Education Policy
What are the effects of increasing private school choice vouchers on public school students? What is the role of social-emotional development in students’ lives? How do high school counselors work and understand their role? Which education interventions are most effective in terms of costs and achievement? These are just some of the issues that IPR education policy researchers address in their quest to create a larger pool of rigorous research and policy-relevant solutions for the pressing problems in education faced by teachers, students, parents, taxpayers, and policymakers.
A Message From Jonathan Guryan, Program Chair
Struggling schools, declining school funding, persistent achievement gaps, and recruiting and retaining effective teachers are just a few of the critical issues that school districts across the nation face every day. More rigorous research is needed to understand the issues facing schools and educators and to create effective solutions to address them. IPR’s Education Policy program groups fellows from a variety of disciplines and aligns with others, including those on Quantitative Methods.
Working Papers
Recently published articles and working papers in this program area include:
Jessica Polos, Stephanie Koning, Taylor Hargrove, Kiarri Kershaw, and Thomas McDade. 2022. Structural Racism in School Contexts and Adolescent Depression: Development of New Indices for the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and Beyond (WP-22-26).
Jo Blanden, Matthias Doepke, and Jan Stuhler. 2022. Educational Inequality (WP-22-19).
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Sarah Turner. 2022. Limited Supply and Lagging Enrollment: Production Technologies and Enrollment Changes at Community Colleges During the Pandemic (WP-22-04).
Faculty Experts
Faculty consider issues associated with education from different vantage points that include economics, sociology, psychology, biomedical sciences, and quantitative research methods.
Events
Research Training Institute on Cluster-Randomized Trials
Faculty Organizers: Larry Hedges and Elizabeth Tipton
This two-week, in-depth training institute covers a range of specific topics in the design, implementation, and analysis of data for use in cluster-randomized trials, allowing researchers to account for the group effects of teachers and classrooms when measuring an intervention’s effects on individual student achievement. Support comes from the National Center for Education Research, housed in the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences.
Improving Evaluations of R&D in STEM Education 2023 Summer Institute
Northwestern University, with support from the National Science Foundation is providing support for the 2023 Summer Research Training Institute on Improving Evaluations of Research and Development projects in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education.