Ethnic studies increases longer-run academic engagement and attainment.

Increased interest in anti-racist education has motivated the rapidly growing but politically contentious adoption of ethnic studies (ES) courses in US public schools. A long-standing rationale for ES courses is that their emphasis on culturally relevant and critically engaged content (e.g., social justice, anti-racism, stereotypes, contemporary social movements) has potent effects on student engagement and outcomes. However, the quantitative evidence supporting this claim is limited. In this preregistered regression-discontinuity study, we examine the longer-run impact of a grade 9 ES course offered in the San Francisco Unified School District. Our key confirmatory finding is that assignment to this course significantly increased the probability of high school graduation among students near the grade 8 2.0 grade point average (GPA) threshold used for assigning students to the course. Our exploratory analyses also indicate that assignment increased measures of engagement throughout high school (e.g., attendance) as well as the probability of postsecondary matriculation.

Differing Views of Equity: How Prospective Educators Perceive Their Role in Closing Achievement Gaps.

Hiring is an opportunity for school districts to find educators with values and beliefs that align with district goals. Yet beliefs are difficult to measure. We use administrative data from more than ten thousand applications to certificated positions in an urban California school district in which applicants submitted essays about closing achievement gaps. Using structural topic modeling (STM) to code these essays, we examine whether applicants systematically differ in their use of these themes and whether themes predict hiring outcomes. Relative to white applicants, Hispanic and African American applicants are more likely to identify structural causes of inequities and discuss educators' responsibilities for addressing inequality. Similar differences in themes emerge between applicants to schools with different student populations. Techniques like STM can decipher hard-to-measure beliefs from administrative data, providing valuable information for hiring and decision making.

Early Parenting and the Reduction of Educational Inequality in Childhood and Adolescence.

Socio-economic status (SES) differences in parenting are often implicated in widening the SES-achievement gap. Using nationally representative data (N = 12,887), this study tests for variation across SES in the types and intensity of parenting behaviors utilized and then examines SES differences in the relationship between parenting and student achievement growth from kindergarten through eighth grade. Exploratory factor analysis identifies three dimensions of early parenting: Educational Engagement, Stimulating Parent-Child Interaction, and Discursive Discipline. Regression results indicate that all three dimensions are used most heavily by high-SES families. However, only Educational Engagement consistently predicts achievement growth. Surprisingly, it is positively associated with achievement for lower-, but not higher-SES students in first through eighth grades. Further, Educational Engagement is beneficial for low-SES children because it is particularly beneficial for low-achieving students, consistent with a compensatory hypothesis.

`Membership Has Its Privileges': Status Incentives and Categorical Inequality in Education.

Prizes - formal systems that publicly allocate rewards for exemplary behavior - play an increasingly important role in a wide array of social settings, including education. In this paper, we evaluate a prize system designed to boost achievement at two high schools by assigning students color-coded ID cards based on a previously low stakes test. Average student achievement on this test increased in the ID card schools beyond what one would expect from contemporaneous changes in neighboring schools. However, regression discontinuity analyses indicate that the program created new inequalities between students who received low-status and high-status ID cards. These findings indicate that status-based incentives create categorical inequalities between prize winners and others even as they reorient behavior toward the goals they reward.

Curricular policy as a collective effects problem: A distributional approach.

Current educational policies in the United States attempt to boost student achievement and promote equality by intensifying the curriculum and exposing students to more advanced coursework. This paper investigates the relationship between one such effort - California's push to enroll all 8th grade students in Algebra - and the distribution of student achievement. We suggest that this effort is an instance of a "collective effects" problem, where the population-level effects of a policy are different from its effects at the individual level. In such contexts, we argue that it is important to consider broader population effects as well as the difference between "treated" and "untreated" individuals. To do so, we present differences in inverse propensity score weighted distributions investigating how this curricular policy changed the distribution of student achievement. We find that California's attempt to intensify the curriculum did not raise test scores at the bottom of the distribution, but did lower scores at the top of the distribution. These results highlight the efficacy of inverse propensity score weighting approaches for examining distributional differences, and provide a cautionary tale for curricular intensification efforts and other policies with collective effects.