or a panel on enrollment loss over time across LEAs/how families' decide to stay in public schools
Leah Clark
@leahclark.bsky.social
Economist @ U.S. Census Bureau. Views are my own.
Is anyone thinking about submitting to APPAM this year a project on school segregation/composition or on high schools? I have an abstract that would fit nicely on a panel (but don't quite have the bandwidth to put a panel together myself)
Dear eligible voters of the United States: I know there’s a lot to keep track of right now. So I’ll keep it simple. If you need help with registering to vote, start by going to npr.org/vote ...
How to register to vote and check your registration status
For the 2026 primary elections, NPR has collected deadlines and information on how to register to vote — online, in person or by mail — in every U.S. state and territory.
npr.org
A stunning (yet unsurprising) graph of who gets identified for special versus gifted education in Oregon. Graph reported by @mattbarnum.bsky.social.
Nick Ainsworth@nick-ainsworth.bsky.social · 5mo agoExcited to share a new EdWorkingPaper on the relationship between family income and disability ID. 🧵 TLDR: Low-income students are much more likely to receive SPED services while high-income students are more likely to get 504 plan accommodations. edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1374
And I was a math-loving high school student hearing my usually feminist dad speculate that maybe Summers had a point because he was the president of Harvard... Still got an econ phd, though. Better late than never, NBER.
Prof Dynarski@dynarski.bsky.social · 5mo ago25 years ago, I was a very anxious junior female economics professor at Harvard while our President Larry Summers was telling the world how women weren’t very smart Wish the arc bent a bit more sharply
Excited to share a new EdWorkingPaper on the relationship between family income and disability ID. 🧵 TLDR: Low-income students are much more likely to receive SPED services while high-income students are more likely to get 504 plan accommodations. edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1374
School-Based Disability Identification Varies by Student Family Income
Currently, 18 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive additional supports through the identification of a disability. Socioeconomic status is viewed as central to understanding who gets ...
edworkingpapers.com
NEW: The White House's Office of Management and Budget has a new chief statistician overseeing the Census Bureau & other federal statistical agencies, according to StatsPolicy.gov. Stuart Levenbach has replaced Mark Calabria, according to the website's "About Us" page statspolicy.gov/about/#members
Students from families in the top income percentile are more than 5 times as likely to be identified for gifted programs as students from the bottom percentile.
New CES Working Paper: "Gifted Identification Across the Distribution of Family Income" by Ainsworth, Ainsworth, Cleveland, Clark, Brummet, Penner, Hibel, Saultz, Spiegel, Hanselman, and Penner www.census.gov/library/work...
Gifted Identification Across the Distribution of Family Income
Students from families in the top income percentile are more than 5 times as likely to be identified for gifted programs as students from the bottom percentile.
census.gov
Family income shapes school disability supports: high-income students receive more 504 accommodations and low-income students more special education services.
New CES Working Paper: "School-Based Disability Identification Varies by Student Family Income" by Ainsworth, Cleveland, Clark, Hibel, Brummet, Saultz, Penner, Spiegel, Yoo, Cristancho, Hanselman, and Penner www.census.gov/library/work...
School-Based Disability Identification Varies by Student Family Income
Family income shapes school disability supports: high-income students receive more 504 accommodations and low-income students more special education services.
census.gov
New in print: In MS counties w/ higher % Black students, white policymakers were less likely to access Equalization funds. Exploiting variation in school spending induced by this so-called equalization policy, we document a tragedy in racist public policy. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Every mention of SNAP being frozen should include this simple fact: TRUMP is CHOOSING TO CANCEL FOOD ASSISTANCE. There are literally emergency dollars available to keep SNAP funded.
New research from PSC researcher @pgonalon.bsky.social with @imarinescu.bsky.social shows that the high cost of U.S. childcare breeds family income inequality. Learn more in OMNIA: bit.ly/48W3iOT Read the study in American Sociological Review: bit.ly/4h60nVY
A loud reminder that this administration wants to bring back SEGREGATION as @victorerikray.bsky.social has pointed out and they're starting within the administration. A literal page out of Woodrow Wilson's playbook. #blacksky #news
Trump Fires Black Officials From an Overwhelmingly White Administration
nytimes.com
NEW: The Census Bureau says parts of its website are not being updated because of the federal government shutdown and questions from data users will not be answered "until appropriations are enacted"
Yeah, honestly: “parental rights” are starting to sound more like “property rights.”
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
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...
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…
medium.com
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...
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...
journals.sagepub.com
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...
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.
edweek.org
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
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.
npr.org
Looking for one more paper for the APPAM panel Josh describes here. Please reach out if you have a paper that might fit!
Joshua Goodman@joshua-goodman.com · last yr.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.
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...
CSWEP DC
aeaweb.org
So, um, some professional news:
Hansi Lo Wang (he/him)@hansilowang.bsky.social · last yr.JUST IN: The Census Bureau is ending its telework and remote-work agreements for unionized federal workers and requiring a full return to office for telework employees by April 21 and a return for remote employees within 60 days, according to emails shared with @npr.org
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]
MMichelle Spiegel@michspieg.bsky.social · last yr.
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.
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
Economic integration within schools is limited, UC Irvine-led study finds
socsci.uci.edu
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.
MMichelle Spiegel@michspieg.bsky.social · last yr.
We're living through a highly polarized time, both economically and politically. Schools have the potential to bring us together, but are contributing to our separation. In a new @pnas.org article, my colleagues and I document students' exposure to economically diverse school and classroom peers. 📄: