EdWorkingPapers
The Maternal Labor Market Effects of State Pre-K Funding
Public pre-kindergarten (pre-K) is primarily designed as an educational policy for young children but has attracted attention as a potential lever to support maternal employment. This study provides national evidence on the maternal labor market effects of state pre-K funding, exploiting variation in public investment across states and over time (academic years 2002-2024). Using a triple-… more →
Institutional Resources or Changing Compositions? Unpacking Neighborhood Effects on Education
Children in neighborhoods marked by concentrated poverty and racial isolation face persistent educational barriers, yet the mechanisms underlying neighborhood effects remain poorly understood. This study employs a multi-method analysis of the Near North Side Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI) in St. Louis, Missouri—the nation's largest mixed-income redevelopment program—to unpack two core… more →
Teacher Sorting and Preferences over School Disadvantage: Evidence from Performance Pay in Texas
In this paper I study how performance-based compensation affects teacher mobility and sorting using the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA), a statewide program introduced in 2019. TIA gives teachers a tiered quality designation, Recognized, Exemplary, or Master, based on performance evaluations and value-added measures. These designations are portable across schools and come with a salary… more →
Why Are Bureaucrats More Left-Wing?
Government employees often have policy beliefs that do not reflect those of the public. Civil servants are frequently more supportive of redistribution, which critics attribute to a state that socializes employees to be self-interested. But left-leaning citizens may instead self-select into public jobs. We test these two explanations using the case of Brazilian teachers. Leveraging selection… more →
Career and Technical Education as a Strategy to Improve Long-term Outcomes for English Language Learners
Career and Technical Education (CTE) has emerged as a strategy to enhance college and labor market outcomes for all students, yet little is known about its implications for multilingual students classified as English Learners (ML-ELs). Using longitudinal data from Massachusetts, this study provides some of the first evidence on ML-ELs’ CTE participation and its relationship with long-term… more →
Compounded Disadvantage: Intersectional Inequities in Chronic Absenteeism Prevalence and Recovery During the COVID-19 Era
This study applies an intersectional lens to examine how chronic absenteeism evolved across intersecting dimensions of race, gender, economic disadvantage, disability status, and housing instability before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic using statewide, administrative data from Georgia. Consistent with national evidence, chronic absenteeism roughly doubled from prepandemic levels and… more →
Let’s Chat: Leveraging Chatbot Outreach for Improved Course Performance
This study provides pre-registered, experimental evidence on the use of non-generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to support students in large-enrollment undergraduate courses. We find the chatbot messaging increased students’ final grades and engagement with academic supports, such as tutoring. Treatment effects were generally consistent across student demographics, with the exception… more →
Boosting Dual Enrollment Participation by Simplifying Access for High School Students
Despite the promise of dual enrollment to expand college access, racial disparities in participation persist, and limited research examines policies designed to reduce access barriers. Using statewide student-level data from 2013–14 to 2021–22 and difference-in-differences approaches, I estimate the causal impact of College and Career Access Pathways (CCAP) partnerships, which aimed to reduce… more →
Principal Effects on Teacher Working Conditions
Research on school principals highlights their role in shaping teachers’ work environments, but most evidence is qualitative or correlational. We provide plausibly causal estimates of how principals affect a wide range of teacher working conditions using data from Illinois, where the State Board of Education collects detailed information on working conditions annually. Our identification strategy… more →
Unequal Foundations: Racial Disparities in School Building Conditions in New York State
School infrastructure is a critical yet often overlooked factor shaping student health, learning, and well-being. This study examines racial disparities in public school building conditions across New York State using building inspection data linked to demographic and fiscal data. Schools serving more students of color are significantly more likely to have poor overall conditions, inadequate… more →
Quantifying the Double Advantage: A Multilevel Bayesian Analysis of Same-Race (Black) Teacher Matching on Literacy and Promotion
A growing body of research has highlighted the positive impact of Black teachers on the academic outcomes of Black students. This experimental study contributes to that literature by examining the relationship between teacher–student race matching and the likelihood of grade retention for third-grade Black students in Jackson, Mississippi. This study built on the historical legacy of Black… more →
Does Relative Performance Feedback Improve Academic Outcomes? Evidence from a Randomised Controlled Trial in a Spanish University
The effects of relative performance feedback on student achievement remain contested in the economics of education literature. Some studies find that providing students with information about their standing relative to peers improves academic outcomes, while others show negative effects driven by reduced effort among students who learn they perform better than expected. This paper provides new… more →
The Anatomy of a High-Price Question: Text, Skills, and the Economics of Achievement Measurement
Standardized test scores aggregate item (question) responses into a single scalar, collapsing distinct skills into an undifferentiated measure of proficiency. Which of these component skills matter most for long-run economic outcomes is a question that aggregate scores cannot answer. We develop a framework that looks both inside the score - re-weighting items by their predictive power for a… more →
Access is Not Enough: Human Support Improves Engagement with AI Tutoring
