The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows high-poverty schools to offer free meals to all students regardless of household income. Conceptualizing universal meal provision as a strategy to alleviate stigma associated with school meals, we hypothesize that CEP implementation reduces the incidence of suspensions, particularly for students…

We use data from the Stanford Education Data Archive to describe district-level trends in average academic achievement between 2009 and 2019. Although on average school districts' test scores improved very modestly (by about 0.001 standard deviations per year), there is significant variation among districts. Moreover, we find that average test…

This study examined whether pre-K benefits persist through the end of first grade and the extent to which persistence differs based on outcome domains, subsequent classroom environments, and key subgroups of children. Data from 2,351 children living in a large and diverse county in Virginia revealed that the initial benefits of pre-K for academic…

Half of kindergarten teachers split children into higher and lower ability groups for reading or math. In national data, we predicted kindergarten ability group placement using linear and ordinal logistic regression with classroom fixed effects. In fall, test scores were the best predictors of group placement, but there was bias favoring girls,…

Resource exposure was a key mechanism linking patterns of racial segregation and student outcomes during the Brown v. Board of Education era. Decades later, past progress on school desegregation may have stalled, raising concerns about resource equity and associated student outcomes. Are recent trends in segregation associated with racial…

This cluster randomized controlled trial investigated the impact of project-based learning with professional development supports on social studies and literacy achievement and motivation of second-grade students from low-socioeconomic status school districts. At random in within-school pairs, 48 teachers were assigned to the experimental or…

This article documents the patterns of White-Black and White-Hispanic enrollment gaps in Advanced Placement (AP) and Dual Enrollment (DE) programs across thousands of school districts in the United States by merging several data sources. We show that the vast majority of districts have racial enrollment gaps in both programs, with wider gaps in AP…

Scholarship on college choice largely focuses on how students search for colleges but less is known about how colleges recruit students. This article analyzes off-campus recruiting visits for 15 public research universities. We Web-scrape university admissions websites and issue public records requests to collect data on recruiting visits.…

High levels of school mobility are a problem in many urban districts. Many of these same districts are also dealing with high rates of violent crime. In this study, we use 6 years (2010-2011 to 2015-2016) of administrative data from Baltimore City public elementary school students and crime data from the Baltimore Police Department to examine…

Despite scholarly consensus on the positive influence of peers' parental education on students' academic achievement, less is known about whether marginalized students reap similar benefits as their nonmarginalized counterparts. Using data from the China Educational Panel Survey and a quasi-experimental design, we show that the impact of…

In this study, we examine the intersections and divergences of class- and race-based parenting motivations and practices as they connect to education through an exploration of the purposeful, race-conscious ways that a socioeconomically mixed sample of Black families approaches and practices academic and social enrichment and development. Drawing…

We characterize the extent to which Black-White gaps for multiple educational outcomes are linked across school districts in the United States. Gaps in disciplinary action, grade-level retention, classification into special education and Gifted and Talented, and Advanced Placement course-taking are large in magnitude and correlated. Racial…

In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment…

Despite widespread utilization, research exploring associations between playgroup and child development is scarce. We analyzed a national data set measuring the holistic development of children aged 4 to 6 years who commenced school in Australia in 2015 (n = 104,767), the Australian Early Development Census, to explore developmental differences…