Dan Goldhaber

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#econ_ra great opportunity
careers-brookings.icims.com/jobs/3763/re...

IDEA at 50 The landmark federal law ensured access for students with disabilities. Now it’s time to focus on outcomes.

Fifty years ago, IDEA transformed education by guaranteeing access for students with disabilities. AIR's Allison Gilmour reflects on the law’s impact and what’s next for special education. https://www.educationnext.org/idea-at-50-landmark-federal-law-ensured-access-students-disabilities/

I have done this a few times... In our profession we got so much rejection and even R&Rs may focus on the negatives. Telling someone you like their paper is refreshing for the person and you too!

The Influence of Partisanship in Local School Board Elections: Evidence from Exit Polling in Michigan & Rhode Island Education in the U.S. has long been shaped by local school boards elected in nonpartisan contests, a structure intended to shield schools from broader political forces. Today, many states are consider...

Excited to share a new @annenberginstitute.bsky.social working paper, co-authored w/ Rebecca Jacobsen. We’ve been exploring what happens when national partisan politics reach one of the most local arenas of American democracy—school board elections?

edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1360

Impressive new RCT on professional learning/teacher beliefs/instructional practices.

It uses a team-based, theory-driven, methodologically rigorous & large scale research design to uncover core insights about increasing student engagement & learning.

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Could Trump-backed federal tax-credit scholarships benefit public school students too? Some public education advocates say the rulesmaking process is the time to lean in and help shape the final form of a school choice program that was designed for private school students.

Education groups are jockeying to shape the federal tax-credit scholarship through the rule-making process. But making this scheme, designed to create a voucher-like benefit, work for public school students could be tricky. www.chalkbeat.org/2025/12/09/f...

Good to know for people who use LLMs for their R code

Myth busting in action ! @joshua-goodman.com & Joseph Winkelman wrote a great paper on trends in US college enrollments and debunk the narrative we’ve been seeing everywhere about students massively leaving higher education

— please journalists read this

🔗 docs.iza.org/dp18285.pdf

Also: do you know of any existing empirical work evaluating the tech tool? What do you know about the strength of the evidence? Some additional considerations in this blog post series: www.edweek.org/teaching-lea...

Is a Master’s in Education Really Worth It? Probably Not, Research Shows Aldeman: Educators take on huge debt to earn advanced degrees, and taxpayers foot the bill for higher pay. But an M.A. doesn't make teachers better.

I almost let this go without saying anything, but I can't. This issue of the non-value (to student test achievement) of the generic MA is such an old one (e.g.,
www.jstor.org/stable/20439...). Why aren't we learning from the evidence?

www.the74million.org/article/is-a...

My worry isn't so much about the use of the SAT, but a general decline in standards/expectations of students in K12 (so yes on the potential to influence what happens in HS).

Work I haven't released yet shows that tests predict college outcomes, but GPA is a better predictor.

Yes to #1 and yes to the fact of #2 (I think this much open enrollment probably cuts in different ways). I'm actually skeptical that the UCSD findings are primarily due to the use/non use of the SAT, rather I think they reflect general decline in math competency (which may be due to standards).

(PDF) Does Monitoring Change Teacher Pedagogy and Student Outcomes? PDF | Using administrative data from D.C. Public Schools, I use exogenous variation in the presence and intensity of teacher monitoring to show it... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on...

Welcome Brian ("Brian's Research Minute)!

Great pick (on teacher monitoring/surprise drop ins to observe teachers) for your research minute: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Is the “college enrollment crisis” a myth? | Episode 998 of The Education Gadfly Show This week, we’re joined by Matt Barnum, Chalkbeat’s Ideas editor, to unpack whether college enrollment is truly declining—or whether the national narrative has gotten ahead of the data.

Worth listening to @mattbarnum.bsky.social who busts three general myths about higher ed (maybe debunker-in-chief or uncle-debunker?): 1) average tuition has soared; 2) 4YC enrollment has plummeted; 3) it's not worth it to go to college.

Plus 👇
fordhaminstitute.org/national/res...

Thanks Jen. I do think this type of research is really important for how we think about these top-X plans, and standards, more generally. But, I also know that the RD approach is not getting us general equilibrium results on changes to standards.

I haven't seen that evidence on the top-10 plans showing negative incentives, but I do think that's conceptually possible and suspect the results might be very different if they were top-50 plans. My view is that there are tradeoffs that are sometimes hard to detect.

Vax Rates, ESAs, and Cell Phone Bans: 12 Charts That Defined Education in 2025 These research findings captured the K–12 world at the start of President Trump’s second term.

I love the year-end chart story! It's both a great way to catch up on some of the big issues in education and a testament to the power of a good figure in conveying an idea.

Vax Rates, ESAs, and Cell Phone Bans: 12 Charts That Defined Education in 2025 www.the74million.org/article/12-c...

It's not a perfect analogy, but this paper on the effects of changes to grading standards helps make the case about the potential general equilibrium downsides to lowering standards: edworkingpapers.com/sites/defaul...

Again, I think your narrow point (those students admitted) is that those admitted w/ low scores are better off is probably right. Unfortunately it's really hard to get good evidence on the larger general equilibrium issues that come up with changes to standards. I'll think on this one.

There are two reasons for this. One is that admission standards create incentives for all those wishing admission. The second is that the standard (in this case for grad from UCSD) matter for the labor market.

@mattbarnum.bsky.social, would love your thoughts.

3/3

This is a collective action problem (similar to the one that exists for high school grad standards). The individuals may be better off if they get extra help + credential. At the same time, not having some standards is likely to make us all worse off.
2/n

More UC San Diego students need remedial math — but is that a problem? A UCSD report said the school should reject students who struggle with math, but researchers have found that those students are likely to benefit from an elite education.

@mattbarnum.bsky.social makes the important point that the students with low test scores admitted to UCSD probably are better off as a consequence of being there, BUT ... 👇

1/n

cbnewsletters.chalkbeat.org/p/what-the-i...

One state made preschool free. Then dozens of child care centers closed in its largest city Universal preschool promised equity but benefits went to the wealthy

Important tale from California for those who care about public policy. Fix one problem, and you can inadvertently start another. "One state made preschool free. Then dozens of child care centers closed in its largest city" hechingerreport.org/proof-points...

I've now updated this with a few updates:

1. I've added the JFE, JF, and RFS
2. I've added QJE and (most of) JPE
3. I've fixed some bugs
4. I added a way to adjust for length of papers over time
5. I've added citation counts (per OpenAlex)

paulgp.com/econlit-pipe...

PS - Taking a little Bluesky break while I work on our paper! It's coming along.

Or maybe more prudent: don't tell! But actually: do tell!

Do tell!

Big thanks to Emily Morton for pulling this all together!

Summer school participation pretty consistently provided modest benefits to students in math (but NOT reading), see Figure 1. The math benefits of summary school in our studies were generally more consistent and larger than what we found for tutoring (Figure 2).

This bite-sized brief summarizes a lot of research on how summer school contributes to academic achievement (COVID recovery programs), see this piece. But want something even more succinct, see 👇