Improving Education and Reducing Inequality in the United States

Overview

<p>We seek research projects that deepen our understanding of educational opportunity and success in the United States by using data on academic achievement from the Stanford Education Data Archive constructed by Sean Reardon and colleagues (<a href="http://seda.stanford.edu">http://seda.stanford.edu</a&gt;). Using data on the results of over 330 million standardized achievement tests taken by roughly 45 million public school students from 2009 to 2016, Reardon and colleagues have constructed data files that provide estimates of the distribution of academic performance on a common scale in every public school and every school district in the United States.</p> <p>Research Goals:<br>Studies that can plausibly identify the effects of policies, practices, and conditions on achievement inequality or the effects of achievement gaps on other outcomes and forms of inequality will be preferred over descriptive or correlational studies. We are particularly, though not exclusively, interested in studies aimed at understanding how to reduce educational inequality or subsequent forms of inequality.</p> <p>Studies may make use of variation across places (schools, school districts, counties, metropolitan areas, states), grades (grades 3-8), years (2009-2016), birth cohorts (there are 13 birth cohorts in the data – born roughly 1995-2007), and student subgroups to identify mechanisms that affect inequality. For example, if researchers could identify policies and practices that affected certain grades (such as middle school, but not elementary school) or were enacted in specific years (or in different years in different places), such variation might plausibly be used to identify the effects of some policies. If there were policies that affected some birth cohorts (perhaps state pre-school programs began in a given year in some states and different years in others), this might produce exogenous variation in access to preschool, the effects of which might be observed by comparing the achievement patters of different cohorts as they progress through school. Finally, policies that differentially affect some schools and/districts but not others (such as school finance policies and changes in such policies, title 1 funding, NCLB waivers or accountability sanctions, federal SIG grants, and so on) may provide a source of exogenous variation that could be used to identify the effects of specific policies on inequality.</p>