Recent Publications

Lu, A., & Williams, R. E. (2023). Contracting Whiteness: Charter Authorizing and the Erasure of Blackness in Southern Urban Spaces. Urban Education.

This study examines the linkages between charter school board composition, proposed school models, and authorization outcomes in two majority Black cities in the initial years post-state takeover. Findings illuminate how approved applications overlapped with the following factors: majority White boards with affiliations to elite reform networks or non-educational professional backgrounds and “No Excuses” models. Using concepts from The Racial Contract (Mills, 1997), this study evidences how application components work to socio-politically construct a proposed school as legible and show an underexplored mechanism by which power is consolidated during the authorization process in ways that limit local Black political power.

Bulkley, K., Lu, A., Meza Fernandez, K., & Gerry, A. (2023). Charter Authorizing, Applications, and the Needs of Historically Marginalized Students: A Cross State Analysis. Educational Policy.

Charter school authorizers shape which charter schools open, where they open, and who they serve. We draw on principal agent theory to investigate how the priorities and practices of nine authorizers intersected with charter school applications’ attention to the needs of historically marginalized students. Using data from interviews and applications, we find authorizers vary in orientations toward equity and the ways in which they signal that orientation to charter applicants. Our analysis suggests a robust relationship between authorizer mission and the content found in charter applications, demonstrating the influence of authorizing practices on the contents of charter school applications.

Bettinger, E. P., Lu, A., Matheny, K. T., & Kienzl, G. S. (2022). Unmet Need: Evaluating Pell as a Lever for Equitable Dual Enrollment Participation and Outcomes. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 44(4), 783–807.

Dual enrollment is an increasingly popular avenue for high school students to earn college credit. However, low-income students are underrepresented among dual enrollment participants. In this study, we use a difference-in-differences design to evaluate a unique federal pilot program that allowed high school students to access Pell Grants to fund their dual enrollment. Generally, we find a negative effect of the pilot program on dual enrollment participation, with no effect on subsequent college attendance. Our qualitative analysis suggests this initiative did not sufficiently meet students’ specific needs, required strong partnerships with high schools to ensure high school counselors informed students about the program, and involved substantial financial and administrative burden for participating institutions.