NEW: The White House's Office of Management and Budget has a new chief statistician overseeing the Census Bureau & other federal statistical agencies, according to StatsPolicy.gov. Stuart Levenbach has replaced Mark Calabria, according to the website's "About Us" page statspolicy.gov/about/#members

Students from families in the top income percentile are more than 5 times as likely to be identified for gifted programs as students from the bottom percentile.

New CES Working Paper: "Gifted Identification Across the Distribution of Family Income" by Ainsworth, Ainsworth, Cleveland, Clark, Brummet, Penner, Hibel, Saultz, Spiegel, Hanselman, and Penner www.census.gov/library/work...

Family income shapes school disability supports: high-income students receive more 504 accommodations and low-income students more special education services.

New CES Working Paper: "School-Based Disability Identification Varies by Student Family Income" by Ainsworth, Cleveland, Clark, Hibel, Brummet, Saultz, Penner, Spiegel, Yoo, Cristancho, Hanselman, and Penner www.census.gov/library/work...

New in print: In MS counties w/ higher % Black students, white policymakers were less likely to access Equalization funds. Exploiting variation in school spending induced by this so-called equalization policy, we document a tragedy in racist public policy. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Every mention of SNAP being frozen should include this simple fact: TRUMP is CHOOSING TO CANCEL FOOD ASSISTANCE. There are literally emergency dollars available to keep SNAP funded.

ICYMI...

New research from PSC researcher @pgonalon.bsky.social with @imarinescu.bsky.social shows that the high cost of U.S. childcare breeds family income inequality. Learn more in OMNIA: bit.ly/48W3iOT Read the study in American Sociological Review: bit.ly/4h60nVY

A loud reminder that this administration wants to bring back SEGREGATION as @victorerikray.bsky.social has pointed out and they're starting within the administration. A literal page out of Woodrow Wilson's playbook. #blacksky #news

NEW: The Census Bureau says parts of its website are not being updated because of the federal government shutdown and questions from data users will not be answered "until appropriations are enacted"

Yeah, honestly: “parental rights” are starting to sound more like “property rights.”

Want to know how the pandemic has reshaped school enrollment patterns in Massachusetts and nationwide? Here's Education Next's quick and accessible version of our recent working paper: www.educationnext.org/school-enrol... @abbyfrancis.bsky.social @educationnext.bsky.social

Carnegie Mellon University leaders silenced @cmu.edu students who called Trump a rapist claiming they violated civil discourse. I wrote about the disgrace of reprimanding students for rejecting the idea that our campus is a place to engage in civil discourse with rapists. medium.com/@ujuanya/who...

It's great to see this officially in print! I will continue to bang the drum that if you're using FRPL to measure economic disadvantage since 2014-15 (or earlier in some states), you don't know what you're actually capturing... journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3...

The White House wants to axe funding programs for: -English learners -Homeless students -Migrant students -Teacher PD -Civics ed. -Literacy -Arts ed. -Preschoolers with disabilities -Adult learners -Rural schools -School desegregation -Alaska/Hawaii Native students www.edweek.org/policy-polit...

My latest @npr.org story with Marisa Peñaloza, Kyna Uwaeme and Brent Jones: For generations of Black workers, federal government jobs have provided a path into the middle class. The Trump administration’s workforce cuts are now throwing that sense of stability up in the air

Looking for one more paper for the APPAM panel Josh describes here. Please reach out if you have a paper that might fit!

A couple of us are putting together an APPAM panel on post-pandemic school enrollment/access patterns, broadly conceived. Let me know if you or someone you know has a paper that might fit this theme.

Submit papers for two CSWEP sponsored sessions at APPAM next fall. Looking especially for papers on health policy and poverty and income policy, broadly interpreted. Deadline extended to April 15. Pls share! www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/co...

So, um, some professional news:

Allow me to nerd out a bit about the stats in our recent PNAS paper... To make this graph, we calculated a 100-by-100 grid of the average proportion of peers in each income percentile for students in each percentile (i.e., average peer income distributions for each student percentile). [1/n]

Economic integration within schools is limited, @ucirvine.bsky.social-led study finds | Research, published in PNAS, highlights disproportionate isolation of students from families in highest income brackets   @uofcalifornia.bsky.social @andrewpenner.bsky.social @stanforduniversity.bsky.social

How fitting for this new work on economic inequality in schools to come out @pnas.org on the day I learned about Sandy Jencks' death. His work documenting widening income inequality, segregation in schools, and equality of opportunity is a cornerstone of this study.

Students in the top 1% of the income distribution are highly isolated in affluent school enclaves. 💥6%💥 of these top 1% percentile kids’ peers are ALSO in the top income percentile. 💥20%💥 are in the top 5 income percentiles. 💥Nearly 50%💥come from the top 20 income percentiles.

So excited that our new paper, "Peer income exposure across the income distribution," is now out in PNAS! Great overview (including link to ungated version) from the great @michspieg.bsky.social below.

