Many large urban school dis­tricts match stu­dents to schools using algo­rithms that incor­po­rate an ele­ment of ran­dom assign­ment. We intro­duce two sim­ple empir­i­cal strate­gies to har­ness this ran­dom­iza­tion for mea­sur­ing the causal effects of indi­vid­ual schools. In appli­ca­tions to data from Denver and New York City, we find that our mod­els yield high­ly reli­able school effectiveness […]

To help mit­i­gate struc­tur­al dis­ad­van­tage, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) frame­work for equi­tably allo­cat­ing COVID-19 vac­cines pro­posed increas­ing allo­ca­tions to worse-off minori­ties through the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). However, the extent of ben­e­fit is unknown. Moreover, since SVI includes a race vari­able and could face legal chal­lenges, it is desir­able to […]

Mayara Felix eval­u­ates the impact of Massachusetts Chapter 222—a pol­i­cy that lim­it­ed char­ter schools’ abil­i­ty to sus­pend students—on stu­dent sus­pen­sions and test scores. Comparing char­ter atten­dance effects before vs. after Chapter 222, she find that Chapter 222 reduced char­ter sus­pen­sions by rough­ly 10 per­cent­age points, but had no impact on char­ter learn­ing. The author then […]