In the U.S., state politicians directly influence legislation and budget decisions that can substantially affect public education spending and students. Does the political party of elected officials matter for these outcomes? We use a regression discontinuity design to analyze close house and gubernatorial elections from 1982 to 2016 and find that…

Class size is one of the small number of variables in American K-12 education that are both thought to influence student learning and are subject to legislative action. Legislative mandates on maximum class size have been very popular at the state level. In recent decades, at least 24 states have mandated or incentivized class-size reduction…

California was, and remains, the largest "experiment" in class-size reduction (CSR) in the country's history. Its sweeping program to reduce the state's classes in kindergarten through the third grade covered nearly 2 million students and dropped the average class size from almost twenty-nine students per class, and often a great many…