Dissertation • Journal Articles • Books and Book Chapters
Dissertations Chapters
When Pigs’ (Poops) Fly: Animal Waste Pond Closures and Student Outcomes in North Carolina
Brooks, C.D. and Cardwell J.
Manuscript in preparation
North Carolina has a complex recent history with pig farms. In the 1980’s the industry exploded as favorable legislation was passed that made it so pig farms could be built without permitting. This led to lots of pig farm construction in lower income areas of the state and meant pig farms could be adjacent to housing communities. Hog feces and other waste is stored in wet open-air lagoons where it decomposes, off gassing and releasing pollutants into the environment. This wet waste is also used by irrigations systems to aerially spray the waste as fertilizer, putting these particles in the air in spaces that can be quite close to residential or public areas. This project seeks to causally examine the impact that living in close proximity to these farms has on student outcomes. It is relevant both to the growing literature on the relationship between air pollution and student learning, and in environmental justice, as complaints and lawsuits against current hog waste storage practices have relied on associational data, but there has not yet been any causal demonstration of harm.
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
See ‘Publications’ page for details.
ESSER-ting Your Preferences: Examining school districts’ revealed preferences for addressing pandemic learning loss
Brooks, C. D.
Manuscript in preparation
In this study, I am examining how school districts proposed spending their federal pandemic relief funding from the ESSER III program. These funds were distributed with an explicit intention to address pandemic related learning loss, but the flexible nature of the funds means districts have almost complete leverage on how the dollars are actually spent. I am investigating whether there is identifiable and patterned heterogeneity in proposed spending that may predict uneven academic learning recovery that was enabled, but not intended, by the flexible nature of ESSER III.
Journal Articles
Is 2nd Grade the Zone of Instructional Development?
Cohen-Vogel, L., Brooks, C.D., Drake, T.A., Domina, T., Gragson, A., Little, M., Springer, M.G.
Manuscript in preparation for Fall 2023
In this mixed methods paper, we conducted interviews with principals to better understand the extent to which principals roster teachers strategically based on test score accountability. What surfaced was that principals discussed moving teachers they perceived as less effective to untested grade levels. My primary contribution was examining how teachers move across grades over time, and testing whether measures of teacher effectiveness predicted movement across grades. We find that there is significant evidence of an intentional sorting effect by principals.
Progression with Intent to Distribute: Do State Weighted School Funding Models Lead to Within-District Funding Progressivity?
Brooks, C.D.
Manuscript in development
A core aspect of my perspective on policy is that systemic problems require equally systemic solutions. In education, which engages with each level of the federalist structure of American polis, it is almost always the case that large problems, like unequal or inequitable access to educational resources, are due to related but separate problems at different levels of governance. This dissertation examines one such problem, related to the progressive school finance formulas. A recent trend in finance formulas is to use weighted student funding models, which modifies a per-pupil base funding allocation by student characteristics like being an English Learner, having a disability or living in a low-income household. The general idea is that the money follows high needs students; those schools which serve a greater proportion of students with higher than baseline need receive relatively more funding to ensure a comparable education is offered to all students. But when states adopt these funding models, they can only go so far as to allocate the weighted money at the district level, and in all cases there isn’t necessarily a guarantee that the money is distributed to schools within districts at the rates ‘intended’ by the statewide policy. This paper will examine the various combinations of weighting to see if policy intentions, conveyed through the state weighted funding amount, translates to actual weighted funding at the school level.
Money, Money, Money: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of School Spending on Student Outcomes
Brooks, C.D., Pham L.D., Nguyen, T.D., Springer, M.G.
Manuscript in development
Whether, and in what contexts, money matters for causally improving student outcomes are an important and ongoing debate in the academic literature. This paper takes a comprehensive and systematic approach to synthesizing the literature on school spending to help explore why different researchers and syntheses have drawn different conclusions on this topic in the past. This work is not only policy relevant, but also displays something I value in my research: building topical expertise in areas that I am interested in studying and translating complex and broad areas of research into well synthesized and understandable packages that are useful for both progressing the research field and which can serve as easy reference to policy stakeholders who want to better understand topics in which there are many nuances and disagreements. This ability is useful both in my research, and in developing the knowledge base to study disparate but related topics researching social policy by measuring impacts to student outcomes.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of the learning benefits of demographic matching between teachers and students
Lindsay, C.A., Brooks, C.D., and Kumar, J.M.
Manuscript in development
There have been a number of studies suggesting that students have better educational and behavioral outcomes when exposed to teachers of a congruent race or gender. These papers have significant implications for how the teacher workforce should be shaped, and on teacher effectiveness models which often do not interact complementarity between student and teacher assignment. In this study, we systematically synthesize the research on both student race and sex match, and offer meta-analytic estimates of the average effect size of student teacher race match with stronger external validity than any individual study.
Matching market methods for classroom rostering
Halpin P., Springer M.G., Brooks C.D., Springer, J., and Stuit D.
Manuscript in preparation
In this paper, we examine the methodological challenges of developing a matching algorithm to assign students to effective teachers in an equitable manner and secondarily maximizes overall student learning. The primary challenge is developing a matching model which accounts for student and teacher characteristics and predicts robust estimates of expected student growth by teacher using traditional regression techniques and machine learning, and then comparing these predicted values to counterfactual rosters in the many-to-one framework by which students are assigned to teachers.
Classroom Rostering Practices and Student Outcomes: A Simulation Study
Springer M.G., Halpin P., Brooks C.D., Cohen-Vogel L., Domina T.
Manuscript in preparation
Often nonwhite, economically disadvantaged, English language, and/or highly mobile learners are assigned to the least effective teachers within their schools. Building on the methodological paper above, the purpose of this study is to explore different approaches to classroom rostering and their relationship with student outcomes. We will estimate the differences in equitable access to effective teaching and overall learning when comparing the predicted gains of several different roster techniques, including randomization, business as usual, and by our research team’s Equitable Rostering Solutions algorithm. This will demonstrate the potential equity gains and overall achievement gains that could be made if the rostering process were better informed by the effectiveness data already collected by schools.
Books and Book Chapters
Will have updates soon!