Over the past two decades, researchers have spent countless hours studying the impacts of public charter schools--independently-run, tuition-free schools of choice that serve some 3.7 million U.S. students today. Just prior to the pandemic, studies from Ohio and nationally indicated that charters on average delivered superior academic outcomes…

Without standardized tests, college admissions may reward high schools' reputation over effectiveness--a phenomenon we study in Peru. We first estimate the impact of selective public exam schools on college outcomes by leveraging the admissions mechanism in a single- and multiple-offers RDD. Despite no conclusive evidence of learning gains,…

We estimate the longitudinal effects of charter schools authorized by different authorizing bodies on student achievement by using student-level data from Indiana. The results of our analysis point to substantial variation, especially between the state's two largest authorizers: Ball State University and the Indianapolis Mayor's Office. Some of…

Supporting social-emotional development, such as by fostering experiences of belonging and promoting sharing and productive communication, has long been part of preschool and elementary school programs. Now, high schools increasingly are focused on social-emotional development, too. The most common instruments used to measure social-emotional…

Performance-based funding (PBF) models have become increasingly prevalent in higher education. While designed to improve student outcomes, their effectiveness, particularly at community and technical colleges (CTCs), remains uncertain. Given CTCs' crucial role in providing equitable education, understanding PBF's effectiveness is imperative for…

In public schools across the country, student needs are both diversifying and intensifying. At the same time, public school districts are facing increasing resource constraints, including declining enrollment, teacher workforce shortages, and reduced federal funding. These conditions make the need to prioritize the most effective strategies for…

There is growing concern that some public service providers may be nonprofit in name but not in fact. We consider this issue in the context of nonprofit charter schools, which sometimes subcontract their daily operations to for-profit management organizations. We use unique data from Ohio to study how nonprofit charters' reliance on for-profit…

Distributed leadership is one of the most influential and well-discussed ideas to emerge in the field of educational leadership. Prompted by the foundational and seminal work of Spillane et al. (2001) the idea of shared or 'stretched' leadership that incorporates both formal and informal leaders, has been of interest to researchers, policy-makers…

Charter school policies have focused on improving three aspects of schools--autonomy, innovation, and accountability--with the intention of promoting advances in curriculum, instruction, and learning that lead to better student outcomes. However, most research on charter schools tends to neglect school organizational and instructional conditions.…

The Institutional Effectiveness Partnership Initiative (IEPI) launched in 2014 as a collaborative effort to help districts promote student success and improve their fiscal and operational effectiveness. The initiative focuses on four major aspects of institutional effectiveness: 1) student performance and outcomes; 2) accreditation status; 3)…

The COVID-19 pandemic-associated learning losses were unequal across school subjects and sociodemographic groups. This study posits that these losses are also heterogeneous based on pre-pandemic school effectiveness, that is, the value schools added above the expected students' learning based on their socioeconomic background. Using national-scale…

A growing literature uses value-added (VA) models to quantify principals' contributions to improving student outcomes. Principal VA is typically estimated using a connected networks model that includes both principal and school fixed effects (FE) to isolate principal effectiveness from fixed school factors that principals cannot control. While…

Background/significance: Standards-based accountability systems have been a pillar of education reform in the United States for almost three decades. Although accountability systems have evolved in progressive reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the underlying theory of action has changed little. The basic…

This paper contributes to the analysis of impacts a university might experience with an increased degree of autonomy. Most autonomy studies have empirically considered the legal, political and financial relationships between state authorities and universities in different national contexts. Nevertheless, most of these studies focus on the changes…

Although there is recognition that there may be differential outcomes for groups of students within schools, examination of outcomes for subgroups presents challenges to researchers and policymakers. It complicates analytic procedures, particularly when the number of students per school in the subgroup is small. We explored five alternatives for…