We use a rigorous three-stage many-analysts design to assess how different researcher decisions—specifically data cleaning, research design, and the interpretation of a policy question—affect the variation in estimated treatment effects. A total of 146 research teams each completed the same causal inference task three times each: first with few constraints, then using a shared research design, and finally with pre-cleaned data in addition to a specified design. We find that even when analyzing the same data, teams reach different conclusions. In the first stage, the interquartile range (IQR) of the reported policy effect was 3.1 percentage points, with substantial outliers. Surprisingly, the second stage, which restricted research design choices, exhibited slightly higher IQR (4.0 percentage points), largely attributable to imperfect adherence to the prescribed protocol. By contrast, the final stage, featuring standardized data cleaning, narrowed variation in estimated effects, achieving an IQR of 2.4 percentage points. Reported sample sizes also displayed significant convergence under more restrictive conditions, with the IQR dropping from 295,187 in the first stage to 29,144 in the second, and effectively zero by the third. Our findings underscore the critical importance of data cleaning in shaping applied microeconomic results and highlight avenues for future replication efforts.

School districts across the United States are increasingly adopting the four-day school week, often in the hope of addressing teacher staffing challenges. We examine the effects of the four-day week on teacher recruitment and retention in Missouri, where three in ten districts currently use it. After presenting qualitative data showing that school and district leaders, and teachers, believe the four-day week improves recruitment and retention, we estimate the effects of the four-day week on these outcomes using difference-in-differences models. We find no consistent evidence that the four-day school week improves teacher recruitment or retention. Our findings hold when considering potential saturation effects, indicating that even early adopters experienced no statistically significant benefit from adopting the four-day school week calendar.

Attracting and retaining high-quality teachers is a pressing policy concern. Increasing teacher salaries and creating more attractive compensation packages are often proposed as a potential solution. Signed into law in March 2023, the LEARNS Act increased Arkansas's minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000, guaranteed all teachers a minimum raise of $2,000, and added flexibility allowing school districts to deviate from seniority-based traditional salary schedules. To study school districts’ adjustments to the new legislation, we collected information about districts' teacher compensation policies one year before and the first year of implementation. We also integrated this data with teachers' administrative records to study patterns of teacher retention and mobility. Our results reveal a more equitable distribution of starting teacher salaries across districts, with minimal variation. The LEARNS Act notably increased funding for rural and high-poverty districts, mitigating the negative association between starting salaries and district poverty rates. However, the initial effects on teacher retention and mobility were modest. While some positive trends emerged, such as reduced probabilities of teachers transitioning to non-instructional roles and increased new teacher placement in geographic areas of shortage, broader impacts on retention and mobility were limited in the first year of implementation.

Paraeducators are among the largest categories of public education employees and are increasingly seen as a pool of potential teachers. However, little is known about paraeducator-to-teacher transitions. Using statewide administrative data, we show that while paraeducators may be more racially/ethnically diverse than the teacher workforce, Black and Hispanic paraeducators are less likely than White paraeducators to transition into teaching. We additionally show that teachers with paraeducator experience are similarly effective to teachers without paraeducator experience. Lastly, we use simulations to show that the potential for the paraeducator-to-teacher pipeline to diversify the teaching profession may be limited unless they are highly targeted. Our results have policy design implications for efforts to expand the paraeducator-to-teacher pipeline or to diversify the teacher workforce.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic teachers reported high levels of stress and burnout, raising concerns about a potential increase in teacher turnover and future teacher shortages. We use administrative data from the 2018 to 2019 through 2022 to 2023 school years to examine how the pandemic affected teacher turnover in Arkansas. We find relatively stable turnover entering the 2020 to 2021 and 2021 to 2022 school years but an increase of 5 percentage points (20%) over pre-pandemic levels entering the 2022 to 2023 school year, representing both higher rates of transitions out of the education sector but also more likely movements to other positions outside regular teaching within the education sector. Importantly, we also find significant heterogeneity in turnover by teacher and school characteristics suggesting a decline in aggregate teacher quality, diversity, and experience. These results suggest potential lasting effects on the composition and quality of the teacher labor force.

