Are Work-Based Professional Skills Associated with Postsecondary Entrance and Persistence? Novel Evidence from the Cristo Rey Network Professional skills such as initiative, communication, and adaptability are thought to shape postsecondary success, but most evidence comes from self- or teacher-reported measures collected in school ...

Are Work-Based Professional Skills Associated with Postsecondary Entrance and Persistence? Novel Evidence from the Cristo Rey Network edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1419

Very much enjoying this new paper showing that:

1) Massachusetts high schools differ dramatically in their impacts on students' earnings

2) More effective high schools are those that tend to raise test scores the most

www.nber.org/papers/w34913

School-Based Disability Identification Varies by Student Family Income Currently, 18 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive additional supports through the identification of a disability. Socioeconomic status is viewed as central to understanding who gets ...

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

Using experimental variation to examine the (co-)development of cognitive and social-emotional skills in early childhood Questions about the stability of psychological constructs, skill generalization, and transfer have long motivated psychological research. Despite a proliferation of theory, the field has rarely establ...

Working paper #4

Across Head Start RCT clusters, we observed 40% persistence for cog skills, 20% for soc-emo skills @ 1yr follow-up. We found some (but not stat sig) support for transfer processes from effects on cog skills to effects on soc skills.

edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1369

Predicting Persistence and Fadeout Across Multi-Site RCTs of an Early Childhood Mathematics Curriculum Intervention This study examined predictors of persistence and fadeout across multiple cluster RCTs that evaluated a preschool mathematics curriculum. We used meta-analytic methods to explore how impacts on studen...

Working paper #3

Using cluster RCTs of a math intervention, we tested whether student characteristics, fidelity, & elementary contexts affected persistence. 40% persistence at 1yr follow-up. Impacts faded faster in elementary contexts where students learned more.

edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1365

Childhood Interventions and Life Course Development A paradox has perplexed researchers studying childhood interventions: although program impacts on children’s skills often fade, some interventions have nonetheless produced long-run impacts on adult o...

Working paper #2

We set out to find all RCTs reporting initial & adult effects, and found 29. Fadeout didn't preclude adult effects. On average, adult impacts were similar in size to faded child impacts (~.05 SD). Some, but weak, links b/w initial & adult effects.

edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1367

How General is Educational Intervention Fadeout? A Meta-Analysis of Educational RCTs with Follow-Up Researchers and policymakers pursue educational interventions with the goal of altering children’s long-term trajectories. However, many effects fade quickly after interventions end. Researchers have ...

Working paper #1

Across 87 RCTs, we found that fadeout was fairly ubiquitous. Though there was variation in persistence, fadeout was observed across 12 theoretically salient intervention dimensions (e.g., age, breadth, duration). ~46% persistence @ 6-12mo follow-up.

edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1366

Happy to share this new paper co-authored with many of my colleagues

We study how college enrollment changed in 2024 after SCOTUS's ruling in SFFA v. Harvard using data on millions of SAT/PSAT/AP exam takers linked to college enrollment records

👇 Check it out! edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1392

Gifted Identification Across the Distribution of Family Income Currently, 6.1 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive gifted education. Using education and IRS data that provide information on students and their family income, we show pronounced dif...

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

Millions of U.S. Students Attend Schools Near Environmentally Hazardous Sites Students of color are far more likely than their white peers to be taught in these classrooms, according to a new report.

Check out this great overview in @the74.bsky.social of our recent paper examining the scale and scope of students' potential exposure to industrial pollution and toxic sites while at school. #SustainableED

@AnnenbergInst WP:
edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1384

www.the74million.org/article/mill...

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: Nearly 1 in 12 U.S. schools is located within a quarter mile of an environmental hazard site.

Sohil Malik, @matthewakraft.com & Grace Falken finds stark racial and socioeconomic inequities in schools’ exposure to pollution risks.

#SustainableED
📄https://bit.ly/49YdXsA

How did college enrollment change after SFFA v. Harvard?

Michael Bloem & coauthors find that in the first year after the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, high-achieving URM students were substantially less likely to enroll in highly selective colleges.

#EdWorkingPapers

📄https://bit.ly/4tgdSIt

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: Bullying doesn’t end in childhood.

A new review shows that exposure to bullying is linked to worse mental health, lower human capital accumulation, and poorer labor market outcomes in adulthood.

🔍 Matias Martinez, Qinyou Hu & Jonathan Schaefer
📄 edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1389

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: Tyler Watts, @emmarosehart.bsky.social, & @drewhalbailey.bsky.social analyze 87 RCTs & find that fadeout is common across most programs. Intervention characteristics explain only a small share of differences in persistence.

