Publications
I study how education policies and programs affect students, and, critically, which students they affect most.
Four themes run through this work. Much of my recent research focuses on out-of-school and disrupted learning: the COVID-19 pandemic's toll on achievement, summer learning loss, and whether recovery interventions can close the gap. A second line examines accountability, how federal and state policies like NCLB, ESEA waivers, and ESSA shape school and teacher quality. I also study exclusionary practices: discipline disparities, curricular tracking, and how school structures deepen segregation. Finally, my work on school choice asks whether charters, virtual schooling, and choice markets improve outcomes or simply reshuffle them.
Out-of-School or Disrupted Learning (24 publications) This line of research examines what happens to student learning outside the traditional school year and during periods of disruption. My work documents summer learning loss patterns, evaluates the effectiveness of summer school programs, and studies the educational consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the impact of remote instruction and academic recovery interventions.
Impacts of Academic Recovery Interventions on Student Achievement in 2022-23
COVID catch-up programs promised a lot but delivered less than hoped. Across eight school districts in 2022-23, most programs reached fewer students than planned and produced few measurable gains. The exception: intensive interventions like subject-specific tutoring, small-group reading, and placement with highly effective teachers actually moved the needle. The lesson is clear but humbling: intensive support works, it's just really hard to pull off at scale.
Summer School as a Learning Loss Recovery Strategy After COVID-19: Evidence from Summer 2022
Summer school seemed like an obvious fix for pandemic learning loss, and many districts doubled down on it. But a look at eight districts serving 400,000 students tells a more sobering story. Attendance was low (only 13% of students participated), and the academic gains were modest at best: a small positive effect in math, and nothing measurable in reading. The bottom line: summer school helped the students who showed up, but with so few attending, it barely made a dent in overall pandemic losses.
Combined Schools as a (Non) Protective Factor During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring Middle School Transitions Under Typical versus Atypical School Conditions
Combined K-8 schools have long been seen as a smoother path through middle school, sparing students the jarring transition to a new building and culture. And the data backed this up, until the pandemic hit. Looking at 20,000 students, we found that K-8 schools' academic edge largely evaporated during COVID, especially for students learning remotely. The takeaway: the stability these schools provide is real and valuable, but it depends on actually being in the building. When that's gone, so is much of the advantage.
Summer School as an Academic Recovery Strategy After COVID-19: Evidence From Summer 2023
Summer school is back for round two, and the results are cautiously encouraging. Across eight large districts serving 400,000 students, 2023 summer programs again produced modest but real gains in math, while reading remained stubbornly flat. One bright spot: students who attended for a second consecutive summer did just as well, or better, than first-timers. That's good news for districts betting on summer school as a long-term recovery strategy. It won't close the gap overnight, but it keeps working for kids who keep showing up.
Implementing programs to align, accelerate, and extend student learning
Districts spent billions of ESSER dollars on three recovery strategies backed by strong pre-pandemic evidence: ELA curriculum, high-dosage tutoring, and summer programs. But running these programs during an ongoing crisis, at a scale no one had attempted, exposed familiar problems: too few staff, too little coordination, and contexts that didn't match the original research. These strategies can improve student learning. The hard part is building the conditions for them to actually work.
The Impact and Implementation of Academic Interventions During COVID-19: Evidence from the Road to Recovery Project
Four large districts rolled out tutoring, small-group instruction, and extended learning time during 2021-22 to help students recover from pandemic losses. The programs reached fewer students than planned and produced little measurable effect on math or reading scores. District leaders traced the shortfall to staffing gaps, scheduling conflicts, and programs that couldn't operate at the intensity the research says they need.
Testing an explanation for summer learning loss: Differential examinee effort between spring and fall
Every fall, teachers brace for the "summer slide" as students return having forgotten much of what they learned. But some researchers have pushed back, arguing that the dip might be a measurement illusion: maybe kids just don't try as hard on fall tests as spring tests. We put that critique to the test, and while we can't say definitively that summer learning loss is real, we also found no evidence that low effort on fall tests is what's driving the pattern. The summer slide remains a genuine puzzle, but this particular explanation doesn't hold up.
Pandemic Learning Loss by Student Baseline Achievement: Extent and Sources of Heterogeneity
The pandemic hit hardest for students who were already behind, and the gap between lower- and higher-achieving students widened significantly. But the more striking finding is what drove that widening: the school a student attended explains about three-quarters of the achievement gap growth in math. Pandemic learning loss wasn't just about individual circumstances. School and district decisions mattered enormously, which means targeted, school-level recovery strategies aren't just helpful, they're essential.
