Education Policy and IBCK crossover episode!

A lot of folks were approvingly sharing Kelsey Piper's post about the problems of educational research. Here's my take. // Ill-Informed Essays About Education Research are Weak and Sloppy. Why? edpolicyhub.substack.com/p/ill-inform...

Interested in some highlights from our latest paper about the effects of Ethnic Studies while it scales district-wide? Our friends at EdWorkingPapers have you covered. edworkingpapers.com/policy-pract...

🚨 Hey You! 🚨 Still at #AEFP tomorrow? Come check out my presentation at 11:45 AM in Vevey 2, where I’ll present some extremely hot off the press work on a statewide teacher compensation policy in Texas

Cool new study about a foundational skills intervention in Zambia showing positive effects that persist into middle grades. Doubling intervention costs by providing teacher PD produced no additional gains. An RCT, DiD, multiple treatment arms!! So much great stuff to see here, congrats!

Glad to see our work about special ed and gifted identification across the income distribution appear in this week's @chalkbeat.org

Excited to share a new EdWorkingPaper on the relationship between family income and disability ID. 🧵 TLDR: Low-income students are much more likely to receive SPED services while high-income students are more likely to get 504 plan accommodations. edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1374

Stunning work: "Currently, 6.1 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive gifted education ... Under 4 percent of students in the lowest income percentile are identified as gifted, compared with 20 percent of those in the top income percentile." edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1375

Really fascinating work on a unique teacher pay reform!

🚨Thrilled to share our new @nber.org WP. Research and policy often assume teacher effectiveness is essentially fixed. We revisit this question by studying what happens when high-performing teachers are incentivized to transfer to struggling schools. 🧵 nber.org/papers/w34845

New– A great teacher might not stay great in schools with less supportive learning environments. This is an important wrinkle on the "teachers are the most important in-school factor" line. It's more like: teachers + context. www.chalkbeat.org/2026/02/17/t...

I’m really glad to see that our paper is now out at Ed Researcher! We examine turnover among the half of school employees who are not teachers to understand how their turnover compares. Using Oregon data (2007-23) for all public school employees, there are 3 new patterns that we document: A 🧵

We are failing our kids

Very excited for the latest paper from the international administrative data network I am a part of! Led by @aresherman.bsky.social we show that 75% of pay differences between immigrants and native-born workers arise because of sorting into different jobs, with 25% due to unequal pay within jobs.

New @caldercenter.bsky.social WP! A study from my dissertation, w/ @roddy-theobald.bsky.social, @natejones.bsky.social‬, & @lizbettini.bsky.social. We find staff turnover matters for SWDs. Ungated WP & one pager: • Working paper: tinyurl.com/j3rykkp9 • One-pager: tinyurl.com/bddtzxtp

Successful pushback to DOGE cuts. Funding had run out for the Education Dept's online library ERIC last week, but funding has restarted. But only half as much. hechingerreport.org/proof-points...

If you have research dependent on these data here is my suggestion 1/N Big picture: Create a dataset of cell means (cells must be big enough to pass disclosure) - load these cell means into many, many tables & put through review -These cell means can then be used in OLS - which runs on means

DHS just detained a Columbia student who helped lead campus protests—a direct attack on campus activism. This timeline shows why authoritarians fear student protests: they're often the first and most effective catalysts for pro-democracy movements.

I was just informed that the Department of Education has taken down all its Civil Rights data. If you need it, alternative sites are now hosting it for the public. See links in this thread. ocrdata.ed.gov/notfound

8/ The billionaire paradox has become America's tragedy: a small elite willing to sacrifice both democratic principles and economic growth on the altar of their tax privileges.

It's come on and offline since, but.... download what you need ASAP

GovWayBack. govwayback.com

How much student learning do you think a school district could gain just by better assigning its teachers to schools? Consider a quite politically-feasible change. Do not let district make any assigned teacher worse off, nor change teacher hiring, nor compensation, nor the students. New evidence!

Students who applied to the METCO program and were admitted were: 13 pct pts more likely to graduate from high school on time 22 pct pts more likely to enroll in a 4-year college 16 pct pts more likely to graduate from a 4-year college ...compared to peers who applied but not offered a spot

Publication alert! Our @caldercenter.bsky.social work on the paraeducator workforce in WA, joint with @lindseykaler.bsky.social, @lizbettini.bsky.social, & @natejones.bsky.social, is now published in EC! Journal link: tinyurl.com/4rp8e5sb Ungated: tinyurl.com/4dwnzy3y 1 pager: tinyurl.com/y7w9jufy

We document substantial recovery from the drops in identification rates associated with the onset of the pandemic, also documented in OR by @nick-ainsworth.bsky.social and covered in reporting by @evieblad.bsky.social and @bethhawkins.bsky.social.

If you’re at APPAM join us tomorrow to hear about how the 4DSW has fared in achieving one of its more recent aims: retaining teachers. Andrew, Emily, Kate and I will try to make sense of findings across Arkansas, Colorado, and Oregon.

What can we do to better recruit and retain teachers? There's been a lot of attention on the teaching profession over the past few years, and specifically on what changes can be made to keep teachers in the classroom. An increasingly popular policy sounds simple enough: a four-day school week.

📣New at the Brookings Brown Center Chalkboard, I summarize big takeaways from my research on 772 teacher strikes over the past 16 years 📣 www.brookings.edu/articles/the... I have 3 big papers/working papers on strikes (all linked in the post)

First new working paper thread on Blue Sky! 🧵 In this study, Moontae Hwang, Marzuka Ahmad Radia, and I look at the impacts of school building HVAC system conditions on student outcomes in New York State . . . edworkingpapers.com/ai24-1093