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NEW EdWorkingPapers
Empty Desks: Schools and Staffing after the Pandemic
Sustained enrollment losses and other post-pandemic factors have placed budgetary pressures on many school districts and motivated difficult discussions about both closing under enrolled schools and staffing reductions. Using the most currently available national data, this brief provides descriptive evidence on trends in the number of operating schools and their teacher staffing and discusses… more →
Interpreting Null Effects in Education: Insights from a Tutoring Experiment
We learn not only from when interventions work—but also from why they do not. Policymakers embraced high impact tutoring to address pandemic learning loss, but scaling promising practices is difficult, and not all implementations prove effective. Using random assignment, we find null (math and a low-stakes reading test) and negative (-0.09 SD on state reading scores) impacts from assignment to… more →
The Returns to Private Tutoring Centers
Private tutoring centers have expanded rapidly across the United States, yet there is little evidence on whether these centers improve student outcomes. Using business records on tutoring establishments linked to administrative data covering over five million public school students in Texas, this paper estimates the short- and long-run impacts of tutoring centers.
Enhancing Teacher Productivity with Information on Students and Skills: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh
Teachers may fail to address learning gaps because they do not know which students and skills need support. While exams are prevalent in every education system, these tests often go underutilized. We evaluate an intervention that provided grade-6 math teachers in 312 schools in Bangladesh with results from two brief tests, reports identifying topics and students in need of support, and an… more →
Increasing Take-Up of Literacy Tutoring: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
Government programs often experience low take-up, limiting their potential positive impact. We examine whether reducing registration frictions can increase participation in a state-financed literacy intervention program. In a randomized field experiment, families received either encouragement and a simplified enrollment process, or these interventions plus text message nudges, relative to a… more →
Does Liberal Education Produce Engaged Citizens? The Relationship Between Curricular Breadth, Depth, and Democratic Outcomes
Liberal education is often touted as an ideal format for preparing students for civic engagement, yet this claim is seldom empirically tested. In this study, we quantify the relationship between college students’ liberal education, measured by the breadth and depth of their curriculum, and markers of civic engagement in four domains: participating in civic life, acting politically, being… 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?
Watch the conversation about the future of the teaching profession in an AI-enabled education system, grounded in two recent EdWorkingPapers.