Econometricians taking our toys away again.

This epitaph goes hard.

Guess he didn't adapt fast enough.

Brendan - There is definitely a distribution in the rigor of quant ed research, but this is painting with a pretty broad brush. Most ed policy programs teach the standard toolkit of causal inference, and many complex questions in ed are best answered through multiple methodological approaches. 1/2

Counterpoint: quantitative researchers in education called out Boaler back in the days of Twitter, and are doing reasonably well as field based on a new NBER paper by @paulgp.com www.nber.org/system/files...

Come to the Association for Education Finance and Policy conference. That will change your mind about at least part of the field pretty quickly.

I can’t read the paywalled article but using critiques of Jo Boaler to attack all of quantitative education research is nonsense. There is tons of excellent education research, experimental and quasi experimental. And our knowledge of what works has grown dramatically in recent years as a result.

Education research is profoundly and proudly pluralistic in its theoretical and methodological traditions. That’s a good thing! We study schools, school systems, and learning. We need every tool we can find to study those well. …And we tolerate too much shoddy work in all of those traditions.

I'm looking forward to discussing how Massachusetts' healthcare spending has grown relative to the economy at today's Health Policy Commission meeting.

My first post here and I'm excited to share some recent work. A team of UMD researchers and I track investments in children to understand who gets left out and when. 1️⃣ Gaps exceed 50% before kindergarten 2️⃣ Public schooling narrows them at age 5 3️⃣ But disparities persist in type of services received

NEW PAPER: We study the effects of immigration policy on student attendance in 2025. Students born outside the U.S. were 2.2pp more likely to be absent after Jan 2025 (a 37% increase). That's ~2 extra missed days per semester. LINK: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1453 @annenberginstitute.bsky.social

I coded up an open-source, not-for-profit AI paper reviewer that rivals the performance of @reviewer3com.bsky.social, Refine.ink, and Stanford Agentic Reviewer (according to Gemini 3.1). Costs <$2! Live @ coarse.ink. Plug in paper, @openrouter.bsky.social key, and email. #econsky

Oh no. I'm in the Chavez-DeRemer files.

What national ranking did US News and World Report just give our @buwheelock.bsky.social Ed Policy program? 4! (And if you get that joke, you should definitely join us.)

“In Greater New Bedford and other regions where housing developers at times struggle to make their numbers work, [rent control] would effectively shut down housing production.” - New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/15/b...

Our BU Wheelock ed school is moving up the national rankings, with our Ed Policy program now ranked for the 2nd year running. Good things are happening here. Join us! @buwheelock.bsky.social @wheelockpolicybu.bsky.social www.bu.edu/wheelock/new...

My book (!) How Economics Discovered Women is now available for pre-order from the University of California Press. The book is a survey and critique of how the economics of gender has developed since the mid-1970s. www.ucpress.edu/books/how-ec...

American higher Ed is a golden goose that’s delivered medical, tech, and science innovations, bolstered soft power internationally, and is one of the largest employers in every state. This admin is doing everything it can to kill it.

Nice NPR piece featuring @jscottclayton.bsky.social explaining the ins and outs of college prices. Really hitting every note my financial aid admin turned higher Ed policy nerd heart could desire. www.npr.org/2026/04/12/n...

+1 on integrity and honesty on boring: there are lots of jobs that seem exciting and are in fact tedious and awful. Economic and social measurement is mostly the opposite - seems like it might be boring until you start doing it

the people who collect data for government statistics like the unemployment rate, the census, etc, have boring, tedious, thankless jobs that they overwhelmingly do with integrity and honesty.

🎉🏫New paper! 🏫🎉 "High Schools and the Uneven Rise in American Opportunity" by myself, Alison Doxey, and Ezra Karger (@ezrakarger.bsky.social) www.peternencka.com/assets/high_... www.nber.org/papers/w35068

The story of ed tech is a repeated loop of massive hype and massive disappointment See MOOCs, and now AI Evidence can interrupt this unproductive cycle The Stanford SCALE Initiative, led by rock star Prof Susanna Loeb, brings evidence to the conversation scale.stanford.edu/sites/defaul...

World's most infuriating setup for a spatial regression discontinuity design.

something that wrinkles my brain every time I remember it is the fact that total eclipses are only possible on earth because the moon and sun appear to be the same size in our sky, due to the insanely, astronomically unlikely fluke that the moon is 400x smaller than the sun but 400x closer to us.

