Douglas N Harris
Biographic Data
| ID | 4178630 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Douglas N Harris |
| GIVEN NAMES | Douglas N |
| FAMILY NAME | Harris |
| SIGNATURE | HARRIS D N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tulane University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3605-7132 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 110 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Choice of Policy Comparisons and Relevant Evidence and Approach to Selection Bias Are Keys to the Debate
Standard Empirical Policy Analysis Does Not Support Universal Vouchers/ESAs
The effects of charter school entry on the supply of teachers from university-based education programs
Research on charter schools tends to focus on direct and immediate effects on student outcomes. However, there may be unintended indirect effects on, for example, the teacher labor market. Charter schools tend to hire teachers with fewer traditional teaching credentials, which may reduce the equilibrium quantity of teachers who have traditional credentials and seek to make teaching a career. We test whether charter entry reduces the supply of uni…
The Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Educational Attainment
We study the effects of the COVID pandemic on educational attainment. By 2022, entry into two-year colleges was 21 percent lower than before the pandemic, with larger declines in Black- and Hispanic-majority colleges. Four-year college entry declined by only 6 percent and then rebounded 4 percent. High school graduation reached an all-time high in 2022. To explain these patterns, we undertook an interrupted time series design. Lower numbers of CO…
How Free Market Logic Fails in Schooling—And What It Means for the Role of Government
Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This article broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, although prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I provide a more comprehensive list. Second, with an up-to-date literature review, I show that all of these…
The effects of performance-based school closure and restart on student performance
We study the effects of closing and restarting low-performing schools as charter schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Using matched difference-in-differences identification with students in Louisiana, we estimate effects for the students who attended the treated schools at the time of treatment. We find positive and precise effects of closure/restart on elementary/middle school test scores, but no clear effects on high school graduation or col…
From Central Office to Portfolio Manager in Three Cities: Responding to the Principal-Agent Problem
A number of districts are moving toward a portfolio management model, in which central offices act as “portfolio managers” (PMs) that oversee—but may not actively manage—publicly funded schools. Using principal-agent theory, with its focus on goal alignment and the use of incentives, we explore how PMs operated in ways distinct from traditional district offices in Denver, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. We consider how PMs identify the goals of mul…
The Process and Politics of Educational Governance Change in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Denver
In recent years, some U.S. school districts have shifted away from direct management of schools, toward systems in which some or all schools operate under enhanced autonomy, accountability, and parental choice. Yet dynamics driving these changes are understudied, and there are few comparative studies of system-level governance shifts. To address these gaps, we use extensive qualitative data to analyze change in Los Angeles, Denver, and New Orlean…
Curriculum Reform in The Common Core Era: Evaluating Elementary Math Textbooks Across Six U.S. States
Can a school or district improve student achievement simply by switching to a higher‐quality textbook or curriculum? We conducted the first multi‐textbook, multi‐state effort to estimate textbook efficacy following widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated changes in the textbook market. Pooling textbook adoption and student test score data across six geographically and demographically diverse U.S. states, we fo…
The Impact of Government Contracting Out on Spending: The Case of Public Education in New Orleans
In this study, we start with developing a theoretical framework incorporating theories from the contracting literature and adapt them to the unusual case of nonprofit charter schools, which yields several seemingly novel theoretical insights. In contrast to earlier studies, we use a quasi-experimental research design, the synthetic control group approach, to test the impact of contracting on spending for public schooling in New Orleans. Using det…
Choosing the Leader: Leadership Elections in the U.S. House of Representatives
How are congressional party leaders chosen? In the first comprehensive study since Robert Peabody's classic Leadership in Congress , this book draws on newly collected data about U.S. House members who have sought leadership positions from the 1960s to the present—data including whip tallies, public and private vote commitments, interviews, and media accounts—to provide new insights into how the selection process truly works. Elections for congre…
The Push and Pull of School Performance: Evidence from Student Mobility in New Orleans
We investigate student mobility in a choice-based system that has gone to scale, New Orleans, to gain insight into an underlying improvement mechanism of choice-based reform and its potential equity-related consequences. In contrast to typical analyses of mobility, this study distinguishes incumbent school characteristics that can cause students to search for a new school ("push" factors) from those features that can draw families to a new school…
Teachers’ Perspectives on the Learning and Work Environments Under the New Orleans School Reforms
