Research Areas

Tutoring contracts cannot address all the take-up and implementation challenges associated with academic interventions. They also cannot ensure that all students catch up from COVID losses. Districts and vendors both need to find ways to build momentum, capacity, and, in some cases, urgency among teachers, students, and families to make these programs work. But contracts can create incentives for vendors to focus on session attendance, tutoring dosage, and results; on the margin, such incentives might get vendors to pay more attention to the student outcomes that districts care about most.

If school systems are going to deliver the academic support necessary for recovery, they need clear-eyed assessments of their current catch-up efforts. And if they are working with an external partner, they need agreements with incentives that put everyone’s attention and effort on what matters most: delivering academic support to help students catch up from the chaos of the last three years. Although there is not much evidence yet about the impact of different contract provisions, we should all be paying attention to whether contract language focuses vendors on ensuring that students receive the services that districts are paying for.

Citation: Michael DeArmond, Dan Goldhaber, Thomas J. Kane, Andrew McEachin, Emily Morton (2023). Paying for Access: Are Tutoring Contracts Focused on the Right Things?. CALDER Policy Brief No. 34

Anecdotal evidence points to the importance of school principals, but the limited existing research has neither provided consistent results nor indicated any set of essential characteristics of effective principals.  This paper exploits extensive student-level panel data across six states to investigate both variations in principal performance and the relationship between effectiveness and key certification factors.  While principal effectiveness varies widely across states, there is little indication that regulation of the background and training of principals yields consistently effective performance.  Having prior teaching or management experience is not related to our estimates of principal value-added.

This is an updated version of the paper originally titled "Path to the Principalship and Value Added: A Cross-state Comparison of Elementary and Middle School Principals", released in January 2019.

Citation: Wes Austin, Bingjie Chen, Dan Goldhaber , Eric Hanushek, Kristian Holden, Cory Koedel, Helen Ladd, Jin Luo, Eric Parsons, Gregory Phelan, Steven Rivkin, Tim Sass, Mavzuna Turaeva (2023). Does Regulating Entry Requirements Lead to More Effective Principals?. CALDER Working Paper No. 213-0323-2

CALDER Policy Brief No. 25-0421

We use comprehensive administrative data from three states to document the relationships between geographic mobility and student outcomes during K-12 schooling. We focus specifically on nonstructural mobility events—which we define as school or district changes that do not occur naturally as the result of planned transitions between schools—and on longitudinal measures that capture these events cumulatively for students. We show that the number of nonstructural moves experienced by a student is a powerful indicator of low academic performance and graduation rates. Longitudinal information on student mobility is unlikely to be readily available to local practitioners—i.e., individual districts, schools, or teachers. However, due to recent investments in longitudinal data systems in most states, this information can be made available at low cost by state education agencies.

This paper has been published in AERA Open and can be found here, January 2022.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cory Koedel, Umut Özek, Eric Parsons (2021). Using Longitudinal Student Mobility Across Schools and Districts to Identify At-Risk Students. CALDER Policy Brief No. 25

We study the effects of exposure to non-resident students on the outcomes of undergraduate in-state students during a period of high non-resident enrollment growth at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Our models leverage within-major, cross-time variation in non-resident exposure for identification. We find no evidence that increased exposure to domestic non-residents affects in-state student outcomes and our null results are precisely estimated. We find evidence of modest negative impacts on in-state students when their exposure to foreign students increases using our preferred specification. However, the identifying variation in exposure to foreign students in our data is limited and this result is not robust in all of our models.

This paper has been published in Contemporary Economic Policy and can be found here, January 2020.

Citation: Diyi Li, Cheng Qian, Cory Koedel (2020). Non-Resident Postsecondary Enrollment Growth and the Outcomes of In-State Students. CALDER Working Paper No. 225-0120

Accurate understanding of environmental moderation of genetic influences is vital to advancing the science of cognitive development as well as for designing interventions. One widely- reported idea is increasing genetic influence on cognition for children raised in higher socioeconomic status families, including recent proposals that the pattern is a particularly US phenomenon. We use matched birth and school records from Florida siblings and twins born in 1994-2002 to provide the largest, most population-diverse consideration of this hypothesis to date. We find no evidence of SES moderation of genetic influence on test scores, suggesting that articulating gene-environment interactions for cognition is more complex and elusive than previously supposed.