Got so distracted these last few weeks I forgot to look out for this coverage of my new working paper in Ed Week!

Correlation is not causation, but there's a lot of correlation here. PEPFAR began in 2003 near the peak of world AIDs deaths. Today 20M people receive HIV treatment through PEPFAR funding. That's almost 2/3 of people treated in the world. Call your Congress people and get PEPFAR back.

Are you an early career education researcher? Have you earned your PhD since April 1, 2017? IES has a grant for up to $600K for developing your research, including working closely with a mentor You need to be tenure track at an R1 or R2 Due March 1 ies.ed.gov/funding/pdf/...

📈📉New Census Working Paper: "Potential Bias When Using Administrative Data to Measure the Family Income of School-Aged Children" by Leah R. Clark (@leahclark.bsky.social) and Renuka Bhaskar www.census.gov/library/work...

This is really interesting. It seems to fit the 'only the parents who pay attention benefit from charter schools' narrative.

🚨 🚨 🚨 New working paper alert! 🚨 🚨 🚨 I find evidence that a specific subgroup of disadvantaged students--those previously reported to child welfare--are considerably less likely to opt out of traditional public school and into charter, magnet, and private schools. edworkingpapers.com/ai24-1111

NEW: The Census Bureau plans for its American Community Survey to start using newly required checkboxes for “Middle Eastern or North African” and “Hispanic or Latino” under a question about race and/or ethnicity in 2027, with data releases beginning in 2028 www.census.gov/newsroom/blo...

Lots of work to get this translated into empirical practice. Looking forward to working on this!

Feel the need to tell my many new voice actor followers that I am not Leah Clark, the voice actor, but if sporadic posts about education policy, inequality, and statistics appeal to you, you're welcome to stay.

More research on peers: Early Algebra Affects Peer Composition by Brummet, Lieber, @t-h-a-d.bsky.social, Yoo & Penner journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3...

Partha Deb, Jeff Wooldridge @jmwooldridge.bsky.social , Jeff Zabel, and I are pleased that our new difference-in-differences paper is available as an NBER working paper.

New Economic and Social Science Research Published in the CES Working Paper Series 🧵 content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USC...

Dear Pennsylvania’s mail-in voters, To make sure your vote gets counted and doesn’t end up in a legal fight, remember to: 1) seal your ballot in the YELLOW ENVELOPE 2) write the CURRENT DATE on the return envelope Sincerely, The reporter who wrote this👇 www.npr.org/2024/09/26/n...

75% of calls to FAFSA hotline went UNANSWERED 😱 I'm going to call this a complete government failure Legislative failure to fund Ed Dept to do its legislated work White House failure to oversee ED and sound the alarm ED failure to oversee Federal Student Aid FSA failure to ... can't fit it all

Early Algebra Affects Peer Composition journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3... "Peer composition effects may help to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the positive effects of algebra on individual students and negative effects of algebra acceleration"

Talking to two male junior Econ profs I knew when I was on the market at ASSA in 2019. One turns to the other and asks, "are you hiring women this year?" The response while I spit out my drink was along the lines of "no, we hired some in recent years."

Very excited about this working paper with @nick-ainsworth.bsky.social and @christocleve.bsky.social! Tldr: RTI adoption lowered SPED identification rates & raised reading achievement among Black students. It did not lower achievement (in either reading or math) for any student subgroups.

Seems like a good time to note that universal free school meals -- which Walz achieved in Minnesota and Project 2025 absolutely hates -- is not only the right thing to do; it's also solid educational policy. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3...

NEW: The House Rules Committee is set to meet on May 6 to consider a bill that calls for excluding unauthorized immigrants and visa/green card holders living in the U.S. from a #2030Census count that the 14th Amendment says must include the "whole number of persons in each state"

What longer-run impact might the pandemic have on who public schools serve? We shed light on this in newly published work (& this thread): "The stickiness of pandemic-driven disenrollment from public schools" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

BREAKING: The #2030Census and federal surveys are getting new checkboxes for “Middle Eastern or North African” and “Hispanic or Latino” after the White House’s OMB approved the first changes to U.S. government standards on racial and ethnic data since 1997 www.npr.org/2024/03/09/1...

This is the coolest WP I've seen in a while! I love the inclusion of certificate earners. Fascinating that the unexplained portion of wage differences is so consistent across ed levels, except at the most selective institutions. www2.census.gov/library/work... Hopefully race/ethnicity is next?

Check out some cool work by my coauthors at Census looking at the gender wage gap by postsecondary education quality: www.census.gov/library/stor...

New paper: "Examining Excess Mortality Associated With the COVID-19 Pandemic for Renters Threatened With Eviction" by Nick Graetz, Peter Hepburn, Carl Gershenson, Sonya R. Porter, Danielle H. Sandler, Emily Lemmerman, and Matthew Desmond jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...