Leah Clark

Want to know how the pandemic has reshaped school enrollment patterns in Massachusetts and nationwide?

Here's Education Next's quick and accessible version of our recent working paper:

www.educationnext.org/school-enrol...

@abbyfrancis.bsky.social @educationnext.bsky.social

Who is disgracing whom? There is a Fence located on the central green space of our Carnegie Mellon University campus on which, for more than 100 years, CMU…

Carnegie Mellon University leaders silenced @cmu.edu students who called Trump a rapist claiming they violated civil discourse. I wrote about the disgrace of reprimanding students for rejecting the idea that our campus is a place to engage in civil discourse with rapists. medium.com/@ujuanya/who...

Unfortunately, direct certification-based measures are not widely available yet. We find no easy solutions to measuring school/student economic disadvantage using publicly-available data, and discuss more in this book chapter: books.google.com/books?hl=en&...

Measuring School Economic Disadvantage Many educational policies hinge on the valid measurement of student economic disadvantage at the school level. Measures based on free and reduced-price lunch enrollment are used widely. However, recen

Ungated version here: ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper...

Measuring School Economic Disadvantage - Michelle Spiegel, Leah R. Clark, Thurston Domina, Vitaly Radsky, Paul Y. Yoo, Andrew Penner, 2025 Many educational policies hinge on the valid measurement of student economic disadvantage at the school level. Measures based on free and reduced-price lunch en...

It's great to see this officially in print! I will continue to bang the drum that if you're using FRPL to measure economic disadvantage since 2014-15 (or earlier in some states), you don't know what you're actually capturing... journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3...

Trump Wants to Cut More Than 40 Federal K-12 Programs. See Which Ones The president's detailed budget, released Friday, proposes eliminating dozens of programs as part of a nearly $13 billion cut.

The White House wants to axe funding programs for:
-English learners
-Homeless students
-Migrant students
-Teacher PD
-Civics ed.
-Literacy
-Arts ed.
-Preschoolers with disabilities
-Adult learners
-Rural schools
-School desegregation
-Alaska/Hawaii Native students
www.edweek.org/policy-polit...

Federal work shaped a Black middle class. Now it's destabilized by Trump's job cuts For generations of Black workers, federal government jobs have provided a path into the middle class. The Trump administration's workforce cuts are now throwing that sense of stability up in the air.

My latest @npr.org story with Marisa Peñaloza, Kyna Uwaeme and Brent Jones:

For generations of Black workers, federal government jobs have provided a path into the middle class. The Trump administration’s workforce cuts are now throwing that sense of stability up in the air

Looking for one more paper for the APPAM panel Josh describes here. Please reach out if you have a paper that might fit!

A couple of us are putting together an APPAM panel on post-pandemic school enrollment/access patterns, broadly conceived.

Let me know if you or someone you know has a paper that might fit this theme.

Submit papers for two CSWEP sponsored sessions at APPAM next fall. Looking especially for papers on health policy and poverty and income policy, broadly interpreted. Deadline extended to April 15. Pls share!
www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/co...

So, um, some professional news:

Peer income exposure across the income distribution | PNAS Children from families across the income distribution attend public schools, making schools and classrooms potential sites for interaction between ...

Paper links:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1138 (working paper)

For more technical details, including how we handle students with missing income, check out the online appendix.

Or bug me, @michspieg.bsky.social, @andrewpenner.bsky.social, @emilykpenner.bsky.social, or @t-h-a-d.bsky.social to discuss further!

We use the Uneven Exposure Index to compare peer income exposure across classroom and school peer groups, and across grade levels. Sorting across schools–-in parallel with income sorting across neighborhoods and towns–-is the driver of the uneven peer income distributions we document.

Note that an even average distribution is a necessary-–but not sufficient–-condition for truly even peer income exposure. There are schools, especially in urban settings, with high concentrations of poverty. But there are low-income students everywhere, not just in cities.

The logic behind the Uneven Exposure Index is that if students were evenly distributed by income, they would have 1% of peers in each percentile. We sum up the distance from the even distribution across all 100 percentiles, and divide by 2 to derive Uneven Exposure.

While more than one-quarter of very high-income peers, on average, would need to be swapped for peers in lower percentiles to achieve an even distribution for very high-income students, students around the 60th income percentile have remarkably even peer income distributions.

We love the transparency of the basic stats, but for a more succinct summary, we created an Uneven Exposure Index. This is interpreted as the min. proportion of peers, on average, that would have to be swapped with peers in other income percentiles to achieve an even distribution of peer income.

Allow me to nerd out a bit about the stats in our recent PNAS paper...

To make this graph, we calculated a 100-by-100 grid of the average proportion of peers in each income percentile for students in each percentile (i.e., average peer income distributions for each student percentile). [1/n]

Economic integration within schools is limited, UC Irvine-led study finds

Economic integration within schools is limited, @ucirvine.bsky.social-led study finds | Research, published in PNAS, highlights disproportionate isolation of students from families in highest income brackets
 
@uofcalifornia.bsky.social @andrewpenner.bsky.social @stanforduniversity.bsky.social

How fitting for this new work on economic inequality in schools to come out @pnas.org on the day I learned about Sandy Jencks' death.

His work documenting widening income inequality, segregation in schools, and equality of opportunity is a cornerstone of this study.

Students in the top 1% of the income distribution are highly isolated in affluent school enclaves.

💥6%💥 of these top 1% percentile kids’ peers are ALSO in the top income percentile.

💥20%💥 are in the top 5 income percentiles.

💥Nearly 50%💥come from the top 20 income percentiles.

So excited that our new paper, "Peer income exposure across the income distribution," is now out in PNAS!

Great overview (including link to ungated version) from the great @michspieg.bsky.social below.

Summary thread of working paper: bsky.app/profile/leah...

Appreciated @marklieberman.bsky.social seeing the relevancy of my study on a choice system that doesn't actually include private school vouchers. Why? Because vouchers are not designed to remedy any of the issues facing public school choice, so will likely produce similar disparities.

Got so distracted these last few weeks I forgot to look out for this coverage of my new working paper in Ed Week!

Correlation is not causation, but there's a lot of correlation here. PEPFAR began in 2003 near the peak of world AIDs deaths. Today 20M people receive HIV treatment through PEPFAR funding. That's almost 2/3 of people treated in the world. Call your Congress people and get PEPFAR back.

Are you an early career education researcher? Have you earned your PhD since April 1, 2017?

IES has a grant for up to $600K for developing your research, including working closely with a mentor

You need to be tenure track at an R1 or R2

Due March 1
ies.ed.gov/funding/pdf/...

Researchers and practitioners increasingly rely on administrative data sources to measure family income. However, administrative data sources are often incomplete in their coverage of the population, giving rise to potential bias in family income measures, particularly if coverage deficiencies are not well understood. We focus on the school-aged child population, due to its particular import to research and policy, and because of the unique challenges of linking children to family income information. We find that two of the most significant administrative sources of family income information that permit linking of children and parents—IRS Form 1040 and SNAP participation records—usefully complement each other, potentially reducing coverage bias when used together. In a case study considering how best to measure economic disadvantage rates in the public school student population, we demonstrate the sensitivity of family income statistics to assumptions about individuals who do not appear in administrative data sources.

Figure 3: Population-wide measures of economic disadvantage among public school K-12 students

📈📉New Census Working Paper: "Potential Bias When Using Administrative Data to Measure the Family Income of School-Aged Children" by Leah R. Clark (@leahclark.bsky.social) and Renuka Bhaskar www.census.gov/library/work...

This is really interesting. It seems to fit the 'only the parents who pay attention benefit from charter schools' narrative.