Citation: David Figlio, Jeremy Freese, Krzysztof Karbownik, Jeffrey Roth (2018). Socioeconomic Status and Genetic Influences on Cognitive Development. CALDER Working Paper No. 193

This study examines the community-wide effects of two statewide early childhood policy initiatives in North Carolina. One initiative provides funding to improve the quality of child care services at the county level for all children between the ages of 0 to 5, and the other provides funding for preschool slots for disadvantaged four-year-olds. Differences across counties in the timing of the rollout and in the magnitude of the state financial investments per child provide the variation in programs needed to estimate their effects on schooling outcomes in third grade. We find robust positive effects of each program on third-grade test scores in both reading and math. These effects can best be explained by a combination of direct benefits for participants and spillover benefits for others. Our preferred models suggest that the combined average effects on test scores of investments in both programs at 2009 funding levels are equivalent to two to four months of instruction in grade 3.

Citation: Helen Ladd, Clara Muschkin, Kenneth A. Dodge (2015). From Birth to School: Early Childhood Initiatives and Third-Grade Outcomes in North Carolina. CALDER Working Paper No. 134

Over 40% of full time four-year college students fail to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, and many never complete their education. This paper describes this sizeable fraction of the U.S. higher education market and estimates counterfactual predicted probabilities of degree completion, had students made different initial postsecondary enrollment choices. Using data from the NLSY97, a rich nationally representative data set, we make several observations. First, policies aimed at increasing postsecondary degree attainment by encouraging college enrollment are likely to be unproductive, given that students who are currently not enrolling in postsecondary education have very low predicted probabilities of completion, due to their low academic preparedness. This holds true for enrollment in both two-year and four-year colleges. Second, we find that students who drop-out of four-year colleges generally also have very low predicted probabilities of completion, although this varies across student groups. Finally, we conclude that had four-year college drop-outs begun their postsecondary careers at a two-year college, their predicted probabilities of postsecondary degree completion would be significantly higher. While most of this increase in degree completion comes through increased associate’s degree attainment, about a third of four-year college drop-outs would have a higher chance of bachelor’s degree completion, had they begun college at a two-year institution. While our results are only a descriptive analysis, and should not be interpreted as causal findings, until more is understood about the types of students who drop-out of college and potential reasons why, there will likely be little progress in reducing the college failure rate in the U.S.

Citation: Erin Dunlop Velez (2014). America’s College Drop-Out Epidemic: Understanding the College Drop-Out Population. CALDER Working Paper No. 109

Students who do not have access to credit may not be able to complete their optimal level of post-secondary education. More than one out of every ten community college students nationwide attends a community college that does not allow access to federal college loans. This paper takes advantage of plausibly exogenous variation in whether a student's community college offers student loans to evaluate the effect of access to Stafford loans on student outcomes, including educational attainment, employment, and finances. Using the Beginning Postsecondary Student Study of 2004, I show that access to federal Stafford loans does not affect the decision to attend community college. However, I find that Stafford loan access increases overall borrowing among community college students by $262 a year and increases the likelihood of transferring to a four-year school by 5.6 percentage points. Additionally, for high-need and female students, loan access increases their total months of enrollment and dependent students' bachelor's degree attainment as well. These sizable effects of loan access on student behavior indicate that federal loans relax credit constraints for some community college students.

Citation: Erin Dunlop Velez (2013). What Do Stafford Loans Actually Buy You? - The Effect of Stafford Loan Access on Community College Students. CALDER Working Paper No. 94

There has been a resurgence in research that investigates the efficacy of early investments as a means of reducing gaps in academic performance. However, the strongest evidence for these effects comes from experimental evaluations of small, highly enriched programs. We add to this literature by assessing the extent to which a large-scale public program, Texas's targeted pre-Kindergarten (pre-K), affects scores on math and reading achievement tests, the likelihood of being retained in grade, and the probability that a student receives special education services. We find that having participated in Texas's targeted pre-K program is associated with increased scores on the math and reading sections of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), reductions in the likelihood of being retained in grade, and reductions in the probability of receiving special education services. We also find that participating pre-K increases mathematics scores for students who take the Spanish version of the TAAS tests. These results show that even modest, public pre-K program implemented at scale can have important effects on students’ educational achievement.

Citation: Rodney J. Andrews, Paul Jargowsky, Kristin Kuhne (2012). The Effects of Texas’s Targeted Pre-Kindergarten Program on Academic Performance. CALDER Working Paper No. 84