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Program and policy effects
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Do Innovative Career Pathways in Massachusetts High Schools Promote Equitable Access to Higher Education?
Two persistent shortcomings of the American labor market are the wage gaps and unequal unemployment rates that exist between racial groups. More specifically, Black and Latinx high school graduates earn less and are more likely to be unemployed than their White counterparts, on average. Likewise, students from low-income families are much more likely to be low-income themselves in adulthood. One of the ways Massachusetts seeks to address this is by offering Innovation Career Pathways, optional career and technical education (CTE) programs within traditional public high schools that are attended by students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, to grant them access to preparation for in demand careers through technical courses and hands-on learning experiences. In addition to being conducive to economic opportunity directly by promoting career readiness, literature suggests that CTE programs may also do so indirectly by having a positive effect on educational attainment, which has a positive relationship with employment as well as earnings. This study investigates the effects of participation in the Massachusetts Innovation Career Pathways (ICP) on college readiness, college enrollment, and college persistence of racial minority and low-income students using Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting, as determined by propensity scores. Given the findings that program participation has positive effects on college enrollment and persistence across racial and economic groups, increased recruitment of Black, Latinx, and low-income students into the program may be a way to promote equitable access to higher education in the state of Massachusetts.
The Long-Run Impacts of Universal Pre-K with Equilibrium Considerations
Since 1995, publicly funded pre-K with universal eligibility has proliferated across the U.S. Universal pre-K (UPK) operates at great scale and serves children with a wide range of alternative childcare options. Because these programs are relatively young, very little is known about their long-run impacts on children. In this paper, I use a difference-in-differences (DiD) design to estimate the long-run impacts of Georgia UPK, the first statewide program. Children exposed to UPK were 1.7% more likely to graduate high school, 11.1% less likely to receive SNAP benefits as adults, and girls were 10.6% less likely to have children as teenagers. To help interpret those results, I develop a simple conceptual framework that considers how public pre-K expansions can affect the entire childcare market. For instance, greater competition could force private centers to adjust prices and quality, or to close entirely—creating spillover impacts on children not enrolled in public pre-K. Empirically, I find evidence consistent with large spillovers in Georgia, suggesting that a focus on UPK enrollees would miss a key part of the program’s overall impact. Further, I show that conventional DiD estimates of treatment effects on the treated may be substantially biased in the presence of spillovers—in the Georgia context and in others.
I know my rights? Iowa Senate File 496, book bans, and the First and Fourteenth Amendments
This instrumental case study explores 31 Iowan educators’ and board of education members’ perceptions of the ways the state’s book ban law, Senate File 496 influenced school information systems. Mathisen’s (2015) informational justice conceptual framework guided data analysis. The three key findings of this study were Senate File 496 was imprudently discriminatory in implementation, invalidated recognition of school community identities, and threatened democratic participation in information systems.
Expanding School Counseling: The Impacts of California Funding Changes
Counselors are a common school resource for students navigating complicated and consequential education choices. However, most students have limited access to school counselors. We study one of the largest U.S. policies to increase access to school counselors - California's Supplemental School Counseling Program. The program increased the average number of counselors per high school by 0.7 and reduced student to counselor ratios by over 150 students. Counselors hired as a result of the program had less experience on average. The expansion of counseling had positive effects on high school graduation and public college enrollment rates as well as on student perceptions of school climate. Impacts on college enrollment were largest in high poverty and rural schools. Thus, expanding access to counselors may help schools address equity gaps in college access and concerns over students' mental health.
Are Preschool Programs Becoming Less Effective?
High-quality preschool programs are heralded as an effective policy tool to promote the development and life-long wellbeing of children from low-income families. Yet evaluations of recent preschool programs produce puzzling findings, including negative impacts, and divergent, weaker results than were shown in demonstration programs implemented in the 1960s and 70s. We provide potential explanations for why modern evaluations of preschool programs have produced less positive and more mixed results, focusing on changes in counterfactual conditions and preschool instructional practices. We also address popular explanations such as subsequent low-quality schooling experiences that, we argue, do not appear to account for weakening program effectiveness. The field must take seriously the smaller positive, null, and negative impacts from modern programs and strive to understand why effects vary and how to boost program effectiveness through rigorous, longitudinal research.
