In Progress/Ongoing

Academic

Working paper on the effect of financial aid for college attendance and political participation.

Details TBD.

Book chapter on elected local election officials.

Details TBD.

Do voters hold school board officials accountable?

Abstract

Past scholarship on disparities in education outcomes has done much to uncover the mechanisms through which disparities in education arise and continue. Some show that a lack of racial representation in a district's electorate is positively associated with the racial achievement gap. In a different but related literature, scholars find a similar positive association between segregation of schools within a district and district-level achievement gaps between racial groups, also adding the potential mechanism of concentration in high-poverty districts. However, while it is descriptively true that income, parental education, and other socioeconomic factors are predictors of students' educational success, some districts shrink achievement gaps between certain groups over time while others shrink these gaps less or actually exacerbate them (even when looking at changes in ceteris paribus districts across time). This is unsurprising given that we expect school board officials (SBOs) to exercise control and pull policy levers that instantiate changes in the educational outcomes of the students in their districts; after all, SBOs are among the highest paid public officials in local government. Do voters hold SBOs accountable for education outcomes -- overall test scores, learning rates, racial achievement gaps, and more -- through a theoretically consistent mechanism such as selection or sanction (i.e. reward/punish)?

Notes

• Awarded summer research funding from the UCLA Department of Political Science (Summer 2021).

Non-academic

Running Blog About Making Sense of Washington, D.C. Healthcare Provider Data

UPDATE on 6-20-2021

Almost as mysteriously as Google Sites stopped updating my website, they have returned saving and editing privileges to me. Go figure! My co-auhtor, Molloy Sheehan, and I have since published two articles as part of our collaboration with DCPC:

• A first piece outlining the general scope of our analysis, and introducing the basic facts and figures about the health care clinician (HCC) workforce in Washington, D.C.: https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/health-care-workforce-capacity/.

• A second piece diving into disparities in health care need and demand by region, race/ethnicity, and other descriptive characteristics (again focused on the District, as is the whole series): https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/inequalities-health-care-need-demand/.

We are close to wrapping our third piece, which compares D.C. to other/similar metropolitan areas around the country. As always, we hope you're following along and are always curious to hear thoughts, comments, and feedback.

UPDATE on 7-24-2020

Great news! My co-author, Molloy Sheehan, and I have secured our first publication partnership: the District of Columbia Policy Center (DCPC). Through the DCPC Fellowship program, Molloy and I will work with Emilia Calma, Yesim Sayin Taylor, and other terrific folks to collaboratively publish a series of briefs and reports spanning a number of the issues outlined below (as well as many others that have already evolved, and will continue to evolve out of the project).

We are very excited to have found a home for our analysis, look forward to collaborating with the well-regarded research pros at DCPC, and encourage you all to check out their work in the meantime: https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/.

Original Post and Introduction

On May 6, the government of Washington, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser started releasing neighborhood-level COVID-19 data, which can be found here. A write-up of this rollout can be found at the Web page for the DCist article, "Here’s What D.C.’s Neighborhood-Level Coronavirus Numbers Do—And Don’t—Tell Us" (link).

Some time later, I saw on Twitter (I'm looking for the tweet, it's out there somewhere) a much more useful map that had per capita rates for those neighborhood-level numbers instead of the raw numbers—after all, Columbia Heights is dense whereas Woodley Park is not as dense. So we should not be comparing the absolute counts of positive coronavirus cases—at least not to draw conclusions with policy relevance. Getting this clarity following the District's initial data release was a helpful step, and the whole project brings up a very interesting ethos: 

What can we do to paint the most accurate, most comprehensive picture about the ongoing coronavirus situation in D.C. that includes a perspective of the demand for care (with a particular focus on the ongoing pandemic, but keeping in mind other health care needs as well) and the supply of care?

As a staff researcher at UCSF, I worked on a multi-series project that did a lot to inform how I think about these types of challenges: it was a large, sweeping analysis of the supply of and demand for primary care in California (link); there was an offshoot project focusing on behavioral health that I played a smaller role in (link). The output was pretty interesting: we were able to tell a pretty compelling story illustrating how particular regions of the state (e.g., the San Joaquin Valley, for those in the know) were drastically undersupplied in terms of primary care physicians (PCPs) but also in terms of physician assistants (PAs), nurse practitioners (NPs), and behavioral health clinicians (e.g., psychologists, licensed clinical social workers, and counselors). The study was funded by a Kaiser Permanente community benefit grant and has been cited in a number of studies and policy proposals. It has also been incorporated into a statewide health workforce effort: the California Future Health Workforce Commission.

In the last couple days, I got my hands on the same kind of data we relied on for the UCSF study: licensee-level data from the relevant regulatory body (in California it was the Medical Board of California, MBC; in D.C. it is the District of Columbia Department of Health, DOH). Using this data, I hope to do a few things over the next weeks and months:

• Generate maps showing the geographic distribution of health care clinicians (HCCs) (physicians, nurses, and other folks necessary for coronavirus treatment) in D.C.

• Use pertinent demographic characteristics (e.g., age and years in medical practice / hours of patient care provided) [data permitting] to refine assessment of HCC supply.

• Illustrate any differences in the 'adequacy' of HCCs by Ward and, if resources allow, at some sub-Ward level (whether it's the neighborhood or some other socio-geographic unit).

• Identify neighborhoods with particularly acute HCC shortage as demonstrated by the difference between a semi-sophisticated measure of coronavirus need (i.e. not just the number of coronavirus cases, but also the demographic characteristics and physical/behavioral health of a socio-geographic unit) and the previously mentioned estimates of supply [data permitting].

• Much more, hopefully!

These goals will be achieved by virtue of available data and resources, so their execution will subsequently depend on the availability of both. At the moment, I already have a dataset containing (fairly reliable, but messy) geographic data, so once I clean that up I can hopefully spit out some compelling maps down to the census tract/neighborhood level to mirror what the D.C. government has done so far.

If there are any particular dimensions of this projects that interest you, or if you can think of something that would be interesting to overlay on top, please don't hesitate to reach me at the email address below: