EdWorkingPapers
Can Early Exposure to the Teaching Profession Increase Teacher Supply and Diversity? New Evidence on the Teacher Pipeline
We examine whether early exposure to the teaching career has the potential to expand the size and diversity of new teacher supply. Exploiting the staggered expansion of high school education courses across Texas, we find little evidence that these courses increased new teacher supply or diversity despite course takers being substantially more diverse than the teacher workforce. High school… more →
Why aren’t online learning programs working better in schools: Maybe they need to be more integrated with what is actually taught during whole classroom instruction?
Computer-assisted learning (CAL)—educational software providing instruction to help students learn concepts and skills—is ubiquitous in US schools. Despite meta-analyses suggesting benefits, national test scores have declined during rapid CAL adoption. This may reflect insufficient research on how and when CAL complements instruction. Using a fixed effect model, we find 60 additional minutes of… more →
Immigration Enforcement Actions and Empty Desks: Persistent and Acute Attendance Effects
How do changes in immigration policy affect student attendance? We use student-by-day administrative records from a mid-sized school district to estimate the causal effect of heightened federal immigration enforcement following the January 2025 presidential inauguration on student attendance using a difference-in-differences design. We find that heightened enforcement and immigration enforcement… more →
Heterogeneous Fadeout of Cognitive Gains: Evidence from Head Start Preschool
Fadeout is defined as the decline in an intervention's initial treatment effect in subsequent follow-up periods. This paper uses the Head Start Impact Study to examine heterogeneity in the fadeout of cognitive gains from access to Head Start preschool. I find that Black children experience substantially less fadeout than non-Black children and retain a 0.23 standard deviation gain at the end of… more →
Impact of States' Adoption of Response to Intervention (RTI) on Disability Identification
The rise of specific learning disability (SLD) identification from 1975 to the early 2000s prompted the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to permit states to use a student's response to intervention (RTI) in eligibility determination to improve identification. Single-state studies report that RTI adoption reduced SLD identification by 11% to 15%. We test… more →
Assistant Principals’ Career Aspirations: Exploring the Supply Side of the School Leadership Pipeline
Most assistant principals (APs) seek to become principals in the future. However, little is known about why some APs aspire to the principalship while others wish to remain in the AP role. This study examines the factors that predict APs’ aspirations to the principalship, which is key to understanding the supply of future principals. We use data from the 2024 Tennessee Educator Survey to examine… more →
Incidence and Effects of Reported University Student Absences
Despite the potential for illness or bereavement to significantly disrupt education, there is little evidence about the frequency and impact of absences in higher education. Using administrative data from a large public university in the United States, we analyze the incidence of reported student absences and their effects on grades and retention. We document significant heterogeneity in the use… more →
Persisting Income-Based Preschool Enrollment Gap in the U.S., 2000 to 2023
This study aims to understand whether access to early childhood education (ECE) has become more equitable over a period of substantial growth in public pre-K investment. This study describes and statistically tests the differential trends across income groups in center-based ECE enrollment among 3- and 4-year-olds. Across descriptive, regression, and decomposition analyses, the income-based… more →
Revisiting Why Superintendents Turn Over: Understanding Pathways Out of School District Leadership
Research has examined many facets of superintendent turnover but offers an incomplete understanding of superintendents’ pathways out of the role. We pair administrative data on Tennessee superintendents over 15 years with hand-collected information about the reported reasons for their departures and jobs they took after leaving. Our data show that interpreting exits from state administrative data… more →
Off the Books: School-Based Informal Diversion and Student and Community Outcomes
Efforts to reduce school-based arrest may reshape policing beyond school doors, yet their downstream effects are largely unknown. We study a New York City policy that encouraged informal diversion in place of arrest, using a difference-in-differences strategy. The probability of a juvenile crime record near a school fell by 6.9 percentage points---concentrated among misdemeanor offenses and… more →
Superintendent (In)Stability and Student Achievement in the United States
Superintendents shape conditions for teaching and learning, yet the limited studies of their impact—concentrated in a few states and focused on superintendent turnover—find small or null effects on student achievement. Using more than 37,000 district-year records from national superintendents and student achievement datasets, and drawing on organizational learning and managerial succession… more →
(How) Do We Teach Emotions?
