Student Well-Being and Mental Health
Fadeout and Persistence of Intervention Impacts on Social-Emotional and Cognitive Skills in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analytic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials
Researchers and policymakers aspire for educational interventions to change children’s long-run developmental trajectories. However, intervention impacts on cognitive and achievement measures commonly fade over time. Less is known, although much is theorized, about socialemotional skill… more →
Driving, Dropouts, and Drive-Throughs: Mobility Restrictions and Teen Human Capital
We provide evidence that graduated driver licensing (GDL) laws, originally intended to improve public safety, impact human capital accumulation. Many teens use automobiles to access both school and employment. Because school and work decisions are interrelated, the effects of automobile-specific… more →
School-Based Healthcare and Absenteeism: Evidence from Telemedicine
The prevalence of school-based healthcare has increased markedly over the past decade. We study a modern mode of school-based healthcare, telemedicine, that offers the potential to reach places and populations with historically low access to such care. School-based telemedicine clinics (SBTCs)… more →
Who refers whom? The effects of teacher characteristics on disciplinary office referrals
Teachers affect a wide range of students’ educational and social outcomes, but how they contribute to students’ involvement in school discipline is less understood. We estimate the impact of teacher demographics and other observed qualifications on students’ likelihood of receiving a… more →
Does High School Size Affect Rates of Risky Health Behaviors and Poor Mental Health Among Low-Income Teenagers? Evidence from New York City
There is increasing concern about risky behaviors and poor mental health among school-aged youth. A critical factor in youth well-being is school attendance. This study evaluates how school organization and structure affect health outcomes by examining the impacts of a popular urban high school… more →
Replicating and Extending Effects of “Achievement Gap” Discourse
Scholars argue the “racial achievement gap” frame perpetuates deficit mindsets. Previously, we found teachers gave lower priority to racial equity when disparities were framed as “achievement gaps” versus “inequality in educational outcomes.” In this brief, we analyze data from two survey… more →
Heterogeneous Effects of Violence on Student Achievement
In this paper, I study the causal relationship between violence and human capital accumulation. Due to a power vacuum left in conflict zones of Colombia after the 2016 peace agreement, large spikes in violence were reported in the municipalities of the country dominated by the rebel group FARC.… more →
Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities
Teachers’ sense-making of student behavior determines whether students get in trouble and are formally disciplined.
COVID-19, Online Learning, and Absenteeism in Detroit
How much school students attend is a powerful indicator of their well-being and a strong predictor of their future success in school. Prior research has documented the myriad in-school and out-of-school factors that contribute to high levels of student absenteeism, many emerging from the root… more →
Strictly Speaking: Examining Teacher Use of Punishment and Student Outcomes
While a growing body of literature has documented the negative impacts of exclusionary punishments, such as suspensions, on academic outcomes, less is known about how teachers vary in disciplinary behaviors and the attendant impacts on students. We use administrative data from North Carolina… more →
Beyond Chronic Absenteeism: The Dynamics and Disparities of Class Absences in Secondary School
Student absenteeism is often conceptualized and quantified in a static, uniform manner, providing an incomplete understanding of this important phenomenon. Applying growth curve models to detailed class-attendance data, we document that secondary school students' unexcused absences grow steadily… more →
Student-Teacher Ethnoracial Matching in the Earliest Grades: Benefits for Executive Function Skills
The benefits of student-teacher ethnoracial matching on student outcomes—ranging from academic achievement to postsecondary attainment—are well documented. Yet, we know far less about the role of student-teacher ethnoracial matching in the earliest grades school and on less about effects on non-… more →
Student Misconduct and Learning Outcomes Evidence from Pennsylvania’s K-12 Building Records: 1999-2018
This paper compares and contrasts two required building level school violence measures under NCLB, arrests and incidents of well-defined school misconduct acts, across 20 years of Pennsylvania’s approximately 3,000 public school buildings. Generally, both arrests for school violence and… more →
The Thin Blue Line in Schools: New Evidence on School-Based Policing Across the U.S.
U.S. public school students increasingly attend schools with sworn law enforcement officers present. Yet, little is known about how these school resource officers (SROs) affect school environments or student outcomes. Our study uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) design with national… more →
The Effects of Student-Teacher Ethnoracial Matching on Exclusionary Discipline for Asian American, Black, and Latinx Students: Evidence From New York City
Although Black and Latinx students disproportionately face exclusionary school discipline, prior research finds that the likelihood of suspension for Black students decreases when they are taught by greater proportions of Black teachers. Little prior work, however, has examined whether these… more →
Who’s Left Out of Learning? Racial Disparities in Teachers’ Reports of Exclusionary Discipline Strategies Beyond Suspensions and Expulsions
We documented (1) the use of strategies, beyond suspensions and expulsions, that exclude young students from learning opportunities and (2) how teacher-reported use of these strategies varied according to student racial/ethnic composition. In a sample of 2,053 teachers and 40,771 kindergarten… more →
Can nudging mentors weaken student support? Experimental evidence from a virtual communication intervention
This paper presents results from a randomized trial of a nudge intervention designed to encourage and enhance virtual student support. During the 2019-20 school year, randomly selected mentors in a school-based mentoring program received monthly reminders with tips for communicating with youth… more →
Desegregated but still separated? The impact of school integration on student suspensions and special education classification
In this paper I study the impact of court-mandated school desegregation by race on student suspensions and special education classification. Simple descriptive statistics using student enrollment and outcome data collected from the largest school districts across the country in the 1970s and… more →
The Spillover Effects of Parental Conflict on Classmates' Cognitive and Noncognitive Outcomes
Children exposed to Interparental Verbal Conflict (IPVC) exert negative spillovers on their peers. Using nationally representative survey data from middle schools in China, focusing on schools that randomly assign students into classrooms, and using both (1) within-school, across-classroom… more →
From Referrals to Suspensions: New Evidence on Racial Disparities in Exclusionary Discipline
We use novel data on disciplinary referrals, including those that do not lead to suspensions, to better understand the origins of racial disparities in exclusionary discipline. We find significant differences between Black and white students in both referral rates and the rate at which referrals… more →