or cast education politics in a negative light. We investigate this empirically by collecting original panel data on U.S… more →
The Role of State Education Regulation: Evidence from the Texas Districts of Innovation Statute
Traditional public schools in the United States must comply with a variety of regulations on educational inputs like teacher certification, maximum class sizes, and restrictions on staff contracts. Absent regulations, policymakers fear that troubled districts would make inappropriate decisions… more →
What we teach about race and gender: Representation in images and text of children’s books
Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data and apply them, along with text analysis methods, to measure the representation of skin… more →
Do 2 weeks of instruction time matter? Using a natural experiment to estimate the effect of a calendar change on students' performance
One of the most obvious and not sufficiently well understood political decisions in education regards the optimal amount of instruction time required to improve academic performance. This paper considers an unexpected, exogenous regulatory change that reduced the school calendar of non-fee-… more →
Higher Education and Local Educational Attainment: Evidence from the Establishment of U.S. Colleges
We investigate how the presence of a college affects local educational attainment using historical natural experiments in which "runner-up" locations were strongly considered to become college sites but ultimately not chosen for as-good-as-random reasons. While runner-up counties have since had… more →
Who Wants to Reopen Schools in a Pandemic? Explaining Public Preferences Reopening Schools and Public Compliance with Reopening Orders During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the decision to reopen schools for in-person instruction has become a highly salient policy issue. This study examines what overall factors drive public support for schools re-opening in person, and whether members of the public are any more or less willing to… more →
Public Opinion, Attitude Stability, and Education Policy
Do Americans hold a consistent set of opinions about their public schools and how to improve them? From 2013 to 2018, over 5,000 unique respondents participated in more than one consecutive iteration of the annual, nationally representative Education Next poll, offering an opportunity to examine… more →
A Promise Unfulfilled? How Modern Federal Civil Rights Enforcement is Used to Address Racial Discrimination in School Discipline
Using newly available data on all civil rights complaints submitted to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights related to racial discrimination in discipline between 1999 and 2018, I provide the first systematic evidence on how modern federal civil rights enforcement is used… more →
New Schools and New Classmates: The Disruption and Peer Group Effects of School Reassignment
Policy makers periodically consider using student assignment policies to improve educational outcomes by altering the socio-economic and academic skill composition of schools. We exploit the quasi-random reassignment of students across schools in the Wake County Public School System to estimate… more →