What Works Lab Library

This time of year fills many students with anxiety about what to do after they graduate from high school. For too long, students have heard that a four-year college degree is the only way to succeed. This is a false narrative, and it can set students up for failure. Career and technical education (CTE) provides learners of all ages with valuable skills to enter the workforce and should not be viewed as a “backup plan” but rather as a path to a high-paying, family-sustaining job. When a student graduates from a CTE program, they often have a diploma in one hand and often multiple job offers in the other.

Einstein believed that mentors are especially influential in a protégé’s intellectual development, yet the link between mentorship and protégé success remains a mystery. We marshaled genealogical data on nearly 40,000 scientists who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, or physics between 1960 and 2017 to investigate the relationship between mentorship and protégé achievement. In our data, we find groupings of mentors with similar records and reputations who attracted protégés of similar talents and expected levels of professional success. However, each grouping has an exception: One mentor has an additional hidden capability that can be mentored to their protégés. They display skill in creating and communicating prizewinning research. Because the mentor’s ability for creating and communicating celebrated research existed before the prize’s conferment, protégés of future prizewinning mentors can be uniquely exposed to mentorship for conducting celebrated research. Our models explain 34–44% of the variance in protégé success and reveals three main findings. First, mentorship strongly predicts protégé success across diverse disciplines. Mentorship is associated with a 2×-to-4× rise in a protégé’s likelihood of prizewinning, National Academy of Science (NAS) induction, or superstardom relative to matched protégés. Second, mentorship is significantly associated with an increase in the probability of protégés pioneering their own research topics and being midcareer late bloomers. Third, contrary to conventional thought, protégés do not succeed most by following their mentors’ research topics but by studying original topics and coauthoring no more than a small fraction of papers with their mentors.

We estimate the effects of federal pandemic-relief funding (ESSER III) for K12 schools on district-level student achievement growth in 2023. We rely on student test achievement data from over 5,000 school districts across 30 states. Our novel identification strategy exploits variation in ESSER attributable to its allocation rules and their relationship to Title I. We find that each $1,000 increase in ESSER per pupil funds led to statistically significant increases in district math scores of 0.008 standard deviations and similar but statistically insignificant increases in ELA scores. Our heterogeneity analysis suggests impacts were not even across district pre-pandemic spending levels, student race, or urbanicity. Our estimates provide some insight into how much investment may be needed for a full academic recovery from the pandemic: to recover losses remaining after 2023, we estimate schools would need to spend $9,000 to $13,000 per pupil.

We measure the effect of district use of federal pandemic relief during the 2022-23 school year for a sample of more than 5000 districts in 29 states. We rely on several plausibly exogenous sources of variation in federal grants: differences in state Title I funding formulas, estimation error in Census local area poverty rates and differences in eligibility for federal Title I and subsidized lunch eligibility. We find that each $1000 in spending per student was associated with a .0086 SD improvement in math and a .0049 SD improvement in reading. Both are consistent with a recent meta-analysis of spending impacts by Jackson and Mackevicius (2023). As a placebo test, we find no relationship between federal dollars that were not yet spent during the 2022-23 year. We also find similar results using synthetic control group methods to compare high-poverty districts with high and low amounts of federal aid, but with similar trends in achievement through 2022. Because the federal aid was targeted at higher poverty districts, we find the federal dollars not only contributed to the recovery, but also helped narrow the gaps in achievement which had widened during the pandemic.

Ever since the pandemic shut down schools in the spring of 2020, education researchers have pointed to tutoring as the most promising way to help kids catch up academically. Evidence from almost 100 studies was overwhelming for a particular kind of tutoring, called high-dosage tutoring, where students focus on either reading or math three to five times a week.

The COVID-19 pandemic devastated student achievement, with declines rivaling those after Hurricane Katrina. These losses widened achievement gaps between historically marginalized students and their peers. Three years later, achievement remains behind pre-pandemic levels for many students. This paper examines 2022-23 academic recovery efforts across eight districts, including tutoring, small group instruction, after-school, extended year, double-dose, digital learning, and expert teacher interventions. Across 22 math and reading interventions, most were delivered to fewer students and for less time than planned. We find positive effects for one tutoring program on math scores and two tutoring programs on reading scores, ranging from 0.22 to 0.33 SD. Each of these programs served a very small share of the district’s students and was unlikely to play a major role in district-wide academic recovery. Finally, we find that having an “expert” teacher with high evaluation scores as opposed to a non-expert teacher significantly improves student achievement by 0.06 SD in math and 0.11 SD in reading. While highlighting the promise of intensive academic interventions, our findings underscore the challenges districts face in scaling such interventions to match their recovery needs. The field needs better evidence regarding successful implementation of large-scale interventions.

The ESSER cliff is coming. Most districts and states that initiated high-impact tutoring using federal ESSER dollars are scrambling. Many believe they must eliminate or reduce the scope of their programs; but this is not the case. Here are six durable funding streams that could replace the ESSER dollars to help provide highly effective tutoring in new, cost-saving ways.

The once-a-century public health crisis we have just gone through also created a once-a-century crisis for public education. The average American student lost the equivalent of a half a year of learning, with larger losses still for the most disadvantaged students. Just a modest share of that learning loss has been remediated. Why haven’t we made more progress overcoming pandemic learning loss? What lessons does this suggest for how to make more progress moving forward?