AI tutoring platforms offer a promising path to scaling personalized instruction, but only if students use them. We report findings from two randomized controlled trials in which elementary students were assigned to use an AI literacy platform independently or with an in-person tutor focused on engagement, not direct instruction. Despite dedicated session time, nearly half of students in the… more →
Comparative Cost Analyses of Community College Student Success Initiatives
Limited resources hinder community college completion. Even with strategies shown to improve outcomes, decisionmakers still ask: What does it cost? Can we afford it? I present the first comparative cost analyses of six student success initiatives: basic needs supports, college/career success courses, early alerts, embedded tutoring, retention/emergency aid, and first-year experience programming.… more →
Property Tax Salience and Public Good Investment: Evidence from School Bond Elections
In 2019, Texas passed legislation requiring that the ballot text for all school bond referenda include the phrase “THIS IS A PROPERTY TAX INCREASE,” highlighting property taxes as their primary funding mechanism. Evaluating the impact of this policy change on voter behavior in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the introduction of property tax disclaimers reduced the passage rate… more →
Do Neighbors Shape the Sticker Price? Spatial Competition and State Funding in Cost of Attendance Reporting Over Time
Federal law requires U.S. postsecondary institutions to publish a Cost of Attendance (COA) that serves as the legal ceiling on a student's federal financial aid eligibility, yet off-campus living costs are estimated by institutions at their own discretion, with no standardized methodology or external audit. Using a 14-year panel of 2,311 four-year institutions (2010-2023) and externally… more →
First Impressions Matter: Instructor Gender and Women’s Persistence in Economics
Using near-random assignment of students to instructors in introductory economics at a broad-access public university, we study how instructor gender affects women’s persistence in economics. Female instructors close roughly 40 percent of the gender gap in advanced economics course-taking, with a similar but less precisely estimated improvement in major completion. The effect is concentrated in… more →
Separation of Church and State Curricula? Public Standards, Private Values, and Textbook Content
Curricula are a critical site of cultural transmission, yet we know little about the values conveyed in textbooks across educational settings or the forces that shape them. We examine textbooks from Texas and California public schools and religious-private and home schools spanning 1980-2022, using computational and AI tools to measure presence and portrayal of people, topics, and values over… more →
Identifying Effective Attendance Strategies in Michigan
Chronic absenteeism remains a persistent challenge in Michigan and across the country in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic (Singer, 2024). While schools have expanded their efforts to improve attendance—implementing a wide range of practices, systems, and supports (Singer & Lenhoff, 2025)—there is still limited evidence about which of these strategies are most effective in improving… more →
High School Effects on Civic Engagement
Preparing young people for citizenship is a foundational purpose of public education, yet little is known about whether or how K-12 schools impact civic engagement. Using education, birth, and voting records for nine cohorts of students in Indiana, I estimate and assess the validity of high school effects on voting. School effects on voting are significant and practically meaningful: a one… more →
Beyond School Police Officers: Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Exposure to a Fuller Range of School Security Personnel
Using data from the 2017–18 and 2020–21 Civil Rights Data Collection, we document dispari-ties in exposure to security personnel across US high schools and geographic levels. We dis-tinguish between law enforcement officers (LEOs) and school security guards (SSGs) to cap-ture variation in how security roles are deployed. Results show that Black and Hispanic stu-dents experience greater exposure… more →
From Pilot to Policy: Experimental Evidence from Scaling Online Tutoring
We study a randomized controlled trial of an online mathematics tutoring program scaled from a successful pilot and implemented entirely by regional education authorities in Spain, using interim public-school teachers rather than specially recruited tutors. Assignment to tutoring increased end-of- year grades by 0.15σ and standardized math test scores by 0.11σ — approximately one-third of pilot… more →
The Impact of Statewide Virtual Charter Schools on District Segregation
Enrollment patterns in K-12 online (“virtual”) charter schools have the potential to influence segregation in traditional brick-and-mortar public schools. Yet, research has largely ignored how online schooling options impact racial segregation and poverty concentration within district schools. To address this gap, I conduct two complementary studies: In the first study, I exploit variation in the… more →
The Effects of High-Impact Tutoring on Student Attendance: Evidence from a State Initiative
Student absenteeism surged during and after the pandemic, harming engagement and achievement. We evaluate the impact of Washington DC’s High-Impact Tutoring (HIT) Initiative—designed to mitigate learning loss through targeted academic supports—on student absenteeism. Using daily attendance data and a within-student fixed effects design, we find that students were 1.2 percentage points less likely… more →
Success Begets Success: The Dynamic Treatment Effects of Financial Aid Tournaments
Financial aid programs in higher education vary widely in design, including how aid is structured and the timing of provision. This paper studies the impact of financial aid provided as a repeated tournament and its dynamic treatment effects. Pooling administrative data that captures 32% of all tertiary students in a single European country, I exploit a relative GPAbased eligibility rule in a… more →
Sensemaking in the Program Stream: How Local Leaders Re-purposed the “ALL In Virginia” Policy
School and district leaders are challenged to comprehend and translate policy into practice, a process shaped by cognitive, social, and political dynamics. This study offers a conceptual analysis of Virginia's post-COVID-19 “ALL In” policy, which directed nearly half a billion dollars to school districts, primarily for high-dosage tutoring. We examine ALL In VA implementation through the… more →
