Kenneth Shores

University of Delaware | UDel UD · School of Education

We estimate racial/ethnic achievement gaps in several hundred metropolitan areas and several thousand school districts in the United States using the results of roughly 200 million standardized math and reading tests administered to public school students from 2009-2013. We show that achievement gaps vary substantially, ranging from nearly 0 in som...

We provide new evidence about the effect of court-ordered finance reforms that took place from 1990 to 2010 on per-pupil revenues and graduation rates. We account for heterogeneity in the treated and counterfactual groups to estimate the effect of overturning a state's finance system. Seven years after reform, the highest poverty quartile in a trea...

Educators, policymakers, and citizens face questions of how to allocate scarce resources in the pursuit of competing goals for children and youth. Our goal in this article is to provide decision-makers with a framework for considering allocative problems in education, explicitly highlighting the implications of relevant feasibility constraints. We...

Summary : How well do U.S. students read? In this article, Sean Reardon, Rachel Valentino, and Kenneth Shores rely on studies using data from national and international literacy assessments to answer this question. In part, the answer depends on the specific literacy skills assessed. The authors show that almost all U.S. students can “read” by thir...

Education policy decisions are both normatively and empirically challenging. These decisions require the consideration of both relevant values and empirical facts. Values tell us what we have reason to care about, and facts can be used to describe what is possible. Following Hamlin and Stemplowska, we distinguish between a theory of ideals and desc...

This paper quantifies preferences for income equality and mobility by generating statistics that are uncorrelated with beliefs and can be interpreted as marginal rates of substitution (MRS). All else constant, U.S. residents are willing to reduce average income by $2,744 to reduce the 90/10 income inequality ratio one unit and $1,228 to increase in...

Background When unaddressed, contamination in child maltreatment research, in which some proportion of children recruited for a nonmaltreated comparison group are exposed to maltreatment, downwardly biases the significance and magnitude of effect size estimates. This study extends previous contamination research by investigating how a dual‐measurem...

Contamination is a methodological phenomenon occurring in child maltreatment research when individuals in an established comparison condition have, in reality, been exposed to maltreatment during childhood. The current paper: (1) provides a conceptual and methodological introduction to contamination in child maltreatment research, (2) reviews the e...

Contamination occurs when members of a control condition receive or are exposed to the treatment under scientific investigation. The presence of contamination violates assumptions within counterfactual models of causal inference and results in two systematic and sequential problems: (1) measurement error in the form of misclassification of units in...

Sixty-seven school finance reforms (SFRs), a combination of court-ordered and legislative reforms, have taken place since 1990; however, there is little empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of SFR effects. In this study, we estimate the effects of SFRs on revenues and expenditures between 1990 and 2014 for 26 states. We find that, on average, pe...

Contamination, when members of a comparison or control condition are exposed to the event or intervention under scientific investigation, is a methodological phenomenon that downwardly biases the magnitude of effect size estimates. This study tested a novel approach for controlling contamination in observational child maltreatment research. Data fr...

Revealed preferences for equal college access may be due to beliefs that equal access increases societal income or income equality. To isolate preferences for those goods, we implement an online discrete choice experiment using social statistics generated from true variation among commuting zones. We find that, ceteris paribus, the average income t...

Revealed preferences for equal college access may be due to beliefs that equal access increases societal income or income equality. To isolate preferences for those goods, we implement an online discrete choice experiment using social statistics generated from true variation among commuting zones. We find that, ceteris paribus, the average income t...

We characterize the extent to which Black-White gaps for multiple educational outcomes are linked across school districts in the United States. Gaps in disciplinary action, grade-level retention, classification into special education and Gifted and Talented, and Advanced Placement course-taking are large in magnitude and correlated. Racial differen...

Use of education finance data is ubiquitous. Yet, because the academic calendar circumscribes two calendar years, researchers have linked the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to three different dates: fall, spring, and academic fiscal years. We demonstrate that linking the CPI to these different academic years results in identifying different trends in U...

Objective We describe disparities in civic engagement along two axes: the modal, describing the extent to which civic engagement is structured, and its content, describing the extent to which civic engagement has partisan objectives. Accordingly, this structure creates four domains of civic engagement: associational–partisan (e.g., voting), social–...

The Great Recession was the most severe economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression. Using data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), we describe the patterns of math and English language arts (ELA) achievement for students attending schools in communities differentially affected by recession-induced employment shoc...

Standardized tests are regularly used as education system monitoring tools to compare the average performance of students living in different states or belonging to different subgroups (e.g., defined by race/ethnicity, sex, or parental income) and to track their progress over time. This article describes some uses and design features of tests in sy...

The authors estimate racial/ethnic achievement gaps in several hundred metropolitan areas and several thousand school districts in the United States using the results of roughly 200 million standardized math and English language arts (ELA) tests administered to public school students from 2009 to 2013. They show that achievement gaps vary substanti...

Background When the Zika virus outbreak became a global health emergency in early 2016, the scientific community responded with an increased output of Zika-related research. This upsurge in research naturally made its way into academic journals along with editorials, news, and reports. However, it is not yet known how or whether these scholarly com...

Additional analysis by journal country of publication. (DOCX)

This paper presents a new methodology---the Twitter bot survey---that bridges the gap between social media research and web surveys. The methodology uses the Twitter APIs to identify a target population and then uses the API to deliver a question in the form of a regular Tweet. We hypothesized that this method would yield high response rates becaus...