Recent Publications
Recent Publications
Bleiberg, J., Robinson, C., Bennett, E., Loeb, S. (2025). Effect of Tutor-Student Demographic Matching. American Education Research Journal. (2025).
State takeover of school districts—a form of political centralization that shifts decision-making power from locally elected leaders to the state—has increased in recent years, often with the purported goal of improving district financial condition. Takeover has affected millions of students throughout the U.S. since the first takeover in 1988 and is most common in larger districts and communities serving large shares of low-income students and students of color. While previous research finds takeovers do not benefit student academic achievement on average, we investigate whether takeovers achieve their goal of improving financial outcomes. Using an event study approach, we find takeovers from 1990 to 2019 increased annual school spending by roughly $2,000 per pupil after five years, on average, leading to improvements in financial condition. Increased funding came primarily from state sources and funded districts’ legacy costs. However, takeover did not affect spending for districts with majority-Black student populations—which are disproportionately targeted for takeover—adding to a growing literature suggesting that takeover unequally affects majority-Black communities.
Lyon, M., Bleiberg, J., & Schueler, B., (2025). How State Takeovers of School Districts Affect Education Finance, 1990 to 2019. Education Finance and Policy.
Persistent gender disparities in STEM fields, even when young girls perform as well in STEM in school as boys, highlight the potential importance of preconceived views of STEM work in these difference and the potential need for role models to upend these views. In this study, we investigate whether female math tutors positively influence girls’ STEM interest, attendance, and math performance. We randomly assigned 422 ninth grade students taking Algebra 1 in an urban New England school district to either same-gender or opposite-gender tutors. Girls paired with female tutors reported significantly higher STEM interest (0.73 SD) compared to those assigned to male tutors and were more likely to pass the course with a C- or better (3.9 percentage points). We find no evidence that students’ attendance patterns systematically differed based on their tutors’ gender. The effects appear stronger for students working with tutors in-person, as opposed to virtually, and during the school day, as opposed to after school. As the first experimental study of the impact of the tutor-student gender match, the research provides evidence that pairing girls with female tutors in school can enhance girls' STEM self-concept and academic performance.
Bleiberg, J., Harbatkin, E., Brunner, E., Kraft, & M., Springer, M., (2025). The Effect of Teacher Taking Teacher Evaluation to Scale: The Effect of State Reforms on Achievement and Attainment. Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics.
Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting their staggered implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 0.017 standard deviations for achievement and 1.2 percentage points for high school graduation and college enrollment. We highlight five factors that likely limited the efficacy of teacher evaluation at scale: political opposition, decentralization, capacity constraints, limited generalizability, and the absence of compensating wages.
Bleiberg, J., & Kraft, M., (2022) Changes in the K-12 Education Labor Market During COVID-19: What Jobs Were Lost, Recovered and Why? Education Finance and Policy. https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00391
The COVID-19 pandemic upended the U.S. education system in ways that dramatically affected the jobs of K–12 employees. However, there remains considerable uncertainty about the nature and degree of staffing challenges during the pandemic. We draw on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and State Education Agencies (SEA) to describe patterns in K–12 education employment and to highlight the limitations of available data. Data from the BLS suggest overall employment in the K–12 labor market declined by 9 percent at the onset of the pandemic and remained well below pre-pandemic levels more than two years later. SEA data suggest that teachers did not leave the profession en masse as many predicted, with turnover decreasing in the summer of 2020 and then increasing modestly in 2021 back to pre-pandemic levels. We explore possible explanations for these patterns including weak hiring through the summer of 2020 and high attrition among K–12 instructional support and non-instructional staff. State vacancy data also suggest that schools faced substantial challenges filling open positions during the 2021–22 academic year. Our analyses illustrate the imperative to build nationally representative, detailed, and timely data systems on the K–12 education labor market to better inform policy.