Deven Carlson
Biographic Data
| ID | 4136819 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deven Carlson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deven |
| FAMILY NAME | Carlson |
| SIGNATURE | CARLSON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oklahoma |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3406-7022 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 100 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Structuring Choice Policy, School Segregation and the Two-Staged School Choice Process
School choice is both an important tool for school desegregation policy and an enabler of racial segregation. In this paper, we used a two-stage model of complex decision making to illustrate the relationship between school choice policy structure and school segregation. Our analyses draw on data describing the choices available to kindergarteners entering the Wake County Public School System between 2000 and 2010. As it pursued school diversity …
Award Given by the Vernon Prize Committee for Volume 40 of Jpam
Measuring interest group agendas in regulatory proposals: A method and the case of US education policy
We introduce a new way to measure interest group agendas and demonstrate an approach to extending the CAP topic coding scheme to policy domains at lower levels of analysis. We use public comments on regulatory proposals in US education policy to examine the topics contained in policy arguments. We map the education policy space using a data set of 493 comments and 5315 hand-coded comment paragraphs. A unique measurement model accounts for group a…
The Kids on the Bus: The Academic Consequences of Diversity‐Driven School Reassignments
Many public school diversity efforts rely on reassigning students from one school to another. While opponents of such efforts articulate concerns about the consequences of reassignments for students' educational experiences, little evidence exists regarding these effects, particularly in contemporary policy contexts. Using an event study design, we leverage data from an innovative socioeconomic school desegregation plan to estimate the effects of…
Who Chooses DonorsChoose? Submission and Funding Patterns on the Nation’s Largest Education Crowdfunding Platform
Crowdfunding platforms direct millions of dollars annually to schools across the country, but the scholarly and policy communities have a limited understanding of their operations. In this paper we leverage data from DonorsChoose and the Common Core of Data to examine the characteristics of schools whose teachers do and do not submit projects to DonorsChoose, the subject areas and resource requests of these projects, and the characteristics of pr…
Partisan asymmetry in temporal stability of climate change beliefs
Interjurisdictional Competition and Policy Preferences of the Public
The federal structure of the US government provides states and localities with significant autonomy in many policy domains. Prior research provides evidence that jurisdictions compete with one another in several of these domains. This evidence, however, comes almost exclusively from the decisions of political elites and provides little insight into potential public responsiveness to interjurisdictional competition. In this paper, we leverage a st…
Socioeconomic-Based School Assignment Policy and Racial Segregation Levels: Evidence From the Wake County Public School System
In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment system that the Wake County Public School System employed throughout the 2000s to provide evidence on…
Monetizing Bowser: A Contingent Valuation of the Statistical Value of Dog Life
Households in the USA spend about $70 billion annually on pets. Dogs, the most common pet, can be found in nearly half of American households. An important shadow price in the analysis of policies affecting human mortality is the value of statistical life (VSL), which is imputed from how people make decisions involving tradeoffs between small mortality risks and other goods. The value of statistical dog life (VSDL) is also an important, but until…
Benefit-Cost Analysis, Policy Impacts, and Congressional Hearings
Methods for identifying relevant policy impacts for valuation in benefit-cost analyses (BCAs) have received relatively little attention in academic research, applied policy analyses, and guidance documents. In this paper, we develop a systematic, transparent, and replicable process that draws upon information contained in records of Congressional hearings to identify relevant policy impacts for valuation in a BCA. Our approach involves classifyin…
Should I Stay or Should I Go? Open Enrollment Decisions and Student Achievement Trajectories
Objective Analyze achievement trajectories of students who transfer out of their district of residence via Colorado's interdistrict open enrollment policy. Methods Drawing on a data set containing annual individual‐level records from the universe of students attending Colorado public schools between 2005–2006 and 2009–2010, we estimate the achievement trajectories of open enrollment participants via ordinary least squares (OLS) models containing …
Bayesian versus politically motivated reasoning in human perception of climate anomalies
In complex systems where humans and nature interact to produce joint outcomes, mitigation, adaptation, and resilience require that humans perceive feedback-signals of health and distress-from natural systems. In many instances, humans readily perceive feedback. In others, feedback is more difficult to perceive, so humans rely on experts, heuristics, biases, and/or identify confirming rationalities that may distort perceptions of feedback. This st…