The Fall of Accountability: Federal Education Politics in an Era of Polarization and Regime Decay
Twenty-five years ago, the United States was on the cusp of a major expansion of the federal government’s role in K-12 education policy. The No Child Left Behind legislation passed with bipartisan support and established standards and accountability as strategies to improve education. Until roughly 2013, reading and math scores did improve; however, in the years since, student achievement on test… more →
Effects of Dual-Language Immersion on Attendance and Reclassification in a Large Urban District
Dual-language immersion (DLI) programs have proliferated across the United States, yet evidence on their effects for English Learner-designated (EL) students in large, diverse urban districts remains limited. This study examines DLI's effects on attendance and reclassification—two outcomes that worsened for ELs following the COVID-19 pandemic. Using restricted student-level data from the Los… more →
The Causal Effect of Student Absences Post Pandemic: Evidence from Three School Systems
Researchers, educators, and policymakers have long worried about the consequences of student absences for educational achievement and attainment—concerns that have grown with the significant rise in absenteeism during and following the Covid-19 pandemic. Using administrative data from Maryland, North Carolina, and a large urban school district, we find that the impact of absences on test scores… more →
Trends in Local Teacher Supply Since the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Teacher Job Applications
Recent survey evidence documents pandemic-era challenges in filling teacher vacancies and hiring from too-small applicant pools. However, direct evidence quantifying changes in teacher supply since the onset of the pandemic is scarce. Using longitudinal teacher job application data from a large southeastern school district, we examine trends in local teacher supply from 2015 to 2023. We find… more →
Embrace, Contradiction, or Prohibition: A National Scan of State Policies for Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education
This qualitative document review is a national scan of state policies pertaining to culturally responsive and sustaining education (CRSE) as of September 2025. We present a typology of states—CRSE Forward, CRSE Conflicted, CRSE Limited, and CRSE Prohibitive—reflecting how CRSE is taken up in states’ teaching standards and the extent to which states’ policy environments are supportive of CRSE. Our… more →
The Challenge of Capturing Higher-Order Thinking Skills at Scale
Higher-order thinking skills are important for K-12 students’ long-term success. However, the lack of widely administered assessments designed to capture this construct has made it difficult to measure higher-order skills at scale. This paper examines the measurement properties of an approach to capturing higher-order skills using extant statewide standardized testing data. We use item-level data… more →
Growing Up in Disability-Dense School Districts: Long-Term Impacts of Childhood Exposure on Educational Attainment
This study examines whether growing up in a district with a higher share of people with disabilities shapes long-term educational attainment for children with and without disabilities. Using administrative data on more than 170,000 children from six Texas kindergarten cohorts (1994–1999) who move across districts during K–12, I exploit variation in disability density across school districts to… more →
Hmong but not Asian, Sāmoan but not Pacific Islander: Tracing the ECLS-K Racial Data (Mis)Classification Journey
Race is a socially and politically charged concept that remains contested in the United States. We examine racial data (mis)classification in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies (ECLS-K) dataset. Centering the racial data journey of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA&NHPI) students, we find two types of racial data (mis)classification: (1) racial reformation… more →
Meeting People Where They Are: Experimental Evidence on Embedded Supports, Service Use, and Educational Outcomes
Many public services suffer from persistently low take-up despite high potential returns. A growing body of evidence suggests that information alone does little to close this gap; instead, hassle costs and default access points may be binding constraints on utilization. We test whether reallocating existing services to where people already are – rather than requiring them to seek out centralized… more →
Does Coursework Matter? Uncovering the Role of Skills in the Returns to College
The continuing shift of the U.S. economy toward a high-skill base has increased the demand for college-educated workers. To understand how higher education prepares students for this evolving economy, a large body of literature in labor economics has focused on the causes and consequences of college enrollment, institutional selectivity, and major choice. Much less attention has been paid to a… more →
Unequal and Persistent Effects of Student Loan Policy: Evidence from Parent PLUS Reforms
Federal student loan policy is designed as a uniform intervention, yet institutions differ in their reliance on specific sources of financing. We study how these differences shape the transmission of policy shocks using two reforms to the Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students (Parent PLUS) program: a 2012 tightening of credit standards that limited access to these loans and a 2015 revision that… more →
Answering the call: How changes to the salience of job characteristics affect college students’ decisions
College students often make employment decisions with incomplete information, particularly about compensation. As a result, they may rely on misleading heuristics (such as assuming that interesting or prosocial jobs pay badly) and overlook campus positions that would support both their financial needs and their development. We test whether highlighting job characteristics changes students'… more →
Who Leaves? Interdistrict Magnet School Openings and Enrollment Dynamics in Nearby Schools
Connecticut expanded interdistrict magnet schools (IMS) intending to reduce racial and socioeconomic segregation across districts, yet the potential unintended effects on student composition in nearby schools remains unclear. Leveraging the staggered rollout of IMS openings, this study finds that IMS openings reduce enrollment by about 5 percent in nearby private K8 and traditional public high… more →
Are Rural Republicans Different When It Comes to Public Opinion on Education Policy?
