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NEW EdWorkingPapers
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.
How Much Do Principals Matter When Politicians Choose Them? Evidence from Dated Successions and Close Elections in Brazil
Estimates of how much school principals matter differ by an order of magnitude, in part because conventional estimators require principal identifiers and absorb sampling noise into the estimated dispersion. We identify the variance of principal-by-school effects without identifiers, using successions dated by principals' reported tenure in Brazil's 2011 national assessment, which imply known… more →
What Districts Aim to Do: A Computational Mixed Methods Analysis of School District Strategic Plans
School districts are a distinct but long-critiqued feature of the United States educational system. Amid these critiques and increased public dissatisfaction with education, we revisit a fundamental question: What do school districts aim to do?
One Fell Through the Safety Net: Embeddedness and Take Up of Social Benefits
The U.S. social safety net comprises a patchwork quilt of welfare programs, but not all eligible beneficiaries receive aid. Incomplete take-up suggests that some children and families are not receiving access to the education, healthcare, housing, and income needed to break the cycle of poverty and may reflect unequal burdens in accessing benefits. We examine incomplete take-up using the case… more →
Designing Effective Public-Private Partnerships in Education
Publicly funded school choice is examined as a form of education public-private partnership (PPP), with cross-national differences interpreted through institutional design rather than private provision alone. A novel theoretical framework derives two indicators – alignment and coherence – from a formal utility-theoretic model of PPP maturity, applied here for the first time to education.… more →
Screen or Barrier? Science of Reading Certification Exams and Teacher Supply in Texas
Twenty states now require prospective teachers to pass a standalone Science of Reading (SOR) exam. These exams restrict teacher supply as a barrier, and whether they are worth that cost depends on whether they also screen on teaching quality. This paper explores this tension in Texas' SOR exam, required since 2021 for new elementary and middle-grades candidates, using administrative data… 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.