Journal Articles • Book Chapters • Technical Briefs and Manuscripts
Journal Articles
Creating Classes: A mixed-methods investigation of elementary school classroom assignment practices and their implications.
Brooks, C.D., Domina, T., Carson, C.E., Cohen-Vogel, L., Bastian, K.C., Springer, M.G
Manuscript under peer review
In this mixed methods study, we interviewed educational leaders to understand the practical and normative incentives for clustering students into classrooms by their descriptive and ascriptive characteristics, and quantitatively analyzed administrative data from the state of North Carolina to document how the roster construction processes within schools creates unequal access to effective teaching.
Black Teacher Displacement in the Post-Brown v. Board Era: A Review of Black Teachers’ Lawsuits as Responses to Integration Efforts
Lindsay, C.A. and Brooks, C.D.
Manuscript under peer review
Recent research on the impact that student-teacher race and sex congruence can have on student learning outcomes highlights the need for a more diverse teacher workforce. This paper examines one potential reason why relatively few Black persons are in the teacher workforce today. Building on work in recent decades by critical race scholars on the lasting impact of Brown v Board of Education, I developed a legal narrative of what happened to the Black teacher workforce when Black students were brought into the White educational system. We show that very little legal protection was offered to Black teachers during integration, and by the time some legal standards were established in the courts, the mass firing of Black teachers in the intervening years had already greatly undermined the number of Black teachers, and we suggest shaped a disproportionately White teacher labor force that continues to this day.
The Effect of Participation in a Performance Pay Program on Teacher Opinions toward Performance Pay in Rural China
Chang, F., Brooks C. D., Springer M. G., Liu, H., Shi Y.
Education Economics, 2021
This project was a collaboration with scholars from the Center for Experimental Economics in Education at Shaanxi Normal University in China. Having conducted analyses on the achievement impacts of a performance pay randomized control trial in China, our coauthors wanted to examine how participation in the program may have changed teacher attitudes towards performance pay, since prior research suggested that program success was in-part dependent on teacher attitudes towards the program. Thus my role was primarily to work with the team to examine the various data from the experiment and situate these findings in the broader literature that present an accurate depiction of the change in teacher attitudes throughout the trial, along with being the primary writer of the manuscript.
Professor Smith goes to Washington: Education interest group activity in Congress, 1998 – 2017
Marsicano, C. R., & Brooks, C. D.
Educational Researcher, 2020
This project nicely bridged political science and educational policy, examining the import of the understudied topic of educational lobbying expenditures. I was responsible for data collection and visualization on this project and am proud that my work on this highlights the power of descriptive research to present complex systems in a rich but succinct manner.
Book Chapters
Identifying, Establishing, and Distributing the Economic Value of the Classroom Teacher
Brooks, C. D. and Springer, M.G.
In Economics of Equity Programs in America’s Pre-K-12 Education System, 2023
This chapter was an opportunity to relay my perspective on the value of teachers and the pressing issues in compensation, labor supply, and distributions, and present the most current literature on these topics in a cohesive manner for a broader audience. Education policy research has largely on the market incentives for improving the quality of the teacher labor pool overall. But this focus largely ignores that fact that effective teachers tend to be sorted away from non-White and low income students, and that this unequal distribution perpetuates educational opportunity gaps. I was happy to use this chapter as a platform to emphasize the need for equity driven research in educational policy analysis.
Disproportional Assignment: The Need for Strategic, Equity-forward Student-Teacher Classroom Rostering, 2022
Springer, M.G., Halpin, P., Springer, J.A., Stuit, D.A. Cohen-Vogel, L., Brooks, C. D. & Powell, J.M.
in
Building on the theme of equity, this chapter investigates the extent to which non-White, low income, and lower performing students are on average less likely to be assigned to the effective teachers within their school. A throughline through much of my work is that teachers matter for student educational opportunity, and so disrupting the inequitable distribution of teachers to students is important for closing persistent learning gaps. This work examines a small piece of the overall problem, within-school teacher-student sorting, and lays out the need for better class rostering practices that promote learning equality by preventing consecutive years of less effective instruction. Much of my ongoing work are on different aspects of this topic, with the ultimate goal of developing a software-based solution that leverages school data to automatically develop class rosters that are more equitable. My work for this chapter was to investigate what root causes of inequitable sorting of students to teachers and think of how any solution can satisfy or circumvent these various influences on the rostering process for the sake of equal educational opportunity.
Delaware
Brooks, C. D.
in Funding Public Schools in the United States and Indian Country, 2024.
I was approached to write this book chapter on Delaware’s school finance system because of prior work I did on a school finance lawsuit in the state of Delaware. Delaware’s school finance system is relatively unique and supplements a main funding model with many non-formula funding systems. In the court case, plaintiffs argued that the main funding model lacked explicitly weighted funding for some students with higher educational need, like English learning students and low-income students, and this was leading to inadequate educational opportunity. They argued that the system should be replaced with a weighted student funding model, which modifies a per-pupil spending allocation by various categories. However, it was shown that even though the Delaware funding model was not weighting for these categories, the per-pupil expenditure was nonetheless progressive for these groups, due to the numerous non-formula funding programs the state also had. (Ultimately this case was settled with the state agreeing to invest much more heavily in these non-formula programs that benefit students with high educational need, which is great!). The work on the case and this chapter ultimately taught me that even though weighted funding is the trendy model for creating progressive school funding, other more esoteric funding models can nonetheless create good outcomes, a fact that inspired one of my dissertation chapters on the efficacy of progressive funding models.
Evaluating teacher effectiveness: a review of historical developments and current trends
Brooks, C. D., & Springer, M. G. (2022)
in The Routledge Handbook of the Economics of Education
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There is a need for deeper discussion of what policy stakeholders are implicitly valuing when constructing educational policy. I was able to use this chapter to examine what is meant by ‘teacher effectiveness’ and what policy values are demonstrated in the way this term is operationalized. I then used the past decade of research on teacher evaluation to demystify what the literature says regarding new and traditional means of teacher evaluation. A few months after publication, I met with a researcher at a non-profit who was seeking advice on their work with a state to develop a new compensation structure based on teacher ability to raise student test scores. Even as someone working fulltime in this space, they were confused about what factors about a teacher actually predict student learning, and I was happy to be able to reference my work as a way to critically examine how value was thought of in this policy process, and better understand the nuances of the current literature. It was exciting to see my work be useful as a resource to help influence real policy action.
Technical Briefs and Manuscripts
Details coming soon. See CV.