"We describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence,...

This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) raises parents' earnings and how much these earnings effects matter for evaluating the economic returns to UPK programs. Using a randomized lottery design, we estimate the effects of enrolling in a full-day UPK program in New Haven,...

"The racial achievement gap in education is an important social problem to which decades of research have yielded no scalable solutions. Recent evidence from 'No Excuses' charter schools - which demonstrates that some combination of school inputs can educate the poorest minority children -...