As global policy makers and school leaders look for ways to improve student performance, financial incentives programs for teachers have become increasingly popular. This article describes a school-based randomized trial in over 200 New York City public schools designed to better understand the impact of teacher incentives. I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find evidence that these incentives change student or teacher behavior. If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools. The article concludes with a speculative discussion of theories to explain these stark results.

This study examines the impact on student achievement of implementing a bundle of best practices from high-performing charter schools into low-performing, traditional public schools in Houston, Texas, using a school-level randomized field experiment and quasi-experimental comparisons. The five practices in the bundle are increased instructional time, more effective teachers and administrators, high-dosage tutoring, data-driven instruction, and a culture of high expectations. The findings show that injecting best practices from charter schools into traditional Houston public schools significantly increases student math achievement in treated elementary and secondary schools—by 0.15 to 0.18 standard deviations a year—and has little effect on reading achievement. Similar bundles of practices are found to significantly raise math achievement in analyses for public schools in a field experiment in Denver and program in Chicago.

We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes in Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and 4-year college enrollment but have a statistically insignificant impact on earnings, although the coefficient is almost identical to what one would expect given the correlation between test scores and wages. Other types of charter schools decrease test scores, 4-year college enrollment, and earnings, and surprisingly the decrease in wages is more negative than one would anticipate.

Science makes progress with rational debate, disagreement, and discussion. In that vein, I am grateful to the authors of the comment, Steven Durlauf and James Heckman, for engaging in one of the most important social issues of our time. Their comment can be synthesized into three points. First, Durlauf and Heckman (2020) believe that we make claims about discrimination, or the absence thereof, when no such conclusions using a direct regression approach are justified. Second, they describe issues with the endogeneity of police-civilian contacts and suggest modeling those interactions. And, third, they express skepticism of any analysis that relies on police narratives regarding interactions with civilians. Below, I respond to each of these in turn. Here is a brief summary. I disagree with their first point—we went through painstaking effort to belabor what our analysis can and cannot teach us about race and policing. Weuse the term “racial differences”114 times in lieuof themoreprescriptive wording—“racial discrimination.”Weuse the phrase “conditional on an interaction” 20 times throughout the paper and explicitly note at the outset—in the fifth paragraph—that if we do not use this phrase, it is implied. I am not sure howmanymore ways we would have needed to caveat our results to satisfy the authors. I agree with their second point, theoretically—that is why the section immediately following the data description is titled “A Note on Potential Selection into Police Data Sets”—but I am perplexed as to why they claim that our sample is “based on ‘stops.’” The truth is that the vast majority of the data they are referring to are gleaned from 911 calls for service in which a civilian requests police presence, not from police lurking to harass civilians. I agree that police shootings that begin with police stopping a civilian and that interaction escalating and becoming deadly are deeply

This study examines the impact on student achievement of high-dosage reading tutoring for middle school students in New York City public schools, using a school-level randomized field experiment. Across 3 years, schools offered at least 130 hours of four-on-one tutoring based on a guided reading model. At the mean, tutoring had a positive and significant effect on school attendance, a positive but insignificant effect on English language arts (ELA) state test scores, and no effect on math state test scores. For black students, our treatment increased attendance by 2.0 percentage points and ELA scores by 0.09 standard deviations per year.

In this article, we analyze the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, those who joined it, and its social and political impact by combining a wide range of archival data sources with data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S censuses. We find that individuals who joined the Klan in some cities were more educated and more likely to hold professional jobs than the typical American. Surprisingly, we find little evidence that the Klan had an effect on black or foreign-born residential mobility or vote totals. Rather than a terrorist organization, the 1920s Klan is best described as social organization with a very successful multilevel marketing structure fueled by an army of highly incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand.

This paper formalizes a widely discussed peer eect entitled 'acting white'. 'Acting White'is modeled as a two audience signaling quandary: signals that induce high wages can be signals that induce peer group rejection. Without peer eects, equilibria involve all ability types choosing dierent levels of education. 'Acting White'alters the equilibrium dramatically: the (possibly empty) set of lowest ability individuals and the set of highest ability individuals continue to reveal their type through investments in education; ability types in the middle interval pool on a common education level. Only those in the lower intervals are accepted by the group. The model's predictions …t many stylized facts in the anthropology and sociology literatures regarding social interactions among minority group members.

In previous research, a substantial gap in test scores between white and black students persists, even after controlling for a wide range of observable characteristics. Using a newly available data set (the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study), we demonstrate that in stark contrast to earlier studies, the black-white test score gap among incoming kindergartners disappears when we control for a small number of covariates. Real gains by black children in recent cohorts appear to play an important role in explaining the differences between our findings and earlier research. The availability of better covariates also contributes. Over the first two years of school, however, blacks lose substantial ground relative to other races. There is suggestive evidence that differences in school quality may be an important part of the explanation. None of the other hypotheses we test to explain why blacks are losing ground receive any empirical backing.

Using survey data from the Promise Academy in the Harlem Children’s Zone, we estimate the effects of high-performing charter schools on human capital, risky behaviors, and health outcomes. Six years after the random admissions lottery, youths offered admission to the Promise Academy middle school score 0.279 (0.073) standard deviations higher on academic achievement outcomes, 0.067 (0.076) standard deviations higher on an index of academic attainment, and 0.313 (0.091) standard deviations higher on a measure of on-time benchmarks. Females are 10.1 percentage points less likely to be pregnant as teenagers, and males are 4.4 percentage points less likely to be incarcerated.

This paper reviews the evidence on the efficacy of neighborhood and school interventions in improving the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. We focus on studies exploiting exogenous sources of variation in neighborhoods and schools and which examine at least medium-term outcomes. Higher-quality neighborhoods improve family safety, adult subjective well-being and health, and girls' mental health. But they have no detectable impact on youth human capital, labor market outcomes, or risky behaviors. In contrast, higher-quality schools can improve children's academic achievement and can have longer-term positive impacts of increasing educational attainment and earnings and reducing incarceration and teen pregnancy.