Contingent Valuation and the Policymaking Process: An Application to Used Nuclear Fuel in the United States
Survey-based contingent valuation (CV) techniques are commonly used to value the potential effects of a policy change when market-based valuation of those effects is not possible. The results of these analyses are often intended to inform policy decisions, which are made within the context of formal policymaking institutions. These institutions are typically designed to reduce the large number of potential options for addressing any given policy …
The Effect of English Language Learner Reclassification on Student ACT Scores, High School Graduation, and Postsecondary Enrollment: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Wisconsin
The recent increase in the number of students classified as English language learners (ELLs) has focused significant attention on reclassification policy, which governs the process by which ELLs move toward, and are deemed to reach, full English proficiency. In this paper, we draw on a data set containing annual individual‐level records for every Wisconsin student ever classified as an ELL between the 2006–07 and 2012–13 school years to estimate …
Charter school closure and student achievement: Evidence from Ohio
Divided Government and Delay in the Legislative Process: Evidence From Important Bills, 1949-2010
Despite a robust history of studies examining legislative outputs, little is known about how divided government affects the policymaking process. This article examines these dynamics by analyzing the relationship between divided government and delay in the consideration of important legislation. We also introduce a more nuanced measure of divided government—the strength of the president’s party in Congress—that measures both the presence and magn…
Student Neighborhoods, Schools, and Test Score Growth: Evidence from Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Schools and neighborhoods are thought to be two of the most important contextual influences on student academic outcomes. Drawing on a unique data set that permits simultaneous estimation of neighborhood and school contributions to student test score gains, we analyze the distributions of these contributions to consider the relative importance of schools and neighborhoods in shaping student achievement outcomes. We also evaluate the sensitivity o…
Social Media and Severe Weather: Do Tweets Provide a Valid Indicator of Public Attention to Severe Weather Risk Communication
Effective communication about severe weather requires that providers of weather information disseminate accurate and timely messages and that the intended recipients (i.e., the population at risk) receive and react to these messages. This article contributes to extant research on the second half of this equation by introducing a “real time” measure of public attention to severe weather risk communication based on the growing stream of data that i…
School Choice and Educational Stratification
Recent growth in the number of school choice programs across the country has ignited debate on the stratifying effects of these programs. In the context of interdistrict open enrollment, this paper analyzes—both theoretically and empirically—how choice programs affect stratification levels through the mechanisms of (i) the relative characteristics of program participants and nonparticipants and (ii) the schooling choices of different groups of pr…
Third-Party Governance and Performance Measurement: A Case Study of Publicly Funded Private School Vouchers
This article considers the introduction of a performance measurement reform for private schools serving students who receive state-provided vouchers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Drawing on unique panel data collected both before and after the reform, we show that private sector performance increased significantly when outcomes were publicly reported. We frame these results in the context of third-party provision of public services and argue that our …
Long-term earnings and employment effects of housing voucher receipt
A Multistate District-Level Cluster Randomized Trial of the Impact of Data-Driven Reform on Reading and Mathematics Achievement
Analyzing mathematics and reading achievement outcomes from a district-level random assignment study fielded in over 500 schools within 59 school districts and seven states, the authors estimate the 1-year impacts of a data-driven reform initiative implemented by the Johns Hopkins Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education (CDDRE). CDDRE consultants work with districts to implement quarterly student benchmark assessments and provide district and …
The benefits and costs of the Section 8 housing subsidy program: A framework and estimates of first‐year effects
This paper provides estimates for a comprehensive set of social benefits and costs associated with the federal Housing Choice Voucher ( Section 8 ) program. The impact categories for which we provide empirical estimates include the value of the voucher to recipients; additional services and public benefits induced by voucher receipt; improvements in children's health, education, and criminal behaviors; the costs of voucher provision; the labor su…
Trends and Innovations in Public Policy Analysis
This essay identifies three notable advances that have influenced the field of public policy analysis in recent years: the move toward social experimentation, the use of meta‐analysis and Monte Carlo simulation in benefit‐cost analysis, and the rise of institutional actors that promote the practice and dissemination of high‐quality policy analysis. In addition to describing each of these innovations, this essay discusses how each of these advance…