Emotional intelligence constitutes a key component of human capital, shaped partially by educational materials. Using machine learning and generative AI tools, we examine emotional content in public-school textbooks and children’s literature. A stark mismatch emerges: text exposes children to a broad emotional range, but images overwhelmingly depict happiness and calm, regardless of emotions… more →
Is Calculus a Gatekeeper in Selective Engineering Admissions? Insights from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment with Admissions Officers
Lower-resourced high schools are far less likely to offer calculus, raising concerns that calculus availability may be a gatekeeper in selective college admissions. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment (292 admissions officers, 1768 total observations), we investigate whether engineering applicants are penalized for not taking calculus—even when it was unavailable to them. We also investigate… more →
"How You Spend Your Money is Your Strategy": Education Spending and the Academic Achievement of Students with and without Disabilities in Virginia, 2018-2025
Virginia experienced a boost in federal and state education funding from 2020-2025 and launched the Virginia Literacy Act in 2023. These policy events prompted our study of the impact of education spending by school divisions on growth in academic pass rates in reading and mathematics for students with and without disabilities in grades three through eight (2018-2025). To do this, we estimated… more →
Post-pandemic achievement recovery based on student characteristics and district-level policies
It is well-established that student achievement has declined dramatically since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, less is known how these patterns may vary by developmental timing of exposure to the pandemic and how district-level policies may have influenced student recovery. This descriptive study examined patterns of achievement across middle childhood during and after the COVID-19… more →
Shine a Light: The U.S. Federal Government Should Increase Access to Educational Administrative Data
The Institute of Educational Sciences invested substantial resources into the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grant program. These grants helped states convert their educational records to longitudinal datasets for research and evaluation. However, external researchers still have unreliable access to these datasets. In this commentary, we argue that the U.S. federal government should use… more →
Leveraging complementarities between teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical supports: Experimental evidence from India
We evaluate whether pairing strong subject-matter knowledge with pedagogical supports can improve learning in public primary schools. In Pune, India, we randomly assigned grades within 48 schools to an intervention that recruited college students in science, technology, engineering, and math (“fellows”), supported them with training, coaching, and scripts, and had them partly replace math and… more →
How Colleges and Universities are Adopting AI in Higher Education: A Global Comparative Analysis
Artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI have become central strategic priorities for universities worldwide, yet the extent to which institutions formally embed AI into their governance, academic, and policy structures remains unclear. This study examines the institutionalization of AI across a global sample of research universities drawn from the Times Higher Education 2026 World… more →
Teacher Stability in Turnaround Schools: An Examination of the Impacts of Michigan’s Partnership Model on Teacher Turnover
While a large literature demonstrates that school turnaround can improve performance, impacts on teacher retention are more ambiguous. We examine the impact of Michigan’s turnaround policy on teacher turnover before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Event study findings show limited immediate effects on teacher turnover, but significant and substantively large decreases in school-level turnover… more →
The Access–Enrollment Disconnect in Corequisite Math Reform: Causal Evidence and Stakeholder Perspectives from a Community College
This study examines a statewide developmental education reform in Virginia that allows students who would have been placed in standalone remedial math to enroll directly in college-level math with corequisite support. Although corequisite support has been widely adopted and generally promising, less is known about how these reforms operate when expanded access does not always translate into… more →
State School Accountability Decisions and the Implications for School Ratings
State school accountability systems have been a constant in educational policy since before federal law required them. Currently, state systems must include multiple measures of school quality but states otherwise have considerable leeway in measuring schools. We simulate school ratings using eight years of data to demonstrate how state decisions about (a) weighting multiple measures, and (b) how… more →
The Post-Pandemic “Attendance Crisis” in Historical Perspective
School attendance rates in the United States are lower now than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This rise in absenteeism has often been characterized as a crisis; but whether it amounts to a broader breakdown in norms depends on the historical baseline against which it is judged. The recent decline in attendance rates represents a small setback within a much longer trajectory of increasing school… more →
