Identifying a causal relationship between education and marital status poses methodological challenges. Using regression discontinuity analyses of U.S. Census data from 1910 and 1930, I estimate effects of early U.S. compulsory schooling laws on marital patterns by gender and race. Results from 1910 suggest that compulsory laws had heterogeneous effects by race and gender, reducing the likelihood of being married only among nonwhite men. Results from 1930 suggest that compulsory schooling decreased the racial gap in likelihood of being married and in age at first marriage by at least 24 percent. Contemporary implications include potential benefits of extended compulsory schooling for racial equality.

Existing evidence of educational effects on intergenerational mobility is associational. This study employs early compulsory schooling laws to approach a causal estimate of the relationship between education and mobility in the context of a large-scale policy change. Using IPUMS Linked Representative Samples (linked census data), regression discontinuity models exploit state differences in the timing of compulsory schooling laws to estimate an intent-to-treat effect on intergenerational occupational mobility among white males. Despite increasing equality of attendance, results reveal that compulsory laws initially reduced relative mobility for the first few cohorts affected by the laws. Among later cohorts, who were required to attend the maximum years of school, mobility was similar to prelaw levels. School funding and other data suggest that structural lag could explain this nonlinear relationship. It seems, therefore, that educational expansion inadvertently reduced mobility through institutional inertia rather than elite efforts to maintain advantage.

Modernization theory predicts that rising education should increase assortative mating by education and decrease sorting by race. Recent research suggests that effects of educational expansion depend on contextual factors, such as economic development. Using log-linear and log-multiplicative models of male household heads ages 36 to 75 in the 1940 U.S. census data—the first U.S. census with educational attainment information—I investigate how educational assortative mating changed with one instance of educational expansion: early U.S. compulsory school attendance laws. To improve on existing research and distinguish effects of expansion from changes due to particular years or cohorts, I capitalize on state variation in the timing of these compulsory laws (ranging from 1852 to 1918). Aggregate results suggest that compulsory laws had minimal impact on assortative mating. However, separate analyses by region (and supplemental analyses by race) reveal that assortative mating by education decreased with the laws in the South but increased in the North. Whether due to economic, legal, political, or other differences, results suggest that the implications of educational expansion for marital sorting depend on context. Contemporary implications are discussed in light of President Obama’s 2012 suggested extension of compulsory schooling to age 18.

During the US Industrial Revolution, educational expansion may have created skilled jobs through innovation and skill upgrading or reduced skilled jobs by mechanizing production. Such arguments contradict classic sociological work that treats education as a sorting mechanism, allocating individuals to fixed occupations. I capitalize on state differences in the timing of compulsory school attendance laws to ask whether raising the minimum level of schooling: (1) increased school attendance rate; or (2) shifted state occupational distributions away from agricultural toward skilled and non-manual occupation categories. Using state-level panel data constructed from 1850–1930 censuses and state-year fixed effects models, I find that compulsory laws significantly increased school attendance rates, particularly among lower-class children, and shifted the categorical distribution toward skilled and non-manual occupations. Thus, rather than deskilling through mechanization, raising the minimum level of education seems to have created skilled jobs and raised the occupational distribution through skill-biased technological change. Results suggest that education was not merely a sorting mechanism, supporting the importance of education as an institution even around the turn of the century.

As wealth inequality increases, the importance of parental financial transfers for socioeconomic attainment may also rise. Using data from the 2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics Rosters and Transfers Module, this study investigates two questions: how parental financial transfers for education have changed over time, and what the relationship is between these transfers and adult socioeconomic outcomes. Results suggest that transfers for education have increased, have become more commonplace, and have become more dependent on parental wealth over time. Holding constant several individual and parental measures, the relationship between parental transfers for school and adult socioeconomic attainment is positive. This relationship holds when using three-stage least squares models to account for potential endogeneity of financial transfers for school. Overall, results support arguments that parental financial transfers for education facilitate the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic standing.

