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Education and Human Development

What are the effects of increasing private school choice vouchers on public school students? What is the role of social-emotional development in students’ lives? How do high school counselors work and understand their role? Which education interventions are most effective in terms of costs and achievement? These are just some of the issues that IPR education policy researchers address in their quest to create a larger pool of rigorous research and policy-relevant solutions for the pressing problems in education faced by teachers, students, parents, taxpayers, and policymakers.

A Message From Jonathan Guryan, Program Chair

Jonathan Guryan

Struggling schools, declining school funding, persistent achievement gaps, and recruiting and retaining effective teachers are just a few of the critical issues that school districts across the nation face every day. More rigorous research is needed to understand the issues facing schools and educators and to create effective solutions to address them. IPR’s Education Policy program groups fellows from a variety of disciplines and aligns with others, including those on Quantitative Methods.

Working Papers

Recently published articles and working papers in this program area include:

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Michael Strain. 2024. Employment and Labor Supply Responses to the Child Tax Credit Expansion: Theory and Evidence (WP-24-17).

Rebecca Seligman. 2024. Mothering and Mental Health Among Mexican American Mothers (WP-24-15).

Monica Bhatt, Jonathan Guryan, Salman Khan, Michael LaForest-Tucker, and Bhavya Mishra. 2024. Can Technology Facilitate Scale? Evidence From Randomized Evaluation of High Dosage Tutoring (WP-24-14).

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Faculty Experts

Faculty consider issues associated with education from different vantage points that include economics, sociology, psychology, biomedical sciences, and quantitative research methods.

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Events

There are no upcoming events at this time.

Policy Study: Linking Social-Emotional Learning to Long-Term Success

In a study published in Education Next, IPR labor economist Kirabo Jackson, IPR graduate research assistant Sebastián Kiguel, and their colleagues consider what role social-emotional development has in students’ lives. The researchers examine surveys of social-emotional development given to Chicago Public School students in combination with administrative and test-score data, focusing on over 55,500 students who were in ninth grade in 2011–17. They find that school improvement of students’ social-emotional growth has a greater effect on students’ outcomes than schools raising students’ test scores.

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