Charters in both cities now receive much more revenue per pupil than they otherwise would, but the bill failed to close the gap. Enrollment declines were large enough for districts per pupil revenues to spike, and the mechanics of the fix means that MO taxpayers are footing the bill to close it.

Two things to know about this gap: (1) It affected a large number of students since charters in each city have about half of public school enrollments. (2) The gap remains when we adjust for shares of low income students, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities.

The fix, passed as HB 1552 of 2022, sought to address a long-standing and quickly growing revenue gap between charters and traditional public schools in Kansas City and St. Louis. By 2021-22, charters received about 30% less in total revenue than their TPS counterparts.

In 2022, Missouri changed its school funding formula to equalize revenues between charter and traditional public schools In a new report at Fordham, Collin Hitt, David Griffith, & I document the fiscal effects The impact was far greater than lawmakers expected fordhaminstitute.org/national/res...

A few thoughts from my work and favorite papers over the last few years: Teacher turnover did not increase everywhere. State averages of turnover did. In Arkansas, about as many districts saw a decrease in turnover as saw an increase during/post-COVID.

This is Jack. Jack looks a lot like a fox. Coincidentally, we live in a neighborhood called Fox Point. So I'm running an election to figure out who the official Fox of Fox Point is. Check it out (and vote for Jack!!): foxpointfox.com?fox=5d985f9a...

Effects increase with grade level. While there is near-zero effect in Pre-K through 3rd grade, 5th grade+ students are 3-6pp more likely to be absent following the inauguration. Older students have more agency over their own attendance and possibly face more direct personal risk.

Importantly, the effect isn't driven by spikes *around* specific raids or arrests in the local community. It's a *persistent* elevation across the entire post-inauguration period.

NEW PAPER: We study the effects of immigration policy on student attendance in 2025. Students born outside the U.S. were 2.2pp more likely to be absent after Jan 2025 (a 37% increase). That's ~2 extra missed days per semester. LINK: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1453 @annenberginstitute.bsky.social

Although I can't prove it formally, the two functions might be equivalent if you allow probability to exist in the complex plane/be imaginary.

Rather, it appears as if some combination of policies is affecting enrollment for students we would expect to be most impacted by immigration policy.

But I don't think this can be causally attributed to raids. Take, for example, enrollments in RI schools. This year, they saw the second largest enrollment decrease in nearly 15 years despite having no raids and a (relatively) low number of high profile arrests.

For gov. spending, it can be hard to understand what this actually means. With some generous rounding, and assuming all savings are passed onto taxpayers, this move will allow us all to buy an additional~8g of rice (see photo) per year. Is that a lot? Depends on how much rice you already consume!

At 1:30pm, Acosta will be sharing our work looking at the effects of immigration enforcement on student attendance. Through our partnership with a New England school district and some community orgs, we have some terrific data that allows us to contribute some novel findings. (St. Gallen 2)

At AEFP and looking for some Thursday presentations? At 10am I'll be presenting some work with a terrific group of coauthors looking at how researchers can *responsibly* use LLMs in qual (or qual adjacent) research... (Vevey 4)

"in this paper, we estimate returns to researcher productivity from generative AI by exploiting exogenous variation in service uptime and submission deadlines"

What do we find? Using a clever triple-DiD identification strategy, we estimate a 2pp increase in retention with the greatest increases among teachers receiving the largest raises. This occurs because teachers receiving raises are less likely to move districts, exit the workforce, or retire.

What happens when you shrink salary differences between districts, increase beginning teacher pay by over $10,000, and compress salary schedules? @gzamarro.bsky.social, @jbmcgee.bsky.social, @taylornwilson.bsky.social, Miranda Vernon, and I find out in our new CALDER working paper: bit.ly/4l4b5hO

Pupdate

I think I'll be staying home for the next few days...

What could this mysterious (yet appealing) figure represent? Two ways to find out Read our updated working paper (caldercenter.org/publications...) - OR - See it explained at the CALDER conference in just 11 days (caldercenter.org/events/17th-...) Pr(Bad Jokes) is much higher at the conference!

I'm all for casual identification but will accept some things that are self evidently true at face value. For example:

Fans of value added when they read this paper: edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1395

Not sure why one of my students asked me if I was doing alright after this lecture

New "don't mistake correlation for causation" example is about to drop:

As a side note, props to this reporter for a very astute observation about the internal validity of a study.

This highlights an information problem - districts think the 4DSW will help them, and so they adopt the calendar. Leaders may then over-attribute regular changes in the labor market to be benefits from the 4DSW. So what's our recommendation for rural schools? I think this participant said it best:

When we look at districts in MO, however, we see essentially no evidence that 4DSWs have a significant impact on teacher recruitment or retention. The point estimates are so small, in fact, that if taken at face value, would correspond to (on average) < 1 teacher retained per district per year.

We conduct a series of semi-structured interviews to better understand districts' motivations for adopting the 4DSW. Consistent with much of the media coverage surrounding this topic, staying competitive in the teacher labor market was a major driver of adoption.

From small positives in AR to nulls in CO and negative impacts in OR, the 4DSW doesn't seem to help recruit and retain teachers. This is especially surprising given the rapid growth in 4DSWs recently. In Missouri, where this study takes place, growth in 4DSWs has been rapid since the pandemic