The Educational Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic
We analyzed test scores from more than two million students across nearly 10,000 schools in every state to understand how remote learning widened achievement gaps by race and poverty. Remote instruction was the primary driver: math gaps didn't grow in places that stayed in person, though reading gaps widened everywhere. High-poverty districts that went remote now face a sobering reality, as pandemic learning loss may consume nearly all of their federal relief funding.
Typical learning for whom? Guidelines for selecting benchmarks to calculate months of learning
Headlines love to report pandemic learning loss in "months of learning," but that number is far more slippery than it sounds. The same test-score gap can translate into wildly different months depending on which benchmark you pick, which assessment you use, and which students you're comparing. We walk through the key choices researchers face when calculating this metric and show how each one can swing the results. The takeaway: months of learning can be a useful shorthand, but only if researchers are transparent about the assumptions baked into the denominator.
Summer School as a Learning Loss Recovery Strategy After COVID-19: Evidence From Summer 2022
Allocating resources for COVID-19 recovery: a comparison of three indicators of school need
The Challenges of Implementing Academic COVID Recovery Interventions: Evidence from the Road to Recovery Project
A Comprehensive Picture of Achievement Across the COVID-19 Pandemic Years: Examining Variation in Test Levels and Growth Across Districts, Schools, Grades, and Students
Changes in School Composition During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications for School-Average Interim Test Score Use
School's out: The role of summers in understanding achievement disparities
Learning during COVID-19: Reading and math achievement in the 2020-21 school year
Adapting Course Placement Processes in Response to COVID-19 Disruptions
Not where you start but how much you grow: An addendum to the Coleman Report
The impact of summer learning loss on measures of school performance
Learning from summer: Effects of voluntary summer learning programs on low-income urban youth
School's out: Summer learning loss across grade levels and school contexts in the U.S. Today
What constitutes an effective summer learning program?
An Endless Summer: The role of summer learning loss in school accountability policies
Accountability (22 publications) This research investigates how federal and state accountability policies shape educational quality. My work traces the evolution of accountability from No Child Left Behind through ESEA waivers to the Every Student Succeeds Act, examining how these policies affect teacher quality, school improvement, and the politics of education reform.
The politics of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act Waivers
Validation Study of the TNTP Core Teaching Rubric
Teacher quality, distribution and equity in ESSA
The Every Student Succeeds Act, the decline of the federal role, and the curbing of Executive Authority
The development and validation of the Instructional Practices Log in Science (IPL-S): A measure of K-5 science instruction
Waivering as governance: Federalism during the Obama Administration
Who enters teaching? Encouraging evidence that the status of teaching is improving
More than sanctions: California's use of intensive technical assistance in a high-stakes accountability context to close achievement gaps
Does intensive district-level technical assistance improve student achievement? An evaluation of California's District Assistance and Intervention Teams
Waive of the future: School accountability in the waiver era
Agency Theory
Teacher intelligence
Fix the Waivers Before It's Too Late
Grading the No Child Left Behind waivers
Teacher intelligence
Fixing the Academic Performance Index
We are the 5%: Which schools would be held accountable under a proposed revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act?
Economics of urban education
Do teachers' union contracts restrict districts' abilities to meet accountability goals? The relationship between teachers' union contracts and district performance under the No Child Left Behind Act
Decentralizing resources in Los Angeles high schools: California's Quality Education Investment Act
Organizing Effective Educational Accountability: The Case of Oklahoma
School Reform in Los Angeles: Signs of Progress?
Exclusionary Practices, Discipline, Tracking & Segregation (9 publications) This body of work examines how school structures and practices sort students in ways that reinforce inequality. My research studies curricular tracking and detracking reforms, discipline disparities across student groups, course placement decisions, and how school choice and assignment policies shape racial and socioeconomic segregation.
Structuring Choice: Policy, School Segregation, and the Two-Staged School Choice Process
Lost in transition: A replication of a quasi-experimental approach to estimating middle school structural transition effects on student learning trajectories
The Kids on the Bus: The Academic Consequences of Diversity-Driven School Reassignments
When a school district reassigned students to promote racial and socioeconomic diversity, we find that reassigned students experienced small initial test score declines but no lasting negative effects — and the policy substantially reduced school segregation.
Disparities in student discipline by race and family income
Black students and students from low-income families are disciplined at much higher rates than their peers, and these disparities persist even after accounting for differences in behavior — pointing to systemic bias in how schools apply discipline.