📄 bit.ly/4aGrXY4

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: Analyzing RCTs of a preschool math curriculum, Tyler Watts & colleagues find that immediate impacts are strong forecasters for follow-up effects. Settings promoting more learning post-intervention also produce more fadeout as control groups catch up faster.

📄 bit.ly/4c3YQzp

A photo of Dr. Lindsay C. Page with text that reads "Join us in congratulating Lindsay C. Page on her promotion to full professor. Her research on college access and student success is shaping policy and practice nationwide."

Join us in congratulating @linzpage.bsky.social on her promotion to full professor!

Her research on college access and student success is shaping policy and practice nationwide.

⚡ Key takeaways from the #EdWorkingPapers Policy and Practice Series!

A summary of “Making the Implicit Explicit: An Experiment with Implicit Gender Stereotypes and College Major Choice” by Stephanie Owen and Derek Rury

📄 edworkingpapers.com/policy-pract...

#AnnenbergEdExchange

📢 #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

The Chronic(les) of Absenteeism Measurement: Unpacking the Many Measures of Attendance and Evidence for a Lower Chronic Absenteeism Threshold Chronic absenteeism has surged in recent years, drawing growing policy and research attention. However, a complicating factor often overlooked is that the measurement of absenteeism is inconsistent, w...

🚨 New working paper on chronic absenteeism from IES Predoctoral Fellow Tiffany Wu and co-authors, Professor Christina Weiland and EPI Data Analyst, Thomas Staines!

Read the paper here: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1380

Transferring to a better college does not necessarily work out better for the students:
edworkingpapers.com/sites/defaul...

U.S. Schools’ Proximity to Environmental Hazard Sites: A National Analysis We conduct a nationwide assessment of U.S. PreK-12 public and private schools’ proximity to known environmental hazard sites tracked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Superfund sites, Brown...

Many public schools are located dangerously close to toxic sites, and students of color are overwhelmingly more likely to be in these exposed schools edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1384

College Enrollment Patterns After SFFA v. Harvard We study how U.S. high school students’ patterns of college entry changed in the first year after the Supreme Court’s 2023 SFFA v. Harvard ruling. Drawing on a rich dataset linking more than 12 millio...

"high-achieving underrepresented minority college-goers were up to 10 percentage points less likely to enroll in highly selective colleges... “cascading” down the college selectivity distribution into less selective colleges with lower graduation rates and earnings." edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1392

Making the Implicit Explicit: An Experiment with Implicit Gender Stereotypes and College Major Choice We study whether making college students aware of their implicit gender–STEM stereotypes affects their pursuit of a STEM degree. In a field experiment at a large, selective U.S. university, over 800 u...

Making the Implicit Explicit: An Experiment with Implicit Gender Stereotypes and College Major Choice edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1393

"interventions designed to 'de-bias' individuals can have unintended effects, sometimes reinforcing the very disparities they aim to reduce."

Classroom Composition Affects Teacher Performance Ratings Teacher evaluations should reflect teaching performance rather than the characteristics of the students assigned to a teacher. Exploiting naturally occurring year-to-year variation in classroom compos...

Classroom Composition Affects Teacher Performance Ratings edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1395

"teachers with higher-achieving and less disruptive students, holding constant the teacher and school, receive systematically higher performance ratings"

And that experience, which many kids have had, seems to speak to the need for studying what to do instead. The Access, Detracking, and Tracking SIG is actually hosting a webinar about this paper next week.

edworkingpapers.com/policy-pract...

Fans of value added when they read this paper: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1395

The West Texas Measles Outbreak and Student Absences Declining child-vaccination rates are driving a measles resurgence in the US, yet little evidence documents how these outbreaks may disrupt schooling. Using daily absence data from a school district a...

We provide early evidence on the impact of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks on learning opportunities, and the schooling disruptions that the growing number of low-coverage communities could face if outbreaks continue to spread. See working paper: edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1358

Creating Coherence: Does Instructional Alignment Affect the Impact of Tutoring? This study examines the impact of using instructionally aligned literacy tutoring with students in kindergarten through third grade under a Response to Intervention framework. We conducted a randomize...

Creating Coherence: Does Instructional Alignment Affect the Impact of Tutoring? edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1332 was featured in Overdeck's Five Studies That Inspired Our Thinking in 2025! 🎉 overdeck.org/news-and-res...

No Pay? No Way! Teacher Compensation Reforms and the Market for Graduate Degrees Graduate degrees in education provide financial stability for many institutions, yet reformers have sought to decouple teacher pay from these credentials. Without a wage premium, educators may skip ad...

"Eliminating a graduate degree wage premium for teachers led to a 27% enrollment decline in education fields alone .... This drop subsequently reduced institutional tuition revenue and related state funding." @taylorodle.bsky.social edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1364