The provision of public schooling in the United States has primarily been the states’ responsibility, but states generally lack the capacity to manage day-to-day school operations. Thus, states delegate responsibility to districts while maintaining some oversight. Forms of oversight include regulations and political and market-based accountability. However, these can only do so much in holding schools accountable for providing high-quality schooling. Administrative accountability based on student outcomes and school process measures presents an alternative to complement other accountability mechanisms. Standardized measures of performance used for administrative accountability can better align curriculum with state standards, improve quality, and signal the skills that society wishes for students to build. However, they can be counterproductive if they are not reliable, valid, or comprehensive. We suggest in this article that no measure is perfect and that the usefulness of test-based accountability depends on whether the measures enhance educational opportunities and reflect shared goals with reliability, validity, and comprehensiveness.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) devolves many decisions to states about how to design their accountability system and the measures to use in these systems in order to meet new goals of college and career readiness. Because few states presently have adequate measures for the new goals, they will need to develop the measures along with accountability structures. ESSA includes a provision that would allow district waivers to their state's programs. States can use such waivers to make use of particularly high-capacity districts' ability to innovate and test new approaches. The CORE districts in California serve as a model for the potential for waivers to benefit their state as well as other states. These districts received the only district-level waivers from No Child Left Behind and have designed a new accountability system that incorporates a wide range of measures that could also be used under ESSA. In collaboration with Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), CORE has produced a series of reports about their experiences with the new measures that are important with respect to future state and federal policy. Among the significant findings are the large impact on which schools are identified as underperforming that follows from decisions about the minimum number of students that must be included to calculate and report on the academic outcomes of subgroups of students, such as African-Americans. In a similar vein is the finding that only 13 percent of schools that are identified as low-performing based on end-of-year test scores in a given year are likewise identified as low-performing when the measure is growth of test scores from the end of one year to the end of the next. Not all states will need district waivers or have districts that could provide the kind of insights that the CORE districts have been able to. But states with both the need and such districts could use the waiver provision to help them to develop and refine an accountability system under ESSA.

Although program evaluations using rigorous quasi-experimental or experimental designs can inform decisions about whether to continue or terminate a given program, they often have limited ability to reveal the mechanisms by which complex interventions achieve their effects. To illuminate these mechanisms, this paper analyzes novel text data from thousands of school improvement planning and implementation reports from Washington State, deploying computer-assisted techniques to extract measures of school improvement processes. Our analysis identified 15 coherent reform strategies that varied greatly across schools and over time. The prevalence of identified reform strategies was largely consistent with school leaders’ own perceptions of reform priorities via interviews. Several reform strategies measures were significantly associated with reductions in student chronic absenteeism and improvements in student achievement. We lastly discuss the opportunities and pitfalls of using novel text data to study reform processes.

Despite growing concern over teachers' ability to live comfortably where they work, we know little about the systematic impacts of affordability on teachers' well-being, particularly in highcost urban areas. We use novel survey data from San Francisco to identify the patterns and prevalence of economic anxiety among teachers and how this anxiety relates to teachers' attitudes and behaviors. We find that San Francisco teachers have far higher levels of economic anxiety on average than a national sample of employed adults and that young teachers are particularly anxious. Furthermore, anxiety relates to job performance and well-being economically anxious teachers tend to have more negative attitudes about their jobs, have worse attendance, and are more likely to be chronically absent.

Contradictory evidence of the relationship between education funding and student achievement could reflect heterogeneous effects by revenue source or student characteristics. This study examines potential heterogeneous effects of a particular type of local revenue—bond funds for capital investments—on achievement by socioeconomic status. Comparing California school districts within a narrow window on either side of the cutoff of voter support required to pass a general obligation bond measure, I use dynamic regression discontinuity models to estimate effects of passing a bond on academic achievement among low- and high-socioeconomic-status (SES) students. Results consistently suggest that passing a bond increases achievement among low- but not high-SES students. However, these benefits for low-SES students are delayed and emerge six years after an election. Effects are larger in low-income districts and in small districts, where benefits of capital investments are experienced by a larger proportion of students.