In Rhode Island, out-of-school suspensions were excessively and disproportionately used to penalize low-level infractions. To address this problem, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed legislation, effective May 2012, prohibiting out-of-school suspensions for attendance-specific infractions. Four years later, the Assembly passed additional…

We examined how performance-based funding (PBF) for higher education institutions in Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana affects bachelor's degree completion, admission practices, and the enrollment of underserved students. Utilizing data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, we employed an event study analysis, in addition to a…

Washington, DC's Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), the only federally funded school voucher program in the United States, has provided private school scholarships to low-income students in DC since 2004. From its inception, the program has received significant attention in national debates and has been the subject of rigorous evaluations…

Many states use high-school exit examinations to assess students' career and college readiness in core subjects. We find meaningful consequences of barely passing the mathematics examination in Massachusetts, as opposed to just failing it. However, these impacts operate at different educational attainment margins for low-income and higher-income…

While research supports later start times for secondary schools, there is little evidence regarding start times for elementary schools. We address this gap with a statewide examination of elementary schools and a quasi-experimental analysis of an urban district that recently changed its elementary start times. We find that earlier start times…

Dual enrollment is an increasingly popular avenue for high school students to earn college credit. However, low-income students are underrepresented among dual enrollment participants. In this study, we use a difference-in-differences design to evaluate a unique federal pilot program that allowed high school students to access Pell Grants to fund…

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a policy change to the federally administered National School Lunch Program that allows schools serving low-income populations to classify all students as eligible for free meals, regardless of individual circumstances. This has implications for the use of free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data to proxy…

Every year, the U.S. Department of Education selects hundreds of thousands of low-income students to provide additional documentation to corroborate their financial aid eligibility in a process known as verification. Although many are concerned about the potential deleterious effects of being selected, to date, studies are limited to descriptive…

Chile is known for universal school choice policies and a high level of economic segregation. In part, segregation has been linked to selective school admission policies. Chile implemented a centralized school admission system (New School Admission System), where PK-12 schools must accept any applicant, and lottery assignment is used for…

We replicate and extend prior work on Florida's Bright Futures merit aid scholarship to consider its effect on college enrollment and degree completion. We estimate causal impacts using a regression discontinuity design to exploit SAT thresholds that strongly determine eligibility. We find no positive impacts on attendance or attainment, and…

Income gaps in college enrollment, persistence, and graduation raise concerns for those interested in equal opportunity in higher education. We present findings from a randomly assigned scholarship for low-income students at a medium-sized public 4-year university. The program focused solely on the first four semesters of enrollment and tied aid…

Growing concerns about inequitable access have made public investment in gifted programs controversial in many school districts, yet advocates maintain that gifted services provide necessary enrichment for exceptional students to succeed at school. We provide evidence on whether the typical gifted program indeed benefits elementary students'…

Harnessing a cluster randomized controlled trial, we estimated the impact on students' advanced placement (AP) examination performance of a project-based learning (PBL) approach to AP compared with a lecture-based AP approach. Through PBL, teachers primarily play a facilitator role, while students work on complex tasks organized around central…

Indiana, Oklahoma, and Washington each have programs designed to address college enrollment gaps by offering a promise of state-based college financial aid to low-income middle school students in exchange for making a pledge to do well in high school, be a good citizen, not be convicted of a felony, and apply for financial aid to college. Using a…

We examine access to effective teachers for low-income students in 26 geographically dispersed school districts over a 5-year period. We measure teacher effectiveness using a value-added model that accounts for measurement error in prior test scores and peer effects. Differences between the average value added of teachers of high- and low-income…