Does Fadeout Preclude Long-Run Adult Effects? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Educational Intervention Randomized Controlled Trials
A perplexing pattern has been observed in the intervention literature: although impacts on children’s skills often fade, some interventions still produce long-run impacts on adult outcomes. Existing developmental theory does not provide a straightforward explanation. This “fadeoutemergence paradox” spotlights our limited understanding of how early skill gains shape long-run trajectories. In part… more →
Evaluation Scores and Student Learning under Compulsory Teacher Re-Evaluation
We examine how lower-performing public school teachers respond to more frequent formative evaluations. A 2011 reform in Chile required teachers rated "basic" (the second-lowest category) to be re-evaluated after two years rather than four. Using nationwide administrative data on primary school teachers and students from 2005-2015, we show that the reform increased two-year re-evaluation rates by… more →
Using experimental variation to examine the (co-)development of cognitive and social-emotional skills in early childhood
How cognitive and social-emotional skills emerges in childhood is a central question in developmental psychology. Despite a proliferation of theory and empirical work, the field has struggled to establish causal effects. We employed a novel approach to test the stability and codevelopment of cognitive and social-emotional skills in early childhood using longitudinal randomized controlled trial… more →
Measures Still Matter: Replicating and Extending a Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Educational Apps on Children's Reading and Math Skills with Six Years of New Data
This study replicates and extends a meta-analysis of 36 studies of educational apps (Kim et al., 2021) with six years of new data. We synthesize 841 effect sizes from 141 studies evaluating the effectiveness of educational apps on reading and math skills of students ages 3-9. Replicating the original study, we find a moderate positive pooled effect size with substantial heterogeneity (d = .40, 95… more →
The Geography of Gifted Education: Exploring School and Neighborhood Predictors of Access to Gifted & Talented Programs in New York City
Black and Hispanic students participate in gifted education at lower rates than their share of general education public school enrollment would suggest, including within New York City's Gifted and Talented (G&T) admissions process. Debates over this disparity focus on how students are identified rather than where programs exist. This paper examines a related supply-side question by asking… more →
Unveiling Racism: A Systematic Review of Survey Measures of Racism in Education
Education policy research aimed at eliminating racism necessitates methodological innovation that fosters both racial equity–centered approaches and robust empirical analysis of the systemic and structural nature of racism. Most quantitative research in educational psychology does not account for racism in its modeling, thereby obscuring the racialized environments in which students learn (DeCuir… more →
Distinguishing Burdens from Benefits in Early Care and Education Policy
Contemporary policy conversations discuss burdens imposed by regulations, describing when they render government functions ineffective and inefficient. But one can mislabel the core purposes and benefits of a policy’s existence as burdens. Applying the administrative burden framework to early care and education (ECE) policy, we describe what ECE providers face while navigating disparate state and… more →
The Disparate Impacts of Academic Probation
Institutional rules that appear neutral can produce unequal outcomes when applied to students who differ in how they respond to them. We study this in the context of academic probation, a policy used by nearly every U.S. college to warn students whose grades fall below a fixed threshold that continued enrollment is conditional on improvement. To do so, we draw on student records from a large… more →
Under the Weather? Seasonal Effects of Temperature on Student Test Performance
As students are exposed to extreme temperatures with ever-increasing frequency, it is important to understand how such exposure affects student performance. Drawing on detailed Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) achievement data combined with high-resolution weather records, we estimate the effect of temperature on student test performance across a six-year period for students in Tulsa, Oklahoma… more →
Expanded High-Speed Broadband Internet Access at Home and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Federal Subsidy Program
Policymakers have argued that expanding home broadband would improve educational outcomes. However, prior studies report mixed, null, or negative effects on achievement, with limited post-pandemic evidence. Using district-level achievement and enrollment data from a national broadband subsidy program serving 23 million low-income households, we examine whether increased uptake is associated with… more →
Unpacking the Socioeconomic Status Gap in Exam-Based School Admissions
We analyze the large socioeconomic status (SES) gaps in public high school assignments in Mexico City, a centralized choice system with exam-based admissions. Using a rich structural model, decomposition, and simulations, we find that placement score differences explain 83% of the gap in assignment to elite schools, contrasted with preferences (6%) and location (5%). For less-preferred technical… more →