New Orleans schools experienced drastic reforms after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. To examine teachers’ perspectives on these reforms, we surveyed 323 teachers who taught in New Orleans public schools before 2005 and in 2013–2014. Teachers directly compared the learning and work environments and student and teacher outcomes of their current schools to those of their pre-Katrina schools. Returning teachers perceived significant and generally positiv…
Reducing Income Inequality in Educational Attainment: Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Financial Aid on College Completion
Income inequality in educational attainment is a long-standing concern, and disparities in college completion have grown over time. Need-based financial aid is commonly used to promote equality in college outcomes, but its effectiveness has not been established, and some are calling it into question. A randomized experiment is used to estimate the impact of a private need-based grant program on college persistence and degree completion among stud…
How Can Decentralized Systems Solve System-Level Problems? An Analysis of Market-Driven New Orleans School Reforms
One of the biggest changes in New Orleans after Katrina was observed in the public school system. In this article, we describe the massive overhaul of the public school system in New Orleans post-Katrina and examine the types of problems that this type of decentralized market-oriented system will be most likely to solve as well as those it may struggle with. As examples, we use problems facing New Orleans public schools, namely, student disciplin…
How Teacher Evaluation Methods Matter for Accountability: A Comparative Analysis of Teacher Effectiveness Ratings by Principals and Teacher Value-Added Measures
Policymakers are revolutionizing teacher evaluation by attaching greater stakes to student test scores and observation-based teacher effectiveness measures, but relatively little is known about why they often differ so much. Quantitative analysis of thirty schools suggests that teacher value-added measures and informal principal evaluations are positively, but weakly, correlated. Qualitative analysis suggests that some principals give high value-…
Teacher training, teacher quality and student achievement
How Principals “Bridge and Buffer” the New Demands of Teacher Quality and Accountability: A Mixed‐Methods Analysis of Teacher Hiring
In this mixed‐methods study, we examine the degree to which district‐ and building‐level administrators accommodate teacher‐quality and test‐based accountability policies in their hiring practices. We find that administrators negotiated local hiring goals with characteristics emphasized by federal and state teacher‐quality policies, such as knowledge of the subject and teaching skills. While district administrators and principals largely “bridged…
Response to Heather C. Hill
Teacher value‐added: Don't end the search before it starts
The effects of NBPTS‐certified teachers on student achievement
In this study, we consider the efficacy of a relatively new and widely accepted certification system for teachers established by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). We utilize an extensive database covering the universe of teachers and students in Florida for a four‐year span to determine the relationship between NBPTS certification and the impact of teachers on student test scores from both low‐stakes and high‐stakes …
High‐Flying Schools, Student Disadvantage, and the Logic of NCLB
In debates about accountability, advocates often point to individual “high‐flying” schools that achieve high test scores despite serving disadvantaged populations. Using a near‐census of U.S. public schools, this new analysis considers the likelihood that schools become high flyers. The results suggest that of the more than 60,000 schools considered, low‐poverty schools are 22 times more likely to reach consistently high academic achievement comp…
Accountability, Standards, and the Growing Achievement Gap: Lessons from the Past Half‐Century
The rise of accountability policies during the early 1990s coincided with an increase in the achievement gap between white and minority students, reversing decades of steady improvement in outcome equity. This article explores the policies that helped to reduce the achievement gap before 1990, the effects of the subsequent shift toward accountability, and what can be learned from past successes to guide the future development of accountability sy…
Education and the Economy Revisited: How Schools Matter
A Nation at Risk (NAR; National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) had a tremendous impact on what schools do and has since spawned other reforms that attest to the report's ongoing influence. Coming in the wake of a decade of economic stagnation and import pressures from overseas producers, the authors of NAR blamed these problems on schools. In this article, we show that there was little justification for this conclusion, then or now.…
Reducing Income Inequality in Educational Attainment: Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Financial Aid on College Completion
Income inequality in educational attainment is a long-standing concern, and disparities in college completion have grown over time. Need-based financial aid is commonly used to promote equality in college outcomes, but its effectiveness has not been established, and some are calling it into question. A randomized experiment is used to estimate the impact of a private need-based grant program on college persistence and degree completion among stud…
Accountability, Standards, and the Growing Achievement Gap: Lessons from the Past Half‐Century
The rise of accountability policies during the early 1990s coincided with an increase in the achievement gap between white and minority students, reversing decades of steady improvement in outcome equity. This article explores the policies that helped to reduce the achievement gap before 1990, the effects of the subsequent shift toward accountability, and what can be learned from past successes to guide the future development of accountability sy…
