School systems around the world use achievement tests to assign students to schools, classes, and instructional … students who score below a proficiency cutoff into remedial classes. Students scoring below the cutoff receive more educational … significantly larger and more likely to persist beyond the year of remediation for Black students …

a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and … their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of both children while the spillover is up to 30% of the target … child effect size. The effects are particularly pronounced in families where one of the children is disabled, for boys, and …

quantify the extent to which academic performance depends on students being of similar race or ethnicity to their instructors … performance gap in terms of class dropout and pass rates between white and minority students falls by roughly half when taught by … a minority instructor. In models that allow for a full set of ethnic and racial interactions between students and …