Background. Randomized Controlled Trials are the “gold-standard” for estimating causal impacts of education programs. They are not always feasible, however, and may not generalize to the population of interest. Generally, researchers cannot measure selection bias in quasi-experimental...

Much work has documented that African-American students are more likely to receive expulsions and suspensions than their white peers. These disparities are troubling, but researchers and policymakers need more information to fully understand this issue. We use three years of student level...

We consider situations in which public charter school lotteries are neither universally conducted nor consistently documented. Such lotteries produce “broken” Randomized Control Trials, but provide opportunities to assess the internal validity of quasi-experimental research designs. Here, we...

A vast body of research has proven the correlation between exclusionary discipline (out-of-school suspensions and expulsions) and student outcomes such as lower test scores, dropout, grade retention, and involvement in the juvenile justice system, but there is no consensus on the causal impacts...

School voucher programs (a.k.a. opportunity scholarships) are scholarship programs - frequently government funded - that pay for students to attend private schools of their choice. Many private school vouchers programs have been initiated around the world with the goal of increasing the academic...

In randomized controlled trials, it is common for attrition rates to differ by lottery status, jeopardizing the identification of causal effects. Inverse probability weighting methods (Hirano et al, 2003; Busso et al., 2014) and estimation of informative bounds for the treatment effects (e.g. Lee, 2009;...

There is much discussion in the United States about exclusionary discipline (suspensions and expulsions) in schools. According to a 2014 report from the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, Black students represent 15% of students, but 44% of students suspended more than once,...

According to a 2014 report from the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, black students represent only 15% of students across the nation, but 35% of students suspended once are black, 44% of students suspended more than once are black, and 36% of expelled students are black....