Do smaller classes boost achievement mainly by helping teachers impart specific academic skills to students with low academic achievement? Or do they do so primarily by helping teachers engage poorly behaving students? The analysis uses the grade 3 to 4 transition in San Diego Unified School...

Do smaller classes boost achievement mainly by helping teachers impart specific academic skills to students with low academic achievement? Or do they do so primarily by helping teachers engage poorly behaving students? The analysis uses the grade 3 to 4 transition in San Diego Unified School...

The paper evaluates math performance at four high-need middle schools during a four-year intervention, which was designed to help math teachers diagnose students' areas of need and to design lesson plans responsive to those needs. Before the intervention began, the researchers pre-selected four...

Much of the debate over the allocation of education resources focuses on the alleged benefits of smallness—of classroom or school—and is based on evidence from small-scale studies. This paper reframes the question in terms of cohort size. Using national data, we find that a 10% increase in...

This paper uses micro‐level data on social networks in middle and secondary schools to estimate effects of connectedness on education attainment outcomes. The analysis addresses concerns about unobserved neighborhood and school‐level heterogeneity by using within‐school variation between...

The paper estimates the response of student truancy and long-run labor market outcomes to discipline policies in middle and secondary school. Simultaneous determination of student behaviors and school policies motivates an instrumental variables strategy. Because judicial climate influences...

By estimating differences in long-run education and labor market outcomes for cohorts of students exposed to differing state-level primary school retention rates, this article estimates the effects of retention on all students in a cohort, retained and promoted. We find that a 1 standard...

This paper estimates social effects of incentivizing people in teams. In two field experiments featuring exogenous team formation and opportunities for repeated social interactions, we find large team effects that operate through social channels. The team compensation system induced agents to...

Using multiple data sets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003, they were investing...