How Teacher Evaluation Methods Matter for Accountability: A Comparative Analysis of Teacher Effectiveness Ratings by Principals and Teacher Value-Added Measures
Policymakers are revolutionizing teacher evaluation by attaching greater stakes to student test scores and observation-based teacher effectiveness measures, but relatively little is known about why they often differ so much. Quantitative analysis of thirty schools suggests that teacher value-added measures and informal principal evaluations are positively, but weakly, correlated. Qualitative analysis suggests that some principals give high value-…
The effects of NBPTS‐certified teachers on student achievement
In this study, we consider the efficacy of a relatively new and widely accepted certification system for teachers established by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). We utilize an extensive database covering the universe of teachers and students in Florida for a four‐year span to determine the relationship between NBPTS certification and the impact of teachers on student test scores from both low‐stakes and high‐stakes …
The Process and Politics of Educational Governance Change in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Denver
In recent years, some U.S. school districts have shifted away from direct management of schools, toward systems in which some or all schools operate under enhanced autonomy, accountability, and parental choice. Yet dynamics driving these changes are understudied, and there are few comparative studies of system-level governance shifts. To address these gaps, we use extensive qualitative data to analyze change in Los Angeles, Denver, and New Orlean…
The Impact of Government Contracting Out on Spending: The Case of Public Education in New Orleans
In this study, we start with developing a theoretical framework incorporating theories from the contracting literature and adapt them to the unusual case of nonprofit charter schools, which yields several seemingly novel theoretical insights. In contrast to earlier studies, we use a quasi-experimental research design, the synthetic control group approach, to test the impact of contracting on spending for public schooling in New Orleans. Using det…
How Can Decentralized Systems Solve System-Level Problems? An Analysis of Market-Driven New Orleans School Reforms
One of the biggest changes in New Orleans after Katrina was observed in the public school system. In this article, we describe the massive overhaul of the public school system in New Orleans post-Katrina and examine the types of problems that this type of decentralized market-oriented system will be most likely to solve as well as those it may struggle with. As examples, we use problems facing New Orleans public schools, namely, student disciplin…
The Push and Pull of School Performance: Evidence from Student Mobility in New Orleans
We investigate student mobility in a choice-based system that has gone to scale, New Orleans, to gain insight into an underlying improvement mechanism of choice-based reform and its potential equity-related consequences. In contrast to typical analyses of mobility, this study distinguishes incumbent school characteristics that can cause students to search for a new school ("push" factors) from those features that can draw families to a new school…
How Principals “Bridge and Buffer” the New Demands of Teacher Quality and Accountability: A Mixed‐Methods Analysis of Teacher Hiring
In this mixed‐methods study, we examine the degree to which district‐ and building‐level administrators accommodate teacher‐quality and test‐based accountability policies in their hiring practices. We find that administrators negotiated local hiring goals with characteristics emphasized by federal and state teacher‐quality policies, such as knowledge of the subject and teaching skills. While district administrators and principals largely “bridged…
Teacher value‐added: Don't end the search before it starts
How Free Market Logic Fails in Schooling—And What It Means for the Role of Government
Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This article broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, although prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I provide a more comprehensive list. Second, with an up-to-date literature review, I show that all of these…
Curriculum Reform in The Common Core Era: Evaluating Elementary Math Textbooks Across Six U.S. States
Can a school or district improve student achievement simply by switching to a higher‐quality textbook or curriculum? We conducted the first multi‐textbook, multi‐state effort to estimate textbook efficacy following widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated changes in the textbook market. Pooling textbook adoption and student test score data across six geographically and demographically diverse U.S. states, we fo…
High‐Flying Schools, Student Disadvantage, and the Logic of NCLB
In debates about accountability, advocates often point to individual “high‐flying” schools that achieve high test scores despite serving disadvantaged populations. Using a near‐census of U.S. public schools, this new analysis considers the likelihood that schools become high flyers. The results suggest that of the more than 60,000 schools considered, low‐poverty schools are 22 times more likely to reach consistently high academic achievement comp…
The Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Educational Attainment
We study the effects of the COVID pandemic on educational attainment. By 2022, entry into two-year colleges was 21 percent lower than before the pandemic, with larger declines in Black- and Hispanic-majority colleges. Four-year college entry declined by only 6 percent and then rebounded 4 percent. High school graduation reached an all-time high in 2022. To explain these patterns, we undertook an interrupted time series design. Lower numbers of CO…
