For decades, calculus has towered over the high-school math landscape, its mastery viewed as the surest marker of high academic achievement. Yet in New England as across the nation, changes are underway: Statistics and data science courses are multiplying, and state leaders are re-engineering graduation rules so students can choose the pathway…

The charter school movement encompasses many school models. In Massachusetts in the 2010's, the site of our study, urban charter schools primarily used "No Excuses" practices, whereas nonurban charters had greater model variety. Using randomized admissions lotteries, we estimate the impact of charter schools by locality on college…

Most of the literature on lottery-based charter school research focuses on charters in large urban centers, primarily finding that they raise standardized test scores. In contrast, the limited rigorous research on rural and suburban charters suggests that they reduce or do not affect test scores. However, this evidence is limited, and almost no…