Author
Matthew M. Chingos
Articles
Privilege Worth Perpetuating
A review of “The Years That Matter Most” by Paul Tough
Campus Culture Shock
A review of “The Privileged Poor” by Anthony Abraham Jack
Do Charter Schools Increase Segregation?
First national analysis reveals a modest impact, depending on where you look
The Rich Get Richer
A review of “Dream Hoarders” by Richard V. Reeves
Getting Classroom Observations Right
Lessons on how from four pioneering districts
The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment
African Americans benefited the most
Online Learning in Higher Education
Study finds that students enrolled in a large “hybrid” course learned as much as students in a traditional course, at substantial cost savings
Questioning the Quality of Virtual Schools
NEPC report uses flawed measures
Grading Schools
Can citizens tell a good school when they see one?
For-Profit and Nonprofit Management in Philadelphia Schools
What kind of management does better than the district-run schools?
Blog Posts/Multimedia
Exploring Education Data Reveals Increasing Diversity in Maryland Schools
A new tool makes historical education data easier to find.
Can We Design Student Loan Forgiveness to Target Low-Income Families?
How different approaches to loan forgiveness, including plans put forward by members of Congress and presidential hopefuls, would distribute benefits to Americans of different income levels and races and ethnicities.
Who Would Benefit from Elizabeth Warren’s Student Loan Forgiveness Proposal?
The plan is likely to disproportionately benefit middle- and upper-middle-income Americans, as well as black families, at an estimated total cost of about $955 billion.
What Do Racial and Ethnic Wealth Gaps Mean for Student Loan Policy?
Higher education policy research tends to focus more on income than wealth, not because income is more important, but because it is easier to measure, but income is a poor proxy for wealth, especially for black and Hispanic families.
Four Things to Know about Tax Credit Scholarships for School Choice
For a tax credit scholarship program to be successful, states will need to begin with a thorough review of the evidence.
A Promising Alternative to Subsidized Lunch Receipt as a Measure of Student Poverty
Some states are putting in place linked data systems that enable them to identify students who are economically disadvantaged regardless of whether their families fill out a form.
40 Years After the Bakke Decision, What’s the Future of Affirmative Action in College Admissions?
Colleges need to be ready for a world in which considering race in college admissions is no longer legal.
What Can NAEP Tell Us About How Much U.S. Children Are Learning?
This report presents new analyses of state-average NAEP data that attempt to address the limitation of changing samples of students by following cohorts of students from 4th grade in a given year to 8th grade four years later.
A Better Way to Compare State Performance on NAEP
Demographically-adjusted data provide important insights into differences in state-level school performance.
Incremental Steps Toward Bold Student Loan Reforms
Congress can take significant steps in the next Higher Education Act toward designing a system that will better serve both borrowers and taxpayers and generate evidence to support bolder policymaking in the future.
Simplifying Grants for College Students: Who Wins and Who Loses?
Making federal student aid programs simpler and easier for students to navigate is a key goal of efforts to reauthorize the Higher Education Act .
What Have We Learned From Three Studies of Private School Choice?
Understanding the effect of private school choice on real-world success beyond test scores requires data on outcomes like college enrollment and graduation, and thanks to three recent Urban Institute studies, we know more about this than we did a year ago.
Are Low-Quality Private Schools on the Rise in Florida?
A new study finds that participation in the state’s tax credit scholarship program has not shifted toward schools with weaker track records of improving student outcomes.
Private School Choice Increases College Enrollment in Florida. Could It Work Nationally?
Here’s what we think our new study means—and doesn’t mean—for both state-led and federal efforts to expand school choice.
Should Congress Take a Page from the Gainful Employment Playbook?
Instead of targeting institutions of higher education, the government should consider targeting individual programs.
How Progressive is School Funding in the United States?
The fact that overall funding progressivity remains low despite two decades of reforms suggests a troubling lack of progress on equitable funding of public schools.
Who Could Benefit From School Choice? Mapping Access to Public and Private Schools
The distance families are able and willing to travel may be more important for expanding school choice than the type of school the policy provides access to.
School Choice Advocates Should Be Worried About Federalizing School Choice
To create a feasible school choice policy, lawmakers would likely need to expand federal involvement in private school education.
Don’t Let Student Borrowers Off Tax-free
A proposal that would allow employers to help pay off their employees’ student loans tax-free would provide a regressive handout to the wealthiest borrowers.
Don’t Forget Private, Non-Profit Colleges
The private, non-profit sector may be in a position to contribute even more to the nation’s educational attainment and economic mobility than it currently does.
Why the Proficiency-Versus-Growth Debate Matters for Assessing School Performance
Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos and Minnesota Senator Al Franken sparred at Tuesday’s confirmation hearing over whether student performance is best measured by proficiency or growth.
Making College Earnings Data Work for Students
State and federal policymakers have embraced the idea that prospective college students need better information on earnings outcomes for individual colleges and programs of study.