From Central Office to Portfolio Manager in Three Cities: Responding to the Principal-Agent Problem
A number of districts are moving toward a portfolio management model, in which central offices act as “portfolio managers” (PMs) that oversee—but may not actively manage—publicly funded schools. Using principal-agent theory, with its focus on goal alignment and the use of incentives, we explore how PMs operated in ways distinct from traditional district offices in Denver, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. We consider how PMs identify the goals of mul…
Teachers’ Perspectives on the Learning and Work Environments Under the New Orleans School Reforms
New Orleans schools experienced drastic reforms after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. To examine teachers’ perspectives on these reforms, we surveyed 323 teachers who taught in New Orleans public schools before 2005 and in 2013–2014. Teachers directly compared the learning and work environments and student and teacher outcomes of their current schools to those of their pre-Katrina schools. Returning teachers perceived significant and generally positiv…
Education and the Economy Revisited: How Schools Matter
A Nation at Risk (NAR; National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) had a tremendous impact on what schools do and has since spawned other reforms that attest to the report's ongoing influence. Coming in the wake of a decade of economic stagnation and import pressures from overseas producers, the authors of NAR blamed these problems on schools. In this article, we show that there was little justification for this conclusion, then or now.…
Accountability, Standards, and the Growing Achievement Gap: Lessons from the Past Half‐Century
The rise of accountability policies during the early 1990s coincided with an increase in the achievement gap between white and minority students, reversing decades of steady improvement in outcome equity. This article explores the policies that helped to reduce the achievement gap before 1990, the effects of the subsequent shift toward accountability, and what can be learned from past successes to guide the future development of accountability sy…
High‐Flying Schools, Student Disadvantage, and the Logic of NCLB
In debates about accountability, advocates often point to individual “high‐flying” schools that achieve high test scores despite serving disadvantaged populations. Using a near‐census of U.S. public schools, this new analysis considers the likelihood that schools become high flyers. The results suggest that of the more than 60,000 schools considered, low‐poverty schools are 22 times more likely to reach consistently high academic achievement comp…
The effects of NBPTS‐certified teachers on student achievement
In this study, we consider the efficacy of a relatively new and widely accepted certification system for teachers established by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). We utilize an extensive database covering the universe of teachers and students in Florida for a four‐year span to determine the relationship between NBPTS certification and the impact of teachers on student test scores from both low‐stakes and high‐stakes …
Response to Heather C. Hill
Teacher value‐added: Don't end the search before it starts
How Principals “Bridge and Buffer” the New Demands of Teacher Quality and Accountability: A Mixed‐Methods Analysis of Teacher Hiring
In this mixed‐methods study, we examine the degree to which district‐ and building‐level administrators accommodate teacher‐quality and test‐based accountability policies in their hiring practices. We find that administrators negotiated local hiring goals with characteristics emphasized by federal and state teacher‐quality policies, such as knowledge of the subject and teaching skills. While district administrators and principals largely “bridged…
Teacher training, teacher quality and student achievement
How Teacher Evaluation Methods Matter for Accountability: A Comparative Analysis of Teacher Effectiveness Ratings by Principals and Teacher Value-Added Measures
Policymakers are revolutionizing teacher evaluation by attaching greater stakes to student test scores and observation-based teacher effectiveness measures, but relatively little is known about why they often differ so much. Quantitative analysis of thirty schools suggests that teacher value-added measures and informal principal evaluations are positively, but weakly, correlated. Qualitative analysis suggests that some principals give high value-…
How Can Decentralized Systems Solve System-Level Problems? An Analysis of Market-Driven New Orleans School Reforms
One of the biggest changes in New Orleans after Katrina was observed in the public school system. In this article, we describe the massive overhaul of the public school system in New Orleans post-Katrina and examine the types of problems that this type of decentralized market-oriented system will be most likely to solve as well as those it may struggle with. As examples, we use problems facing New Orleans public schools, namely, student disciplin…
Reducing Income Inequality in Educational Attainment: Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Financial Aid on College Completion
Income inequality in educational attainment is a long-standing concern, and disparities in college completion have grown over time. Need-based financial aid is commonly used to promote equality in college outcomes, but its effectiveness has not been established, and some are calling it into question. A randomized experiment is used to estimate the impact of a private need-based grant program on college persistence and degree completion among stud…
Teachers’ Perspectives on the Learning and Work Environments Under the New Orleans School Reforms
New Orleans schools experienced drastic reforms after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. To examine teachers’ perspectives on these reforms, we surveyed 323 teachers who taught in New Orleans public schools before 2005 and in 2013–2014. Teachers directly compared the learning and work environments and student and teacher outcomes of their current schools to those of their pre-Katrina schools. Returning teachers perceived significant and generally positiv…