Student Neighborhoods, Schools, and Test Score Growth: Evidence from Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Schools and neighborhoods are thought to be two of the most important contextual influences on student academic outcomes. Drawing on a unique data set that permits simultaneous estimation of neighborhood and school contributions to student test score gains, we analyze the distributions of these contributions to consider the relative importance of schools and neighborhoods in shaping student achievement outcomes. We also evaluate the sensitivity o…
The Effect of English Language Learner Reclassification on Student ACT Scores, High School Graduation, and Postsecondary Enrollment: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Wisconsin
The recent increase in the number of students classified as English language learners (ELLs) has focused significant attention on reclassification policy, which governs the process by which ELLs move toward, and are deemed to reach, full English proficiency. In this paper, we draw on a data set containing annual individual‐level records for every Wisconsin student ever classified as an ELL between the 2006–07 and 2012–13 school years to estimate …
Charter school closure and student achievement: Evidence from Ohio
The benefits and costs of the Section 8 housing subsidy program: A framework and estimates of first‐year effects
This paper provides estimates for a comprehensive set of social benefits and costs associated with the federal Housing Choice Voucher ( Section 8 ) program. The impact categories for which we provide empirical estimates include the value of the voucher to recipients; additional services and public benefits induced by voucher receipt; improvements in children's health, education, and criminal behaviors; the costs of voucher provision; the labor su…
Trends and Innovations in Public Policy Analysis
This essay identifies three notable advances that have influenced the field of public policy analysis in recent years: the move toward social experimentation, the use of meta‐analysis and Monte Carlo simulation in benefit‐cost analysis, and the rise of institutional actors that promote the practice and dissemination of high‐quality policy analysis. In addition to describing each of these innovations, this essay discusses how each of these advance…
The Kids on the Bus: The Academic Consequences of Diversity‐Driven School Reassignments
Many public school diversity efforts rely on reassigning students from one school to another. While opponents of such efforts articulate concerns about the consequences of reassignments for students' educational experiences, little evidence exists regarding these effects, particularly in contemporary policy contexts. Using an event study design, we leverage data from an innovative socioeconomic school desegregation plan to estimate the effects of…
Third-Party Governance and Performance Measurement: A Case Study of Publicly Funded Private School Vouchers
This article considers the introduction of a performance measurement reform for private schools serving students who receive state-provided vouchers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Drawing on unique panel data collected both before and after the reform, we show that private sector performance increased significantly when outcomes were publicly reported. We frame these results in the context of third-party provision of public services and argue that our …
School Choice and Educational Stratification
Recent growth in the number of school choice programs across the country has ignited debate on the stratifying effects of these programs. In the context of interdistrict open enrollment, this paper analyzes—both theoretically and empirically—how choice programs affect stratification levels through the mechanisms of (i) the relative characteristics of program participants and nonparticipants and (ii) the schooling choices of different groups of pr…
Long-term earnings and employment effects of housing voucher receipt
Socioeconomic-Based School Assignment Policy and Racial Segregation Levels: Evidence From the Wake County Public School System
In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment system that the Wake County Public School System employed throughout the 2000s to provide evidence on…
Divided Government and Delay in the Legislative Process: Evidence From Important Bills, 1949-2010
Despite a robust history of studies examining legislative outputs, little is known about how divided government affects the policymaking process. This article examines these dynamics by analyzing the relationship between divided government and delay in the consideration of important legislation. We also introduce a more nuanced measure of divided government—the strength of the president’s party in Congress—that measures both the presence and magn…
Monetizing Bowser: A Contingent Valuation of the Statistical Value of Dog Life
Households in the USA spend about $70 billion annually on pets. Dogs, the most common pet, can be found in nearly half of American households. An important shadow price in the analysis of policies affecting human mortality is the value of statistical life (VSL), which is imputed from how people make decisions involving tradeoffs between small mortality risks and other goods. The value of statistical dog life (VSDL) is also an important, but until…
Contingent Valuation and the Policymaking Process: An Application to Used Nuclear Fuel in the United States
Survey-based contingent valuation (CV) techniques are commonly used to value the potential effects of a policy change when market-based valuation of those effects is not possible. The results of these analyses are often intended to inform policy decisions, which are made within the context of formal policymaking institutions. These institutions are typically designed to reduce the large number of potential options for addressing any given policy …
