COVID-19 vaccine "mandates covering all colleges in a county reduced COVID-19 deaths by 5.6 per 100,000 persons...& ICU admissions by 16.2 per 100,000...Impacts are larger in counties with larger college populations & low estimated ex ante student vaccination rates." jhr.uwpress.org/content/61/4...

The Effect of Vaccine Mandates on Disease Spread

Nearly 700 four-year US colleges mandated students receive COVID-19 vaccinations in fall 2021. Using data on college policies and county health, we estimate how mandates affect surrounding communities...

jhr.uwpress.org

Teacher "strikes more than double the probability that congressional candidates air education campaign ads. Strikes also shape broader support for education funding, resulting in more than $600 increases in district revenues and expenditures per pupil." jhr.uwpress.org/content/61/4...

Teacher Strikes as Public Signals

Teacher strikes are tactics that unions use to influence contract negotiations, and high-profile actions that have the potential to signal the need for policy change. We study the political economy of...

jhr.uwpress.org

Is federal involvement in education policy/reform on the way back? I've thought no, but this Gadfly discussion w/ Rep Harder @ the National Reading Panel makes me think bipartisan federal ed reform isn't dead. fordhaminstitute.org/national/res...

Reviving federal ed reform, starting with literacy | Episode 1029 of The Education Gadfly Show

Congressman Josh Harder joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his push to revive the National Reading Panel and advance the READ Act.

fordhaminstitute.org

Love this: "Anyway, this is why I put all the data out there. I hope other people will dig into it and come to their own conclusions..."

Matt Barnum@mattbarnum.bsky.social · 24h ago

10/ Anyway, this is why I put all the data out there. I hope other people will dig into it and come to their own conclusions, even if they differ from mine. Here's another nice response to the findings. bsky.app/profile/andr...

So excited about this evaluation! WestEd conducted four regression discontinuity design studies in three districts, looking at reading & math, tutoring & edtech, elementary & middle. There's also tons of implementation insights from the qualitative side. www.k12dive.com/news/early-e...

Early evidence finds outcomes-based contracting boosts student performance

Stronger district-vendor relationships are one benefit of contracts that tie results to compensation for products and services, a WestEd analysis finds.

k12dive.com

Job Alert! Really great opportunity for someone with senior leadership experience to work with folks at @nctq.bsky.social on teacher preparation issues! www.nctq.org/about/careers/

Careers - National Council on Teacher Quality

nctq.org

Everyone's talking about teacher turnover after a webinar + article this week. Is it too high? What happened with COVID? Matt Barnum collects state-level average teacher turnover rates from 21 states and finds that turnover remains elevated compared to pre-COVID: www.chalkbeat.org/2026/07/30/t...

A ‘lost generation’ of teachers left the classroom. Schools are still dealing with the consequences.

Veteran teachers left, principals cycled through too, and high-poverty schools likely faced the greatest strain. Here’s what years of churn did to classrooms.

chalkbeat.org

I don't have that many moves if we're honest, and one of them is just "compare this education thing to some other sector".

Paul Bruno@paul-bruno.com · 6d ago

Always interesting to compare teaching to the economy-wide rates (quit and total separation rates, in this case).

This is an important paper on a significant pay reform policy (targeted to helping get effective teachers into hard-to-staff schools). www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=... And here's the ungated CALDER WP version: caldercenter.org/publications...

Attracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Hard-to-Staff Schools

(August 2026) - Attracting and retaining effective teachers in high-poverty schools remains a persistent challenge. We evaluate the impact of an initiative that offered substantial performance-based c...

aeaweb.org

Brian Jacob gave a great presentation on the effect of schools adopting Yonder pouches to restrict cell phone use at #NBERSI2026. The paper has generated lots of 🔥 takes. I think it provides a window into the value & challenges of social science research. Full paper www.nber.org/papers/w35132

The Gadfly talks w/ Mike Miles, Sup of HISD, about school district reform. It seems like there's real improvement in Houston outcomes & that it required a comprehensive approach, but also, Mike has big advantages in HISD given the state control.👇 fordhaminstitute.org/national/res...

Transforming school systems | Episode 1028 of The Education Gadfly Show

Mike Miles, superintendent of Houston Independent School District, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to talk about his new book, By Design: How to

fordhaminstitute.org

Can you guess where I am from the pic? I can't quite pin down my reaction, other than "this is interesting."

New: Already the backlash to ed-tech has led some schools and teachers to cut back on screens. Yet some are not going further for a surprising reason — digital testing is now the standard. But is that a good enough reason? www.chalkbeat.org/2026/07/16/d...

Some educators and parents want less screen time, but digital tests are making that harder

Even tech-skeptical educators say students need device practice before state tests. That creates a new dilemma for screen-time rollbacks.

chalkbeat.org

Yup, Vivian and I make the case that we need a federal role in education research and dissemination for empirical evidence to really factor into local decision-making. That doesn't imply that @IES can't be improved, I think it can, but it does serve a crucial role in the education ecosystem!

