Politics, governance, philanthropy, and organizations

We use data from the applications North Carolina public school districts and charter schools submitted for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) to investigate the sense that educational leaders made of the pandemic as it unfolded. LEAs understood the pandemic as a… more →

The U.S. has witnessed a resurgence of labor activism, with teachers at the forefront. We examine how teacher strikes affect compensation, working conditions, and productivity with an original dataset of 772 teacher strikes generating 48 million student days idle between 2007 and 2023. Using an… more →

Promise programs are discussed as a policy movement that began with the 2005 launch of the Kalamazoo Promise. Since then, programs bearing the Promise label or sharing similar features have spread across the higher educational landscape, appearing in most states and across postsecondary sectors… more →

Research on school improvement has accumulated an extensive list of factors that facilitate turnarounds at underperforming schools. Given that contextual or resource constraints may limit the possibilities of putting all of these factors in place, an important question is what is necessary and… more →

Correspondence audits document causal evidence of racial/ethnic discrimination in many contexts. However, few studies have examined whether local political party voting context influences individuals to engage in “stakeholder-centric” discrimination on behalf of or in response to expectations of… more →

Educational policymakers, leaders, and researchers are paying increasing attention to student attendance and chronic absenteeism, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though researchers have documented the consequences and causes of absenteeism, there is limited empirical evidence… more →

Short-term certificate (STC) programs at community colleges represent a longstanding policy priority to align accelerated postsecondary credentials with job opportunities in local labor markets. Despite large investments in developing STCs, little evidence exists about where and when STCs are… more →

To understand the causes and consequences of polarized demand for government expenditure, we conduct three field experiments in the context of public higher education. The first two experiments study polarization in taxpayer demand. We provide information to shape beliefs about social returns on… more →

Emerging literature on anti-CRT, anti-DEI efforts in education suggest that these attacks represent a rearticulation of racial ideologies which seek to contain racial progress. Although crafting anti-CRT and anti-DEI policies is primarily conducted through discourse, few studies explore the… more →

What happens to public opinion when prominent partisan officials intervene in education policy debates? We analyzed the results of 18 survey experiments conducted between 2009 and 2021 with nationally representative samples of U.S. adults. Each experiment explored the effect of an endorsement of… more →

This mixed-methods study synthesizes Standards-Based Grading (SBG) literature, analyzes 249 Arkansas administrators' survey responses using OLS regressions, and identifies themes through in-vivo coding of qualitative feedback. Results show more SBG support among liberal, elementary-level… more →

Although numerous studies document different forms of discrimination in the U.S. public education system, very few provide plausibly causal estimates. Thus, it is unclear to what extent public school principals discriminate against racial and ethnic minorities. Moreover, no studies test for… more →

A common point of contention across education policy debates is whether and how facially race-neutral metrics of quality produce or maintain racialized inequities. Medical education is a useful site for interrogating this relationship, as many scholars point to the 1910, Carnegie-funded Flexner… more →

Media reports suggest that parent frustration with COVID school policies and the growing politicization of education have increased community engagement with local public schools. However, there is no evidence to date on whether these factors have translated into greater engagement at the ballot… more →

COVID-19 upended schooling across the United States, but with what consequences for the state-level institutions that drive most education policy? This paper reports findings on two related research questions. First, what were the most important ways state government education policymakers… more →

Limited scholarship examines districtwide turnaround reforms beyond the first few years of implementation or efforts to replicate successes in new contexts. We study Massachusetts, home to a state takeover of the Lawrence school district that led to academic gains in early reform years, and… more →

School districts across the U.S. have adopted funding policies designed to distribute resources more equitably across schools. However, schools are also increasing external fundraising efforts to supplement district budget allocations. We document the interaction between funding policies and… more →

School board candidates supported by local teachers' unions overwhelmingly win and we examine the causes and consequences of the "teachers' union premium" in these elections. First, we show that union endorsement information increases voter support. Although the magnitude of this effect varies… more →

Post COVID, is education losing its special status as a policy domain more insulated from partisan politics than other policy areas? Indeed, a community’s political makeup influenced its’ schools’ pandemic learning modality, but did it predict other aspects of educational operations? We study… more →

Congestion is a persistent and expensive problem, costing the nation collectively over $300 billion each year. Cities have generally attempted to address congestion using an unoriginal set of expensive strategies, like building new roads or expanding public transit, and many cities are… more →