Education
An Interactive Tool Helps School Districts Redesign Their Bus Schedules—and Get Kids a Little More Sleep
Yale SOM operations scholar Zhen Lian and her co-authors created an interactive tool that helped San Francisco reach consensus on school schedules, move start times later, and save millions of dollars in transportation costs.
How Superintendents Can Restore Public Trust in Schools
Despite challenges like the scorched-earth debates on curricula, Caitlin Sullivan ’13, co-founder of Leading Now, sees superintendents as uniquely positioned to cross lines of difference and find common ground.
Real-Time Placement Odds Can Smooth the School Choice Process
Some families going through the school placement process overestimate their chances of getting into their top choices, and fail to match at any school as a result. Warnings about the placement odds at top schools can dramatically reduce non-placements.
How the Philadelphia Schools Confronted Systemic Racism
William Hite, Philadelphia’s superintendent of schools, describes how the system sought to create an inclusive process for rooting racism out of its structures.
Century-Old Harvard Records Show How Social Connections Help the Elite
A study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Seth Zimmerman, drawing on a trove of archival student records, suggests that membership in exclusive clubs propelled students from the top prep schools to higher incomes, while good grades did little to lift other students into the top-earning tier.
Weakening Unions Can Lead to Gender Gap in Wages
In 2011, legislation in Wisconsin reduced the power of unions to negotiate teachers’ salaries. Within five years, male teachers started earning more than women did.
Leading Hartford Back to School
This week, students in the Hartford Public Schools, one of the largest districts in Connecticut, returned to the classroom for the first time since March. We talked to Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez about the challenges she has faced and the possibility of lasting change.
Training Girls for the Building Trades, Virtually
Demi Knight Clark, founder of She Built This City, describes how she remade a nonprofit that teaches hands-on buildings skills for a world forced to go virtual.
Equalizing School Spending Boosts Lifelong Income
School finance reforms that equalize spending across rich and poor neighborhoods improve the long-term economic outcomes of disadvantaged children.
Can Civics Education Repair a Failing Democracy?
Louise Dubé ’88 of the nonprofit iCivics argues that engagement in civic life requires skills that many schools no longer teach.
Does Performance-Based Pay Improve Teaching?
Yale SOM economist Barbara Biasi studied what actually happened when some school districts in Wisconsin started paying partly based on effectiveness.
