Student Learning
Within-Year Achievement Gains for English Learners
This study reports achievement levels and fall-to-spring gains in grades K to 8 for three groups of English Learners (ELs): (a) ever-ELs who were ever eligible for service; (b) current-ELs who continue to require service; and (b) dually-identified students eligible for both EL and Special… more →
Who Benefits From Attending Effective Schools?
We estimate the longer-run effects of attending an effective high school (one that improves a combination of test scores, survey measures of socio-emotional development, and behaviors in 9th grade) for students who are more versus less educationally advantaged (i.e., likely to attain more years… more →
A Blueprint for Scaling Tutoring Across Public Schools
In this thought experiment, we explore how tutoring could be scaled nationally to address COVID-19 learning loss and become a permanent feature of the U.S. public education system. We outline a blueprint centered on ten core principles and a federal architecture to support adoption, while… more →
Does Peer Motivation Impact Educational Investments? Evidence From DACA
Despite the significant influence that peer motivation is likely to have on educational investments during high school, it is difficult to test empirically since exogenous changes in peer motivation are rarely observed. In this paper, I focus on the 2012 introduction of Deferred Action for… more →
Higher-Quality Elementary Schools Sustain the Prekindergarten Boost: Evidence from an Exploration of Variation in the Boston Prekindergarten Program’s Impacts
While there is a consensus that attending preschool better prepares children for kindergarten, evidence on the factors that sustain the preschool boost into the early elementary years is still emerging. To add to this literature, we use lottery data from applicants to oversubscribed… more →
Engaging Girls in Math: The Unequal Effects of Text Messaging to Help Parents Support Early Math Development
This study assesses the effects of two text messaging programs for parents that aim to support the development of math skills in prekindergarten students. One program focuses purely on math, while the other takes an identical approach but focuses on a combination of math, literacy, and social-… more →
Dual Language Education and Academic Growth
This paper reports math and reading academic achievement and growth in grades 2 to 8 for Hispanic participants and nonparticipants of a Spanish-English dual language program. I apply a piecewise multilevel growth model to administrative data from a large school district that enrolls a… more →
Negative Impacts From the Shift to Online Learning During the COVID-19 Crisis: Evidence from a Statewide Community College System
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt shift from in-person to virtual instruction in Spring 2020. We use two complementary difference-in differences frameworks, one that leverages within-instructor-by-course variation on whether students started their Spring 2020 courses in person or online and… more →
The Economic Impacts of Learning Losses
The worldwide school closures in early 2020 led to losses in learning that will not easily be made up for even if schools quickly return to their prior performance levels. These losses will have lasting economic impacts both on the affected students and on each nation unless they are effectively… more →
Dual Identification? The Effects of EL Status on SPED Placement in an Equity-Focused District
This study examines the effects of English Learner (EL) status on subsequent Special Education (SPED) placement. Through a research-practice partnership, we link student demographic data and initial English proficiency assessment data across seven cohorts of test takers and observe EL and SPED… more →
The Importance of Cognitive Domains and the Returns to Schooling in South Africa: Evidence from Two Labor Surveys
Numerous studies have considered the important role of cognition in estimating the returns to schooling. How cognitive abilities affect schooling may have important policy implications, especially in developing countries during periods of increasing educational attainment. Using two longitudinal… more →
Online Course-Taking and Expansion of Curricular Options in High Schools
A common rationale for offering online courses in K-12 schools is that they allow students to take courses not offered at their schools; however, there has been little research on how online courses are used to expand curricular options when operating at scale. We assess the extent to which… more →
The Impressive Effects of Tutoring on PreK-12 Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence
Tutoring—defined here as one-on-one or small-group instructional programming by teachers, paraprofessionals, volunteers, or parents—is one of the most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools in use today. Within the past decade, dozens of preK-12 tutoring experiments have been… more →
Racial Disparities in Pre-K Quality: Evidence from New York City’s Universal Pre-K Program
New York City’s universal pre-kindergarten program, which increased full-day enrollment from 19,000 to almost 70,000 children, is ambitious in both scale and implementation speed. We provide new evidence on the distribution of pre-K quality in NYC by student race/ethnicity, and investigate the… more →
The Forgotten 20 Percent: Achievement and Growth in Rural Schools Across the Nation
Nearly one in five U.S. students attends a rural school, yet we know very little about achievement gaps and academic growth in rural schools. This study leverages a unique dataset that includes longitudinal test scores for more than five million 3rd to 8th grade students in approximately 17,000… more →
Catching up or Falling Behind: Measuring Middle School Achievement Trajectories for College Readiness
This study presents a framework that uses academic trajectories in the middle grades for identifying students in need of intervention and providing targeted support. We apply a set of academic college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students in 5900 schools… more →
Projecting the potential impacts of COVID-19 school closures on academic achievement
With 55 million students in the United States out of school due to the COVID-19 pandemic, education systems are scrambling to meet the needs of schools and families, including planning how best to approach instruction in the fall given students may be farther… more →
The learning curve: Revisiting the assumption of linear growth across the school year
Important educational policy decisions, like whether to shorten or extend the school year, often require accurate estimates of how much students learn during the year. Yet, related research relies on a mostly untested assumption: that growth in achievement is linear throughout the entire… more →
Long-run Trends in the U.S. SES-Achievement Gap
Rising inequality in the United States has raised concerns about potentially widening gaps in educational achievement by socio-economic status (SES). Using assessments from LTT-NAEP, Main-NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA that are psychometrically linked over time, we trace trends in achievement for U.S.… more →
Is kindergarten ability group placement biased? New data, new methods, new answers
Half of kindergarten teachers split children into higher and lower ability groups for reading or math. In national data, we predicted kindergarten ability group placement using linear and ordinal logistic regression with classroom fixed effects. In fall, test scores were the best predictors of… more →