CALDER Center@caldercenter.bsky.social · 3w ago

📰 New @edweek.org op-ed by CALDER's @cedr.bsky.social & @uvaehd.bsky.social's Vivian Wong: If local leaders are to make evidence-based decisions, federal support for education research is essential to generating and validating the evidence policymakers rely on. Read: www.edweek.org/policy-polit...

As one of my co-authors likes to say, "it's out in the wild." It being our new paper on the effects of elementary schools departmentalizing (having teachers specialize by subject). Here's the link, which is free for 50 days starting today: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The AEA is seeking nominations for journal coeditors and board members, and is deliberately trying to widen its search beyond the existing team's social networks. Nominate yourself or others! Nominations are simple (basically just names). You can submit them here: survey.sogolytics.com/r/QmAiqd

Thanks to Fordham for highlighting some of the troubling findings from our recent report showing the predictive power of 3rd grade tests of college outcomes: fordhaminstitute.org/ohio/comment... 1/n

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

This is a VERY COOL new @nctq.bsky.social tool that can be used to extract information about what's in a large number of collective bargaining agreements... www.nctq.org/district-pol...

District Policy Pathfinder - National Council on Teacher Quality

nctq.org

It's solo @michaelpetrilli.bsky.social on vibes and school accountability and boy did this episode speak to me. I don't know about causality (did accountability exist b/c of the vibes or did the vibes create accountability?), but ... 👇 fordhaminstitute.org/national/res...

The accountability vibe shift | Episode 1025 of The Education Gadfly Show

Mike Petrilli takes the mic to consider whether America’s schools need a renewed sense of urgency around raising achievement and closing gaps.

fordhaminstitute.org

Job Alert! And a great opportunity to work with @woessmann.bsky.social: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

📢 We are hiring 📢 Please spread the word: We are hiring a 🧑‍🎓 Postdoc (up to 6 years, non-tenure track) at the ifo Center for the Economics of Education! If you are interested in doing great… | Lud...

📢 We are hiring 📢 Please spread the word: We are hiring a 🧑‍🎓 Postdoc (up to 6 years, non-tenure track) at the ifo Center for the Economics of Education! If you are interested in doing great resear...

linkedin.com

🚨Our tutoring meta-analysis is now online at RER. @bethschueler.bsky.social, Grace Falken & I analyzed 263 RCTs. What we learned has important implications for the future of tutoring and the use of meta-analyses to inform policy. Open access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/... 🧵

Just in case it's not abundantly clear, it's a joke. AEFP is a lean organization with no plans (to my knowledge) for an outpost in Paris. But, if those plans change, I will scout for real at low cost.

Dan Goldhaber@cedr.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Scouting out real estate for @aefpweb.bsky.social's Paris office!

Scouting out real estate for @aefpweb.bsky.social's Paris office!

"Pensions do not improve teacher effort or selectively retain high-performing teachers." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Since we're heading into academic job market season, a reminder: I've collected some advice (esp. for new grads): www.paul-bruno.com/2021/07/tips... And reach out if you'd like to set up a time to chat about the job market and how to navigate it. I'm not an expert by any means, but happy to talk.

“Too often, discussions about teaching are driven by assumptions, isolated experiences, or national narratives that may not reflect what is happening in the aggregate across Arkansas” www.arkansasonline.com/news/2026/ju...

OPINION | JOSH McGEE AND GEMA ZAMARRO: The status of Arkansas teachers | Arkansas Democrat Gazette

If you follow public discussions about education, you might conclude that teaching is a profession in crisis.

arkansasonline.com

It's out and about!

@edizonross.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Excited to share our new paper on the CTE teacher pipeline out now in AERA Open! @caldercenter.bsky.social @cedr.bsky.social @roddy-theobald.bsky.social Grace Falken & Patrick Lavallee Delgado

It's time to move on from this outdated understanding of what AI models do. Agentic AI is not just fancy autocomplete. The models can pull data, write code to analyze it, verify claims, create audit trails, etc. It's not error-proof and vigilance is essential, but it's not the ChatGPT of 2024-2025.

Bruce D. Baker@schoolfinance101.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The problem with using an LLM to write social science is that all it can do is scrape/weight/summarize reorganize text that's been used in relation to the topic - even if that training set is rife with mis & dis-information. It's quality neutral regurgitation. Hence the cell phone conclusion.

"These changes have produced policy regime decay and little consistency or direction for state and local policymakers in K-12 education." #EdResearch #EdPolicy edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1492

The Fall of Accountability: Federal Education Politics in an Era of Polarization and Regime Decay

Twenty-five years ago, the United States was on the cusp of a major expansion of the federal government’s role in K-12 education policy. The No Child Left Behind legislation passed with bipartisan sup...

edworkingpapers.com

Incredibly interesting read!

Brendan Bartanen@brendanbartanen.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I think the era of automated social science is starting to emerge. Here's why: open.substack.com/pub/brendanb...