During the 2020–21 school year, Black students were less likely to learn in person than white students. We examine whether this difference persisted as the pandemic progressed. We find that the rate of in-person learning increased in 2021–22 but remained lower for Black students compared to white students. While several factors helped explain observed racial differences in learning modality in 2020–21, only modality offerings continued to be an important explanatory factor in 2021–22 and a Black-white in-person learning gap persisted after controlling for offerings and other factors. These findings suggest a mismatch between Black families’ preferences and the options offered by their schools.

A growing body of research and popular reporting shows racial differences in school modality choices during the COVID-19 crisis, with White students more likely to attend school in person in the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021. This in-person learning gap raises serious equity concerns. We use unique panel survey data to explore possible explanations. We find that a combination of factors may explain these differences. School districts’ offerings, political partisanship, perceived risk from the pandemic, and local COVID-19 outbreaks are all meaningfully associated with and plausibly explain the in-person learning racial gap. Our results illustrate how not only policy decisions but also political leanings and individuals’ beliefs could contribute to inequality in access to learning and illustrate the need for a better understanding of the factors behind observed racial inequalities in education.

School districts across the United States are increasingly adopting the four-day school week, often in the hope of addressing teacher staffing challenges. We examine the effects of the four-day week on non-teacher staffing and recruitment, and schoolwide expenditures in Missouri, where three in ten districts currently use it. Using a difference-in-differences design to identify the causal impact of four-day school week adoption, we find limited evidence that the policy impacts non-teacher staffing, nor do we find practically meaningful effects on retention. While we do see savings in some budget areas (e.g., operations), we observe an increase in tuition payments. Thus, overall, our findings suggest that four-day school week adoption does not result in meaningfully significant positive impacts on non-teacher staffing or retention, nor on schoolwide expenditures.

How do immigration enforcement actions (IEAs) affect student attendance, and through what channels? We use student-by-day administrative records from a mid-size school district to estimate the causal effect of heightened federal immigration enforcement following the January 2025 presidential inauguration on student attendance using a difference-in-differences design. We find that IEAs cause a substantial and persistent increase in absences among foreign-born students, with the daily probability of absence rising by 2.2 percentage points (37%) relative to a pre-treatment mean of 5.9%. We decompose these effects into two distinct channels: 1. a sustained elevation in absences spanning the full post-treatment period and 2. acute, short-lived spikes on dates proximate to specific enforcement events. The sustained elevation in absences dominates and show no signs of attenuation during our study period. Effects increase nearly monotonically with grade level, consistent with older students exercising greater autonomy over their own attendance decisions. We also show that estimates using more common proxies for student vulnerability, such as MLL status, likely understate the effects experienced by the most directly affected students.

Teaching is one of the largest and most important professions in the United States, but there are important concerns about the current health of the profession, including some acute geographic and subject area shortages, declining professional prestige, dwindling student interest in pursuing teaching as a career, and a marked drop in enrollment in traditional Education Preparation Programs (EPPs). As a result, it is increasingly important to understand how teachers move through their preparation programs and into the teaching workforce. A better understanding of the early teacher pipeline could help states design policies and programs that strengthen the pipeline and alleviate teacher shortages. In this respect, prior research from Washington State found that a significant proportion of recently certified teacher candidates start their public school careers in non-teaching positions but transition to teaching within 5 years (Goldhaber et al., 2022). If such a “bench” of teachers exists in a state like Arkansas, which has documented teacher shortage areas, policies could potentially be designed to help place these qualified teachers in areas of need. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of Arkansas EPP enrollees’ labor market trajectories, using rich, statewide, linked administrative data capturing the universe of traditional public and charter school employees from higher education to the labor force. Our results indicate the presence of a “bench” of teachers in Arkansas who start their careers in non-main teacher positions (4%), but of a much smaller size than the one reported in prior work. We then study factors associated with the “bench” of teachers and find that this bench is partially explained by certification area and salary differentials across school districts.