Private Schools Equally Good at Fostering Civic Participation
A new study confirms earlier ones finding that public schools are not better than private schools at fostering civic values.
Look to Congress, not Trump, for Leadership on Education Policy
An assertive Congress ignoring or even steamrolling a weak, incompetent White House seems like a plausible outcome in 2017.
Should Policymakers Make College Free or Better Support Institutions?
Providing the right mix of financial aid and non-financial supports to the students who need them most is a better idea than eliminating tuition for all or most families.
No More Free Lunch for Education Policymakers and Researchers
For many years, the identification of students who are eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches has doubled as a way for researchers and policymakers to identify students from low-income families.
School Choice as an Antipoverty Strategy
Even in a time of great political polarization, at least some school choice policies have the potential to foster bipartisan collaboration.
No Excuses for Stagnant Student Achievement in U.S. High Schools
With graduation rates at an all-time high, , but federal achievement data indicate that these students likely have no better math or reading skills than their parents did.
Does Gentrification Explain Rising Student Scores in Washington, DC?
Our new analysis shows that demographic change explains some, but by no means all, of the increase in scores.
How Do States Really Stack Up on the 2015 NAEP?
The declines in NAEP scores from 2013 to 2015 are unlikely to be explained by shifts in student demographics.
Evaluating the DC School Voucher Program
More high-quality evidence on the nation’s most prominent voucher program has the potential to inform education policymaking in the capital and across the country
Who Opts Out of State Tests?
District-level data from New York suggest that relatively affluent districts tend to have higher opt-out rates, and that districts with lower test scores have higher opt-out rates after taking socioeconomic status into account
Opt-Out Movement Likely Inconsequential for Teacher Evaluations
In the majority of classrooms, where opt-out appears likely to remain at low levels, the data strongly suggest that students sitting out of standardized testing will have only a trivial impact on the ratings received by their teachers.
Why Annual Statewide Testing Is Critical to Judging School Quality
Accountability based on grade-span testing judges schools based on the students they serve, not how well they serve them.
Testing Costs a Drop in the Bucket
The cost of standardized tests, long assailed by testing critics as too high, has resurfaced in the debate over reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act currently underway in Congress.
School Vouchers Help Low-Income Minority Students Earn a College Degree
For the first time, we are able to show that vouchers may have a long-term positive impact on college graduation rates.
Big Data Wins the War on Christmas
A social scientist analyzes whether Christmas affects test scores
Mixed Results for Arizona’s Charter Schools
Charter schools vary more in their impact on student performance on state tests than traditional public schools; there are more charters with very large positive or very large negative test-score impacts than there are traditional public schools with such extreme outcomes.
Ending Teacher Tenure Would Have Little Impact on its Own
Data from North Carolina suggest that principals are not using the four-year period before teachers qualify for tenure to identify and remove their lowest performers.
Classroom Observations Offer Biggest Room for Improvement in Teacher Evaluations
Addressing the design flaws we have identified in teacher evaluation systems will bring districts closer to achieving the primary goal of meaningful teacher evaluation: assuring greater equity in students’ access to good teachers.
Who Profits from the Master’s Degree Pay Bump for Teachers?
The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research.
Do Public Pensions Provide Equal Pay for Equal Work?
Women are more likely to spend time out of the workforce than men, and defined-benefit pension plans tend to punish teachers who fail to meet specific targets, such as 30 years of service.
Ending Summer Vacation is Long Overdue—Here’s How to Pay for It
There’s clearly a slam-dunk case for eliminating—or at least dramatically shortening—summer vacation, which fits into a broader push to lengthen the school year beyond the 180 days that is typical in the U.S.
The Need for Good Research on Pension Reform
Rhode Island is among the few states that have enacted sweeping pension reforms. Accurate information about the effects of those changes is vital both locally and to other states deciding which changes to make to their own retirement systems.
Does Expanding School Choice Increase Segregation?
The findings reported here indicate that it is unlikely that charter schools—a prominent effort to increase school choice, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds—are making the problem worse.
U.S. Institute of Education Sciences Weighs In on Voucher Impacts on College Enrollment
The What Works Clearinghouse declared the voucher study to be “a well-implemented randomized controlled trial.”
Accepting Class Size Increases in Order to Sustain Wiser Investments
Are smaller classes worth the cost, relative to the alternative of a salary increase?
Critique of Study of Voucher Impact on College Enrollment Misguided
Several of the issues raised by Goldrick-Rab have no merit and none undermine the primary conclusion of our study.
Choosing Blindly
How can we tolerate ignorance on something that is as critical to student learning as instructional materials?
Reviewing the Evidence on Class Size
There is little doubt that reducing class size can boost student achievement in some circumstances. What is much less certain is how much of a difference class-size policies can make, and whether the impacts are large enough to justify the costs of hiring additional teachers and building new classrooms.