Choosing the Leader: Leadership Elections in the U.S. House of Representatives
How are congressional party leaders chosen? In the first comprehensive study since Robert Peabody's classic Leadership in Congress , this book draws on newly collected data about U.S. House members who have sought leadership positions from the 1960s to the present—data including whip tallies, public and private vote commitments, interviews, and media accounts—to provide new insights into how the selection process truly works. Elections for congre…
The Push and Pull of School Performance: Evidence from Student Mobility in New Orleans
We investigate student mobility in a choice-based system that has gone to scale, New Orleans, to gain insight into an underlying improvement mechanism of choice-based reform and its potential equity-related consequences. In contrast to typical analyses of mobility, this study distinguishes incumbent school characteristics that can cause students to search for a new school ("push" factors) from those features that can draw families to a new school…
Curriculum Reform in The Common Core Era: Evaluating Elementary Math Textbooks Across Six U.S. States
Can a school or district improve student achievement simply by switching to a higher‐quality textbook or curriculum? We conducted the first multi‐textbook, multi‐state effort to estimate textbook efficacy following widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated changes in the textbook market. Pooling textbook adoption and student test score data across six geographically and demographically diverse U.S. states, we fo…
The Impact of Government Contracting Out on Spending: The Case of Public Education in New Orleans
In this study, we start with developing a theoretical framework incorporating theories from the contracting literature and adapt them to the unusual case of nonprofit charter schools, which yields several seemingly novel theoretical insights. In contrast to earlier studies, we use a quasi-experimental research design, the synthetic control group approach, to test the impact of contracting on spending for public schooling in New Orleans. Using det…
From Central Office to Portfolio Manager in Three Cities: Responding to the Principal-Agent Problem
A number of districts are moving toward a portfolio management model, in which central offices act as “portfolio managers” (PMs) that oversee—but may not actively manage—publicly funded schools. Using principal-agent theory, with its focus on goal alignment and the use of incentives, we explore how PMs operated in ways distinct from traditional district offices in Denver, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. We consider how PMs identify the goals of mul…
The Process and Politics of Educational Governance Change in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Denver
In recent years, some U.S. school districts have shifted away from direct management of schools, toward systems in which some or all schools operate under enhanced autonomy, accountability, and parental choice. Yet dynamics driving these changes are understudied, and there are few comparative studies of system-level governance shifts. To address these gaps, we use extensive qualitative data to analyze change in Los Angeles, Denver, and New Orlean…
The effects of performance-based school closure and restart on student performance
We study the effects of closing and restarting low-performing schools as charter schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Using matched difference-in-differences identification with students in Louisiana, we estimate effects for the students who attended the treated schools at the time of treatment. We find positive and precise effects of closure/restart on elementary/middle school test scores, but no clear effects on high school graduation or col…
The effects of charter school entry on the supply of teachers from university-based education programs
Research on charter schools tends to focus on direct and immediate effects on student outcomes. However, there may be unintended indirect effects on, for example, the teacher labor market. Charter schools tend to hire teachers with fewer traditional teaching credentials, which may reduce the equilibrium quantity of teachers who have traditional credentials and seek to make teaching a career. We test whether charter entry reduces the supply of uni…
The Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Educational Attainment
We study the effects of the COVID pandemic on educational attainment. By 2022, entry into two-year colleges was 21 percent lower than before the pandemic, with larger declines in Black- and Hispanic-majority colleges. Four-year college entry declined by only 6 percent and then rebounded 4 percent. High school graduation reached an all-time high in 2022. To explain these patterns, we undertook an interrupted time series design. Lower numbers of CO…
How Free Market Logic Fails in Schooling—And What It Means for the Role of Government
Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This article broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, although prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I provide a more comprehensive list. Second, with an up-to-date literature review, I show that all of these…
The Choice of Policy Comparisons and Relevant Evidence and Approach to Selection Bias Are Keys to the Debate
Standard Empirical Policy Analysis Does Not Support Universal Vouchers/ESAs
School Choice and Performance (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Economics (13 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Mathematics education (9 works) · Pedagogy (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Economic growth (7 works) · Educational Assessment and Improvement (7 works) · Law (7 works)