Do Pensions Enhance Worker Effort and Selection? Evidence from Public Schools
Why do employers offer pensions? We empirically examine two theoretical rationales, namely that pensions improve worker effort and worker selection. We test these hypotheses using rich administrative measures on effort and output for teachers around the pension-eligibility notch. When workers cross the notch, their effective compensation falls by roughly 50 percent of salary, but we observe no reduction in worker effort or output. This implies that pension payments do not increase effort. As for selection, we find that pensions retain low-value-added and high-value-added workers at the same rate, implying similar preferences across teacher quality and no influence on selection.
The Long-Term Effect of North Carolina Pre-Kindergarten is Larger in School Districts with Lower Rates of Growth in Academic Achievement
Prior research has found that public investments in North Carolina’s pre-kindergarten program—NC Pre-K—generated positive effects on student reading and math achievement through eighth grade (Bai et al., 2020). This study examined whether the effect of NC Pre-K funding exposure is moderated by the educational environments children subsequently experience during elementary and middle school. The NC Pre-K effect on student reading and math achievement in eighth grade was found to be larger in school districts with lower rates of growth in academic achievement. These findings suggest that public investments in early childhood education may be particularly beneficial in the long term for children who subsequently experience low-growth school environments—consistent with a dynamic substitutability hypothesis of combined effects.
What’s the Goal Here? Educator’s Perspectives of Iowa’s Senate File 496 on School Mental Health Systems
Iowa's Senate File 496 requires parent permission to formally survey students about their mental health, bans the discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in schools before 7th grade, mandates schools obtain parental permission to use a nick name, and bans any books that depict or describe sex acts in schools. This exploratory case study explores educators’ (n = 20) perceptions of Senate File 496’s influence on school-based mental health systems and the ways participants perceived the legislation influenced student mental health. Key findings reveal that Senate File 496 was dismantling school-based mental health systems in schools, there was a rise of vigilantism in education, and participants perceived the legislation caused irrevocable student harm.
Tutor CoPilot: A Human-AI Approach for Scaling Real-Time Expertise
Generative AI, particularly Language Models (LMs), has the potential to transform real-world domains with societal impact, particularly where access to experts is limited. For example, in education, training novice educators with expert guidance is important for effectiveness but expensive, creating significant barriers to improving education quality at scale. This challenge disproportionately hurts students from under-served communities, who stand to gain the most from high-quality education and are most likely to be taught by inexperienced educators. We introduce Tutor CoPilot, a novel Human-AI approach that leverages a model of expert thinking to provide expert-like guidance to tutors as they tutor. This study presents the first randomized controlled trial of a Human-AI system in live tutoring, involving 900 tutors and 1,800 K-12 students from historically under-served communities. Following a preregistered analysis plan, we find that students working on mathematics with tutors randomly assigned to have access to Tutor CoPilot are 4 percentage points (p.p.) more likely to master topics (p<0.01). Notably, students of lower-rated tutors experienced the greatest benefit, improving mastery by 9 p.p. relative to the control group. We find that Tutor CoPilot costs only $20 per-tutor annually, based on the tutors’ usage during the study. We analyze 550,000+ messages using classifiers to identify pedagogical strategies, and find that tutors with access to Tutor CoPilot are more likely to use strategies that foster student understanding (e.g., asking guiding questions) and less likely to give away the answer to the student, aligning with high-quality teaching practices. Tutor interviews qualitatively highlight how Tutor CoPilot’s guidance helps them to respond to student needs, though tutors flag common issues in Tutor CoPilot, such as generating suggestions that are not grade-level appropriate. Altogether, our study of Tutor CoPilot demonstrates how Human-AI systems can scale expertise in real-world domains, bridge gaps in skills and create a future where high-quality education is accessible to all students.
Accelerating Opportunity: The Effects of Instructionally Supported Detracking
The pivotal role of Algebra in the educational trajectories of U.S. students continues to motivate controversial, high-profile policies focused on when students access the course, their classroom peers, and how the course is taught. This random-assignment partnership study examines an innovative district-level reform—the Algebra I Initiative—that placed 9th-grade students with prior math scores well below grade level into Algebra I classes coupled with teacher training instead of a remedial pre-Algebra class. We find that this reform significantly increased grade-11 math achievement (ES = 0.2 SD) without lowering the achievement of classroom peers eligible for conventional Algebra I classes. This initiative also increased attendance, district retention, and overall math credits. These results suggest that higher expectations for the lowest-performing students coupled with aligned teacher supports is a promising model for realizing students’ mathematical potential.