Research Supported by The Broad Center
Professor Jayanti Owens, Teachers See Misbehavior from Black Students as More Blameworthy
Research Description: In order to isolate the role of race in teacher-student interactions, Prof. Jayanti Owens created videos using actors to depict misbehavior. She found that teachers are more likely to describe an incident with “blaming” language if the actor playing the misbehaving students is Black.
Professor Seth Zimmerman, Understanding the Economics of Education
Research Description: College isn’t for everybody—but who is it for? School choice systems are too complicated—so how can they be improved? Yale SOM’s Seth Zimmerman takes on real issues facing students, parents, and schools and uses the tools of economics to offer data-driven answers.
Professor Barbara Biasi, Does Capital Spending on Schools Improve Education?
Research Description: In a new study, Yale SOM’s Barbara Biasi and her co-authors drew on data covering most of the United States in order to track the effects of capital investments by school districts, such as new buildings or athletic facilities. They found that some projects improve test scores and others boost local property values—but they are not the same ones.
Other Education Research
John Eric Humphries, Christopher Neilson, Xiaoyang Ye & Seth D. Zimmerman, Parents' Earnings and the Returns to Universal Pre-Kindergarten
Research Description: This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) raises parents’ earnings and how much earnings effects matter for evaluating the economic returns to UPK. Using a randomized lottery design, we estimate the effects of enrolling in an extended-day UPK program in New Haven, Connecticut on parents’ labor market outcomes as well as educational expenditures and children’s academic performance. During children’s prekindergarten years, UPK enrollment increases weekly childcare coverage by 11 hours. Enrollment has limited impacts on children’s academic outcomes between kindergarten and 8th grade, likely due to a combination of effect fadeout and substitution away from other programs of similar educational quality. In contrast, UPK enrollment increases parent earnings by 21.7% during pre-kindergarten, and gains persist for at least six years after pre-kindergarten. Gains are largest for middle-income families. Earnings effects for parents have substantial consequences for cost-benefit analysis: tax revenue generated by parents’ income gains reduces the net government cost of UPK by 90% compared to what we would have found without data on parent earnings. Under the conservative assumption that families value UPK at the cost of provision, each dollar of government expenditure on UPK yields $10.04 in benefits. We show that while the benefits of UPK for children per dollar of government expenditure are lower than the benefits of many child-focused policies, the benefits of UPK for adults are high compared to other active labor market policies, and it is gains for adults that generate the high overall returns.