Conservative education policy in the United States increasingly emphasizes school choice, decentralization, and parental authority. This chapter examines whether these priorities resonate equally across geographic contexts, focusing specifically on rural Republicans. Using data from the 2015–2022 Education Next surveys, we find that while partisanship strongly structures education attitudes,… more →
Does in-service training in special education increase the effectiveness of general classroom teachers? Evidence from the large-scale “Special Education Pedagogy for Learning” program in Sweden
This study evaluates the impact of a large-scale professional development program for general classroom teachers in Sweden, the “Special Education Pedagogy for Learning” (SFL) program. Linking program administrative data to national full population register data, we apply a dynamic difference-in-differences estimation of school-level program participation on grade 6 and grade 9 student… more →
Corequisite Course Models in California Community Colleges: Implementation Variation and Challenges
Fewer than one third of students who are assessed as not meeting college readiness standards and placed into traditional developmental education (DE) complete their DE sequences and move on to college-level coursework (Bailey et al., 2010). Research suggests that allowing these students to enroll directly into introductory college-level courses—either with concurrent DE or in lieu of DE—is an… more →
Teacher-student relationships and adult outcomes: Developmental cascades via childhood executive function and behavioral dysregulation
Longitudinal data were examined to test associations between teacher-student relationships and adult outcomes, as well as mechanisms underlying these associations. Results from the NICHD-SECCYD (N=1364; 52% male; 76% White; 13% Black; 6% Hispanic; 5% other; data collection took place in the U.S. beginning in 1991) revealed a complex set of findings. First, teacher-student conflict and closeness… more →
Indiana Charter School Performance During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted schooling nationwide and contributed to substantial declines in student achievement. At the same time, enrollment patterns shifted and charter school sectors expanded in several states, raising questions about whether charter schools were better positioned to support student learning during and after the pandemic. This study estimates the effect of attending a… more →
Scaling High-Touch College Advising: Causal Evidence and Program Design Insights from Tennessee
College advising can raise postsecondary enrollment, but few programs prove effective at scale. We leverage the rollout of a statewide, professionally staffed, and centrally coordinated college advising program (Advise TN) across 33 communities to estimate causal impacts on enrollment, persistence, degree completion, and workforce participation. Using event-study and robust difference-in-… more →
Public Opinion on Electoral Policy: Evidence from U.S. School Board Elections
Changes to electoral systems are relatively rare in established democracies. Conventional explanations for this stability suggest elected officials and citizens who stand to lose influence under new arrangements will oppose change. We explore the nature of public awareness and opinion regarding an electoral institution that has undergone notable change in recent decades—the timing of local school… more →
Returns to Education in the United States: A Comparison of OLS and Double Machine Learning Methods
This study examines the economic returns to education in the U.S. using 2024 CPS data and compares Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression with a Double Machine Learning (DML) framework incorporating models such as random forests, boosted trees, lasso, GAMs, and neural networks (MLP). Results show consistent returns of 8 to 9 percent per additional year of schooling across methods. Simulations… more →
Long-term Consequences of Early Access to Educational Opportunity
This paper examines the long-term consequences of tracking in middle school. Using longitudinal administrative data from a large, urban school district and regression and quasi-experimental matching methods, we find that students who had the opportunity to take advanced math earned higher math test scores, completed more rigorous high school coursework, and were more likely to attend a four-year… more →
The Impact of the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard Decision on Undergraduate Demographics
The 2023 Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA) effectively ended the explicit consideration of race in college admissions. This paper examines the impact of SFFA on the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic composition of undergraduate populations across institutional sectors. Using 2018–2024 data from the Integrated Postsecondary… more →