Mayor Sheffield proposed a new initiative that will provide free bus service to city students. The Detroit City Council approved it Tuesday and students can begin riding for free on Wednesday..

We are excited to announce that applications for JEP 2026 are now open! If you are a current doctoral student or post-doc in education policy working on racial justice, this Institute shows how, in community, to develop your research agenda. Apply here through 6/1: www.justeducationpolicy.org/apply

So, I built a little BETA "Tinder meets ESA" application in which you can swipe left and right on Arizona ESA purchases that were part of the state's recent sample, and see if they were allowed or unallowed. Enjoy! You can play two rounds right now. Comments welcome.

Lots of great work! You can read ours here: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1390

I chaired an awesome session on understanding + responding to student absenteeism this morning. The panel highlighted findings from qual + quant studies from 5 states, underscoring the role of policy + practice, sense making + discretion, and the need for resources in promoting attendance #AEFP2026

POSTDOC OPENING! We are hiring a Postdoctoral Fellow for a mixed-methods project aimed at supporting and researching implementation of high-quality preschool curricula. The position is 1-2 years and can be in person or remote. More details here: edpolicy.umich.edu/what-we-do/j...

Excited to share a new research brief on absenteeism in NC through 2024-25! This mixed methods work shows that absence rates did not change much between '23-24 and '24-25, and describes key possible reasons why based on interviews with educators, parents, and students. epic.unc.edu/wp-content/u...

SAIPE, or, if I want data for non-geographic LEAs, school-level MEPS from the Urban Institute, aggregated to district level. www.urban.org/projects/mod...

It's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack! Calling all graduate students doing research on K-12 or higher education...

And for more detail on that inequality piece in Michigan

Michigan has made progress in the past few years thanks to increased education spending, but we have a long way to go to achieve adequate funding for high-poverty schools and districts.

New/Update for 2026 www.schoolfinancedata.org/the-adequacy...

Revisiting Evidence on the Role of Funding Adequacy in School Reopening During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Response to Weber and Baker journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... "controlling for partisanship & union strength substantively attenuated...the association b/w funding adequacy & school reopening"

Just released: The Cycle of Disinvestment in Public Schools: How Public-School Criticism Drives Policy and Disinvestment bit.ly/4rhKWO4

This truly is an important new report from Huriya Jabbar and Daniel Espinoza at @uscrossier.bsky.social!

“sweeping failure claims erode public support and fuel a cycle of disinvestment—reduced funding and enrollment that weaken schools and invite further criticism—advancing privatization and deepening inequality at a moment of heightened political and fiscal threats” nepc.colorado.edu/publication/...

Love this (Short version: the original finding still holds, but less dramatic after replication with key additional variables accounted for)

Love to see this type of replication and iterative process

The moment many of us in #edresearch have been waiting for... Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences has been released. ies.ed.gov/ies/2026/02/...

I replicated and extended @jerseyjazzman.bsky.social and @schoolfinance101.bsky.social's study on funding adequacy and school reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their original study did not incorporate measures of local partisanship. I found... journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The Detroit district’s board shared their ideas to help kids get to school despite systemic barriers. Administrators also revealed what policies could soon roll out.

The district’s rate was 83% in 2025, which was nearly 5 percentage points higher compared to the year before.

This is a great study, and I think the longitudinal analysis (schools with declining perceptions of climate see declines in attendance) is especially useful. Still, I struggle with causation/correlation here. This relationship between absenteeism and climate is very well. But which causes which?

Creating Welcoming Schools: The Role of Positive Climates in Reducing Absenteeism journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3...

VERSION 2.0 of the Segregation Tracking Project is here! New data on racial and economic segregation between neighborhoods and schools over the last 30+ years for every school district, metro area, state, county, congressional district (new!), and more! edopportunity.org/segregation/

Today, I’m launching DAAF, the Data Analyst Augmentation Framework: an open-source, extensible workflow for Claude Code that allows skilled researchers to rapidly scale their expertise and accelerate data analysis by 5-10x -- *without* sacrificing the transparency... github.com/brhkim/daaf/...

