Excited to share a new research brief on absenteeism in NC through 2024-25! This mixed methods work shows that absence rates did not change much between '23-24 and '24-25, and describes key possible reasons why based on interviews with educators, parents, and students.
epic.unc.edu/wp-content/u...
SAIPE, or, if I want data for non-geographic LEAs, school-level MEPS from the Urban Institute, aggregated to district level. www.urban.org/projects/mod...
It's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!
Calling all graduate students doing research on K-12 or higher education...
And for more detail on that inequality piece in Michigan
Michigan has made progress in the past few years thanks to increased education spending, but we have a long way to go to achieve adequate funding for high-poverty schools and districts.
Revisiting Evidence on the Role of Funding Adequacy in School Reopening During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Response to Weber and Baker journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
"controlling for partisanship & union strength substantively attenuated...the association b/w funding adequacy & school reopening"
@alexmoran.bsky.social
@michaelpetrilli.bsky.social
Just released: The Cycle of Disinvestment in Public Schools: How Public-School Criticism Drives Policy and Disinvestment bit.ly/4rhKWO4
This truly is an important new report from Huriya Jabbar and Daniel Espinoza at @uscrossier.bsky.social!
@nepc.bsky.social
“sweeping failure claims erode public support and fuel a cycle of disinvestment—reduced funding and enrollment that weaken schools and invite further criticism—advancing privatization and deepening inequality at a moment of heightened political and fiscal threats”
nepc.colorado.edu/publication/...
Love this
(Short version: the original finding still holds, but less dramatic after replication with key additional variables accounted for)
Love to see this type of replication and iterative process
The moment many of us in #edresearch have been waiting for...
Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences has been released.
ies.ed.gov/ies/2026/02/...
This was a great experience with open data and replication. The data and analysis files for the original study and my replication/extension are available via the @icpsr.bsky.social repository.
Original study: www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/pr...
My study: www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/pr...
...that incorporating measures of local partisanship (Trump vote share in 2020) and a proxy for union strength (though this adds less explanatory power than partisanship) substantively attenuated but did not eliminate the association between funding adequacy and school reopening.
I replicated and extended @jerseyjazzman.bsky.social and @schoolfinance101.bsky.social's study on funding adequacy and school reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their original study did not incorporate measures of local partisanship. I found...
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
The Detroit district’s board shared their ideas to help kids get to school despite systemic barriers. Administrators also revealed what policies could soon roll out.
The district’s rate was 83% in 2025, which was nearly 5 percentage points higher compared to the year before.
strongly agree! though I also generally feel conflicted about how to interpret the results from this and other great work on school climate and absenteeism... bsky.app/profile/jere...
Yes absolutely! Though worth noting from prior research that value-add measures for attendance and academics (at teacher level, school level, and even principal level) are usually only modestly correlated. So there seems to be some distinct actions/attributes that relate to climate specifically...
I (want to?) believe that improving school climate/culture (relationships, safety, etc.) is one of the highest-leverage things schools can to do improve attendance. But it's possible the impact will be only marginal. See for example Hamlin's (2021) prior work journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3...
Or, are there additional unobserved factors causing both? In particular, this study findings something that most other studies on climate and attendance find: relationships ("connectedness" here) and safety stand out as strong correlates of absenteeism. Other unobserved factors could be at play here
This is a great study, and I think the longitudinal analysis (schools with declining perceptions of climate see declines in attendance) is especially useful. Still, I struggle with causation/correlation here. This relationship between absenteeism and climate is very well. But which causes which?
Creating Welcoming Schools: The Role of Positive Climates in Reducing Absenteeism journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3...
Natural sciences only or social sciences too?
VERSION 2.0 of the Segregation Tracking Project is here!
New data on racial and economic segregation between neighborhoods and schools over the last 30+ years for every school district, metro area, state, county, congressional district (new!), and more!
edopportunity.org/segregation/
Today, I’m launching DAAF, the Data Analyst Augmentation Framework: an open-source, extensible workflow for Claude Code that allows skilled researchers to rapidly scale their expertise and accelerate data analysis by 5-10x -- *without* sacrificing the transparency...
github.com/brhkim/daaf/...
