In this paper we study the impact on student absenteeism of a large, school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during times when students traveled to and from school. We find that the program resulted in a 0.58 percentage point (8.5 percent) reduction…

Do grade configurations affect student academic performance? To bring new evidence to this question, I use recent district-by-grade data for nearly the entire United States that contain measures of test score achievement and rates of school switching induced by grade configuration. Past research has found that student performance, is, on average,…

The ongoing crisis in teacher pension funding has led states to consider various reforms in plan design to replace the traditional benefit formulas, based on years of service and final average salary (FAS). One such design is a cash balance (CB) plan, long deployed in the private sector, and increasingly considered, but rarely yet adopted, for…

Access to quality secondary schooling can be life changing for students in developing contexts. In Kenya, entrance to such schools was historically determined by performance on a high-stakes exam. Understandably then, preparation for this exam is a priority for families and educators. To increase the share of students entering these schools, some…

Two-way dual language (DL) classrooms enroll students of two different language backgrounds and teach curriculum in both languages. I estimate the effect of attending a DL school on student achievement using school choice lotteries from Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina, finding local average treatment effects of 0.04 and…

We examine the effects of offering full-day kindergarten as a replacement for half-day kindergarten on mothers' labor supply using the rollout of full-day kindergarten in Ontario, Canada. We find no effect on the extensive margin but found an effect on the intensive margin. In particular, we find that access to full-day kindergarten increases…

School closings displace thousands of teachers in the United States every year. This paper explores how elementary school teachers in North Carolina respond to this labor market shock. After documenting in our study that declining enrollment is a key driver of school closings, we find that whereas most displaced teachers move to new schools in the…

This paper examines whether schoolwide free meals affect disciplinary outcomes, focusing on the use of suspensions. Under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), schools serving sufficiently high-poverty populations may enroll their entire student bodies in free lunch and breakfast programs, extending free meals to some students who would not…

In 2010, Teach For America (TFA) launched a major expansion effort, funded in part by a five-year Investing in Innovation scale-up grant from the U.S. Department of Education. To examine the effectiveness of TFA elementary school teachers in the second year of the scale-up, we recruited thirty-six schools from ten states and randomly assigned…

The 2007 Public Education Reform Amendment Act led to 39 percent of the principals in District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) being dismissed before the start of the 2008-09 school year, and additional principal exits over the next few years. We measure the impact of replacing these principals on schoolwide student achievement by measuring the…

Schools often have to decide between extending the length of the school year or the school day. This paper examines the effects of changes in the distribution of instructional time on eighth-grade student achievement through a methodological framework that disaggregates total yearly instructional time into separate inputs for days per year and…

Catching students up who have fallen behind academically is a key challenge for educators, and can be difficult to do in a cost-effective manner. This field experiment examines the causal effect of a program designed to provide struggling sixth and seventh graders with math instruction delivered in small groups of roughly ten students by select…

Using unique administrative data from North Carolina that allow us to separate classroom teacher turnover during the school year from end-of-year turnover, we find students who lose their teacher during the school year have significantly lower test score gains (on average -7.5 percent of a standard deviation unit) than those students whose…

Whereas subject-area specialization is common practice in secondary grades, little is known about its incidence and impact in elementary schools. In this study we use data from North Carolina elementary schools to assess which teachers specialize and estimate whether specialization is associated with teacher effectiveness and school achievement.…

Educational accountability policies are a popular tool to close the achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. However, these policies may exacerbate inequality if families from advantaged backgrounds are better able to advocate for their children and thus circumvent policy. We investigate this possibility in the context of…