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: What are schools actually doing to improve attendance? @jeremylsinger.bsky.social & coauthors find that in Michigan and Georgia, schools rely on communication-based strategies while efforts to remove barriers or improve student experiences are less common. bit.ly/4abAWPG

Our new working paper on school-level attendance practices and systems in MI and GA! In addition to cataloguing more and less common practices, we also show there is relatively little variation both across states and within states across contexts in attendance strategies. 1/2

Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield said often on the campaign trail that she wanted to play a role in education. Battling chronic absenteeism is a priority for the team helping guide her efforts.

Our new working paper on school-level attendance practices and systems in MI and GA! In addition to cataloguing more and less common practices, we also show there is relatively little variation both across states and within states across contexts in attendance strategies. 1/2

Compelling new evidence on the positive impact of the community schools model from @oppinsights.bsky.social. Substantial positive impact on academic outcomes and later-in-life earnings, especially for lower-income/higher-risk students. opportunityinsights.org/paper/cis/

www.fox47news.com/news/state/m... The tool enables Michiganders to report and document concerns about actions taken by federal immigration officers in their neighborhoods. Nessel said the platform collects details, photos and video of those events.

I testified today about inter-district choice in front of the MI House of Reps education and workforce subcommittee. I was proud to spotlight the excellent and robust scholarship from MI on this topic! 🧵

Detroit teachers called in sick en masse to draw attention to school building conditions they said were deplorable. A lot has changed in the 10 years since.

From teacher protests to the filing of a historic “right to read” lawsuit against the state of Michigan, 2016 was a pivotal year for education in Detroit.

“State context explains roughly 33% of the variation in daily attendance” — I think part of this has to do with weather! (whereas other macro factors vary more w/in state) We found that temperature was pretty strongly correlated with absenteeism in major cities journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

One or two missed days for everyone might be better than virtual learning where attendance and engagement is low.

Ypsilanti Superintendent Alena Zachery-Ross said targeting Ypsilanti families is a “violation of the sense of safety that every member of our community deserves.”

"...capacities for policy implementation depended on their pre-existing resources (foundational capacity), the resources to execute the policy given policy-induced constraints (execution capacity), and the resources to provide the target population with access to the policy (provision capacity)."

Michigan folks: Ypsilanti Community Schools confirm several parents taken into custody by ICE. Not in my fuckin town.

Now posted on @annenberginstitute.bsky.social EdWorkingPapers: What are schools doing to improve attendance? Based on school leader surveys in MI and GA, we describe the prevalence of various attendance practices and organizational systems. We find little variation, both between and within states.

The more important contribution (at least for me) is the examination of heterogeneity across states. The waivers had a positive effect in 14 states. Half of the variation in achievement effects is explained by federal per-pupil education funding.

"In St. Paul, at least one-fourth of students from Spanish-speaking homes have missed every day of school since Dec. 12."

Curious about what people said in response to the RFI about "re-imagining" the Institute of Education Sciences (IES)? I put the public comments in one file (763 pages) and used AI to analyze the themes and areas of agreement and disagreement (5 pages) by audience ⬇️: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Glad this issue is getting the attention it deserves. Educators need more support & training for the day-to-day work of meeting kids where they are in the face of terrifying ICE brutality. Thx to @theconversation.com for covering

Great insights by @csattinbajaj.bsky.social on how schools can support immigrant students, parents, and the teachers who care about them.

This study started with a convo over coffee w/ Huriya Jabbar in 2017! We wrote two unsuccessful grant proposals, finally got internal funding, and then struggled through 4 journals to get the null findings published. Persistence and great colleagues for the win! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

President Trump took office one year ago today. Since then, his administration has disrupted at least $12 billion in federal funding for education (and likely much more). I did my best to tabulate the damage for @edweek.org: www.edweek.org/policy-polit...