A Multistate District-Level Cluster Randomized Trial of the Impact of Data-Driven Reform on Reading and Mathematics Achievement
Analyzing mathematics and reading achievement outcomes from a district-level random assignment study fielded in over 500 schools within 59 school districts and seven states, the authors estimate the 1-year impacts of a data-driven reform initiative implemented by the Johns Hopkins Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education (CDDRE). CDDRE consultants work with districts to implement quarterly student benchmark assessments and provide district and …
The benefits and costs of the Section 8 housing subsidy program: A framework and estimates of first‐year effects
This paper provides estimates for a comprehensive set of social benefits and costs associated with the federal Housing Choice Voucher ( Section 8 ) program. The impact categories for which we provide empirical estimates include the value of the voucher to recipients; additional services and public benefits induced by voucher receipt; improvements in children's health, education, and criminal behaviors; the costs of voucher provision; the labor su…
Trends and Innovations in Public Policy Analysis
This essay identifies three notable advances that have influenced the field of public policy analysis in recent years: the move toward social experimentation, the use of meta‐analysis and Monte Carlo simulation in benefit‐cost analysis, and the rise of institutional actors that promote the practice and dissemination of high‐quality policy analysis. In addition to describing each of these innovations, this essay discusses how each of these advance…
Long-term earnings and employment effects of housing voucher receipt
Social Media and Severe Weather: Do Tweets Provide a Valid Indicator of Public Attention to Severe Weather Risk Communication
Effective communication about severe weather requires that providers of weather information disseminate accurate and timely messages and that the intended recipients (i.e., the population at risk) receive and react to these messages. This article contributes to extant research on the second half of this equation by introducing a “real time” measure of public attention to severe weather risk communication based on the growing stream of data that i…
School Choice and Educational Stratification
Recent growth in the number of school choice programs across the country has ignited debate on the stratifying effects of these programs. In the context of interdistrict open enrollment, this paper analyzes—both theoretically and empirically—how choice programs affect stratification levels through the mechanisms of (i) the relative characteristics of program participants and nonparticipants and (ii) the schooling choices of different groups of pr…
Third-Party Governance and Performance Measurement: A Case Study of Publicly Funded Private School Vouchers
This article considers the introduction of a performance measurement reform for private schools serving students who receive state-provided vouchers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Drawing on unique panel data collected both before and after the reform, we show that private sector performance increased significantly when outcomes were publicly reported. We frame these results in the context of third-party provision of public services and argue that our …
Divided Government and Delay in the Legislative Process: Evidence From Important Bills, 1949-2010
Despite a robust history of studies examining legislative outputs, little is known about how divided government affects the policymaking process. This article examines these dynamics by analyzing the relationship between divided government and delay in the consideration of important legislation. We also introduce a more nuanced measure of divided government—the strength of the president’s party in Congress—that measures both the presence and magn…
Student Neighborhoods, Schools, and Test Score Growth: Evidence from Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Schools and neighborhoods are thought to be two of the most important contextual influences on student academic outcomes. Drawing on a unique data set that permits simultaneous estimation of neighborhood and school contributions to student test score gains, we analyze the distributions of these contributions to consider the relative importance of schools and neighborhoods in shaping student achievement outcomes. We also evaluate the sensitivity o…
Contingent Valuation and the Policymaking Process: An Application to Used Nuclear Fuel in the United States
Survey-based contingent valuation (CV) techniques are commonly used to value the potential effects of a policy change when market-based valuation of those effects is not possible. The results of these analyses are often intended to inform policy decisions, which are made within the context of formal policymaking institutions. These institutions are typically designed to reduce the large number of potential options for addressing any given policy …
The Effect of English Language Learner Reclassification on Student ACT Scores, High School Graduation, and Postsecondary Enrollment: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Wisconsin
The recent increase in the number of students classified as English language learners (ELLs) has focused significant attention on reclassification policy, which governs the process by which ELLs move toward, and are deemed to reach, full English proficiency. In this paper, we draw on a data set containing annual individual‐level records for every Wisconsin student ever classified as an ELL between the 2006–07 and 2012–13 school years to estimate …
