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NEW EdWorkingPapers
Unpacking Racial Disparities in School Spending: Why “progressiveness” and “comparability” are not enough
Studies of racial and economic disparities in school funding typically rely on simple spending comparisons or "progressiveness" measures that ignore variation in the cost of achieving common educational outcomes. This article argues that such approaches essentially ignore how much it costs schools in order to provide students with an adequate opportunity to learn. Simplistic spending measures… more →
Parents’ Biased Beliefs and Competitive Investments in Education: A Field Experiment
Using a field experiment in China, we demonstrate that parental investment decisions are affected by their beliefs about their peers’ investment levels, and that they often hold biased beliefs about these levels. When provided information about the true distribution of tutoring hours invested among their reference groups, parents in the treated group significantly adjust their investments (by… more →
Remediation or Roadblock? The Effects of Failing Virginia's Accountability Exams
Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL) system requires students to pass end-of-course exams to earn verified credits needed for high school graduation. Scoring below the passing cutoff may create a barrier to completing a high school degree, but it also triggers state-mandated remediation, which may include additional instruction and tutoring. Because these channels push in opposite directions… more →
Bidirectional associations between executive function and social behavior across childhood: A registered report using a nationally representative sample
Executive function (EF) refers to a set of cognitive skills involved in deliberate, goal-oriented behavior. Although research has established links between children’s EF and aspects of their social skills, it remains unclear how EF skills are related to specific social behaviors, such as prosociality and social aggression. Additionally, the co-development of EF and social behavior during… more →
Estimating the Overall Effects of Statewide Early Literacy Policies: Evidence from Michigan
This paper evaluates the impacts of Michigan's statewide early literacy reform using a synthetic difference-in-differences approach. We estimate the policy’s effects on student achievement and grade retention and compare them to statewide literacy reforms in South Carolina and Mississippi. We find that the policy increased third-grade reading achievement by 8.7% of a standard deviation, with… more →
The Effects of State-Level Loan Forgiveness Policies on Teacher Supply
The waning prestige of the teaching profession has fueled a decline in the number of aspiring teachers entering preparation programs, compounding staffing challenges already inherent to many schools. In this paper, I show that state-level loan forgiveness policies modestly increase the number of first-year students enrolled in education programs by about 12% but have no overall effect on total… more →
Policy and Practice Series
EdTalks
Centering Teachers in the AI Era
What happens when teachers are treated as professional decision-makers, not just end users of AI tools?
Weigh in: What’s on your mind regarding AI and the teaching profession? >>
We’ll soon record a conversation about the future of the teaching profession in an AI-enabled education system, grounded in two recent EdWorkingPapers.
Maya Kaul representing Landscape Analysis of the Teaching Profession
Dorottya Demszky representing Practitioner Voices Summit: How Teachers Evaluate AI Tools through Deliberative Sensemaking
Constance Lindsay, EdWorkingPapers Review Board member, facilitating the conversation