NEW Just a few years ago Sal Khan was predicting that AI was poised to revolutionize education. But his experience launching an AI-powered tutor, Khanmigo, has been sobering, he says. The hope that it would quickly become a super-tutor still seems a long way off. www.chalkbeat.org/2026/04/09/s...

From enrollment declines and political pressures to waning public trust and the rise of AI, America’s colleges and universities are navigating a turbulent era. These charts explain higher education trends to keep an eye on in 2026.

Submit your work using AI in the social sciences to the annual AI in Social Science conference at the University of Chicago! Submissions due May 1! The conference will be held October 8-9 in Chicago, IL, USA. bfi.uchicago.edu/events/event... @beckerfriedman.bsky.social @caai-booth.bsky.social

Very much enjoyed giving a talk at Harvard's PEPG last week, on: "Labor Market Strength and Declining Community College Enrollment" For those interested, video of the talk, including excellent audience questions, is here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY0A...

Corrected link: www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/ho... He tolerated me after discovering how inured I am to extrinsic motivation, to his extreme credit (speaking to how generally wonderful he was to his student)

Congratulations to my @BU_Tweets colleague Bob Margo, newly elected AEA Distinguished Fellow. A superb scholar and a fantastic mentor, very well deserved! aeaweb.org/about-aea/hono

Congratulations to newly appointed AER Board Members (starting in Jan ‘27): Robert Clark, Klaus Desmet, Joshua Goodman (@joshua-goodman.com), Melanie Morten, Luigi Paciello, Wing Suen, and Thomas Wollmann. @aeajournals.bsky.social #EconSky

Hot off the press! The April 2026 issue of The Economic Journal @resmedia.bsky.social @academic.oup.com #EconSky 👉 bit.ly/4twtCGk

On top of everything else, it is snowing heavily in Boston right now.

Concerned about the possible dismantling of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Directorate of NSF?? www.nature.com/articles/d41... Find out what's happening and what we can do to protect behavioral science with @fabbs.org Friday April 10th at 1:30 ET. Register at us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Bell curve, sine wave, who can tell the difference?

That our VP doesn't undertand this basic fact is an indictment of both him and the current Council of Economic Advisers, which should be deleting these lines from his speeches.

Foreign students *subsidize* domestic students. Without them college will be *more* expensive and there will be *fewer* spots.

I'm honored to have been appointed to the Board of Editors of the American Economic Review starting this coming year. The Board comprises folks who agree to regularly serve as referees. I guess I'm a sucker for reading and commenting on good papers. Should be fun. www.aeaweb.org/journals/aer...

1 in 6 Americans live in the Acela corridor and the California economy is one of the largest in the world

So, thing that is apparently better understood inside academia than outside of it: International students pay sticker price. Most domestic students do not. International students are subsidizing the education costs for domestic students, as per student governmental funding drops.

The Population of the United States.

My initial look at enrollment data for 24 states indicates that this is a real phenomenon that districts should be concerned about. www.the74million.org/article/ice-...

This school year, K–8 students in NYC are scheduled for complete 5-day school weeks just over half of all weeks; for high-school students, 22 of 44 school weeks will be incomplete. snow has played a part, but the bigger culprits are religious & cultural holidays, as well as staff-development days

My kids go to Cambridge Public Schools. I support drastic reductions in computer use, not because it's "screen time" but because the Chromebooks are a menace. The kids are expected to navigate materials that are poorly designed and frequently inaccessible. They receive very little instruction on

Excited to share new paper w/ @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social: "Veiled Power: How Rosenwald Teachers Quietly Shaped the Civil Rights Movement" The puzzle: did ~5,000 segregated schools built in rural South emphasizing “manual labor” strengthen or weaken Jim Crow? 🧵 omarwasow.com/wasow_grumba...

While teaching instrumental variables tonight (the 2nd night of Passover), I somehow found myself describing compliers, defiers, always-takers and never-takers as the four children from the haggadah (the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and the one who doesn't know how to ask).

Special education is one of our country's biggest investments—but does it actually work? Yes! According to a rigorous new study. Identification for services can fundamentally alter a student's trajectory. Via @joshua-goodman.com, et al. cbnewsletters.chalkbeat.org/p/special-ed...

People don't move across state lines as much as they likely should. New work out in @jlaborecon.bsky.social by Riley Wilson: "The Isolated States of America: Home State Bias and the Impact of State Borders on Mobility" www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

Fascinating paper just out in @jlaborecon.bsky.social by Ben Ost, Weixiang Pan, and @dougwebberecon.bsky.social. Part of the economic value of college comes not from human capital or signaling but from a third thing: professional networks. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....