Charter school closure and student achievement: Evidence from Ohio
Bayesian versus politically motivated reasoning in human perception of climate anomalies
In complex systems where humans and nature interact to produce joint outcomes, mitigation, adaptation, and resilience require that humans perceive feedback-signals of health and distress-from natural systems. In many instances, humans readily perceive feedback. In others, feedback is more difficult to perceive, so humans rely on experts, heuristics, biases, and/or identify confirming rationalities that may distort perceptions of feedback. This st…
Should I Stay or Should I Go? Open Enrollment Decisions and Student Achievement Trajectories
Objective Analyze achievement trajectories of students who transfer out of their district of residence via Colorado's interdistrict open enrollment policy. Methods Drawing on a data set containing annual individual‐level records from the universe of students attending Colorado public schools between 2005–2006 and 2009–2010, we estimate the achievement trajectories of open enrollment participants via ordinary least squares (OLS) models containing …
Monetizing Bowser: A Contingent Valuation of the Statistical Value of Dog Life
Households in the USA spend about $70 billion annually on pets. Dogs, the most common pet, can be found in nearly half of American households. An important shadow price in the analysis of policies affecting human mortality is the value of statistical life (VSL), which is imputed from how people make decisions involving tradeoffs between small mortality risks and other goods. The value of statistical dog life (VSDL) is also an important, but until…
Benefit-Cost Analysis, Policy Impacts, and Congressional Hearings
Methods for identifying relevant policy impacts for valuation in benefit-cost analyses (BCAs) have received relatively little attention in academic research, applied policy analyses, and guidance documents. In this paper, we develop a systematic, transparent, and replicable process that draws upon information contained in records of Congressional hearings to identify relevant policy impacts for valuation in a BCA. Our approach involves classifyin…
Partisan asymmetry in temporal stability of climate change beliefs
Interjurisdictional Competition and Policy Preferences of the Public
The federal structure of the US government provides states and localities with significant autonomy in many policy domains. Prior research provides evidence that jurisdictions compete with one another in several of these domains. This evidence, however, comes almost exclusively from the decisions of political elites and provides little insight into potential public responsiveness to interjurisdictional competition. In this paper, we leverage a st…
Socioeconomic-Based School Assignment Policy and Racial Segregation Levels: Evidence From the Wake County Public School System
In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment system that the Wake County Public School System employed throughout the 2000s to provide evidence on…
Measuring interest group agendas in regulatory proposals: A method and the case of US education policy
We introduce a new way to measure interest group agendas and demonstrate an approach to extending the CAP topic coding scheme to policy domains at lower levels of analysis. We use public comments on regulatory proposals in US education policy to examine the topics contained in policy arguments. We map the education policy space using a data set of 493 comments and 5315 hand-coded comment paragraphs. A unique measurement model accounts for group a…
The Kids on the Bus: The Academic Consequences of Diversity‐Driven School Reassignments
Many public school diversity efforts rely on reassigning students from one school to another. While opponents of such efforts articulate concerns about the consequences of reassignments for students' educational experiences, little evidence exists regarding these effects, particularly in contemporary policy contexts. Using an event study design, we leverage data from an innovative socioeconomic school desegregation plan to estimate the effects of…
Who Chooses DonorsChoose? Submission and Funding Patterns on the Nation’s Largest Education Crowdfunding Platform
Crowdfunding platforms direct millions of dollars annually to schools across the country, but the scholarly and policy communities have a limited understanding of their operations. In this paper we leverage data from DonorsChoose and the Common Core of Data to examine the characteristics of schools whose teachers do and do not submit projects to DonorsChoose, the subject areas and resource requests of these projects, and the characteristics of pr…
Award Given by the Vernon Prize Committee for Volume 40 of Jpam
Structuring Choice Policy, School Segregation and the Two-Staged School Choice Process
School choice is both an important tool for school desegregation policy and an enabler of racial segregation. In this paper, we used a two-stage model of complex decision making to illustrate the relationship between school choice policy structure and school segregation. Our analyses draw on data describing the choices available to kindergarteners entering the Wake County Public School System between 2000 and 2010. As it pursued school diversity …
Economics (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Psychology (10 works) · School Choice and Performance (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Public economics (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Mathematics education (7 works)