What Drives Special Education Spending: Evidence from Texas School Districts
Special education finance systems rely on observable indicators such as disability classifications and educational placements to allocate resources, yet limited evidence exists regarding whether these indicators correspond to the expenditures districts incur serving students with disabilities. This study examines variation in special education spending across Texas public school districts… more →
When Youth Enter The Chat: An Epistemic Shift in the Validation of LLM-Based Measures of Student Talk
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used increasingly to measure aspects of student discourse (e.g. talk moves, collaboration, equity of voice) at scale. Typically, LLM-based measures of student talk use transcriptions of classroom conversations that only include verbal contributions, which de-contextualize student language. Common practices for validating these measures include comparing… more →
The Chronic(les) of Absenteeism Measurement: Unpacking the Many Measures of Attendance and Evidence for a Lower Chronic Absenteeism Threshold
This study investigates how absenteeism can be more rigorously measured as an early warning indicator of future academic risk. Using administrative data from 8,891 Boston Public Schools students followed from Pre-K through eighth grade, we (1) describe patterns in excused, unexcused, and total absences, measured as both days and rates, across grades; (2) apply Signal Detection Theory and Receiver… more →
What’s in Play: The Strategic and Symbolic Use of Racial Equity Frames When Racial Politics Shift
Shifting racial politics place substantial pressures on organizations to navigate whether and how to sustain DEI commitments. In this study, I examine how partnerships between public school districts and private school improvement organizations (SIOs) responded to shifting environmental pressures around racial equity in their espoused goals and practice over time. I found that organizations… more →
Measuring Academic Behaviors at Scale: Developing Longitudinal Measures of “Noncognitive” Skills Using Administrative Data and Examining Predictive Validity
Academic behaviors, as reflected in administrative indicators such as attendance and suspensions, are widely used in education research. However, limited guidance exists on how to measure them longitudinally and at scale. Using longitudinal data from Boston Public Schools students followed from kindergarten through high school (N = 12,232), we compare grade-specific point-in-time indicators with… more →
An Untappable Pipeline? Examining Why Many Educators with Administrative Licenses Do Not Pursue School Leadership
States' licensure requirements typically mean that new school principals and assistant principals must come from the pool of educators holding an administrative license. Yet if many license- holders are uninterested in leadership positions, even districts with large numbers of licensed educators may face a constrained supply of leaders. Using statewide administrative and survey data from… more →
Helping the Many by Tutoring the Few: The Social Multiplier of Early Literacy Instruction
Tutoring is almost always evaluated by randomizing students within schools, a design that differences out any spillover onto classmates. We instead randomize 81 Danish schools and 2,583 kindergartners, tutoring a few children in each and testing all. Decoding improved 0.38 standard deviations among the pre-registered target group and 0.27 SD school-wide. Bounds requiring only the test’s range and… more →
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 →
Local Signals in a Global Tournament: Information Frictions, Optimism, and College Completion
Families frequently receive local signals about children’s skills, such as class rank in high school, yet the college market in which most students ultimately compete is much broader. Using nationally-representative data, we show that student effort, parental investment, and beliefs about college degree attainment all respond predominantly to local ranks as opposed to global ranks, despite both… 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Early literacy tutoring and children’s reading trajectories: Evidence from a four-year randomized controlled trial
Most evidence on early literacy tutoring comes from intensive one-year interventions. Much less is known about whether schools can sustain individualized instructional support as students’ reading needs evolve across the early grades. We present findings from a four-year randomized controlled trial evaluating Chapter One, an adaptive instructional support system designed to translate the… more →
Can We Save Failing Schools? Evidence From Los Angeles
Can providing funding and support to failing schools help them improve? This paper studies this question using a natural experiment based on a 2017 lawsuit settlement that allocated substantial resources and support to the lowest-performing schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Using a difference-in-differences design, I compare 50 secondary schools that received an increase… more →
Making AI Tutoring Productive: Evidence from a Mastery-Based Math Practice Experiment
Large language models (LLMs) can make tutoring more scalable, but only if students use them to reason through mistakes rather than avoid effort. We study this question in a randomized field experiment with more than 6,000 middle-school students in Hamilton County Schools using NUMI, a research-based computer-assisted learning (CAL) platform. Students were randomized to AI versus CAL-only support… more →