Large systematic differences in young children’s home learning experiences have long-term economic consequences. Many parenting programs place significant demands on parents’ time and inundate parents with information. This study evaluates the effects of READY4K!, an eight-month-long text-messaging intervention for parents of preschoolers that targets the behavioral barriers to engaged parenting. We find that READY4K! increased parental involvement at home and school by 0.15 to 0.29 standard deviations, leading to child gains in early literacy of about 0.11 standard deviations. The results point to the salience of behavioral barriers to parenting and the potential for low-cost interventions to reduce these barriers.

Analyzes racial differences in climate change attitudes and what they imply for building public support for sustainability policy.

Explores humility as a learning virtue in the Confucian tradition and its implications for how students approach knowledge and effort.

Teachers have become important actors in national, state, and, especially, local politics. Most research on the political behavior of teachers focuses on their relationship with public-sector unions. While extremely useful, little is known about how teachers form the evaluations of schools and districts that motivate their political behavior. I propose and test a new theory of how teachers evaluate school performance that centers on deliberative democracy. I argue that, in addition to student performance, teachers factor in how “deliberative” school districts are when evaluating school performance. Using two separate survey analyses, this article finds that teachers of districts with a stronger deliberative culture are significantly more likely to give positive evaluations of school performance. Moreover, in deliberative culture districts, teachers and students are more likely to be included in decision-making at the school level. This latter relationship holds true even for teachers in districts with high levels of student poverty.