Todd Grindal

SRI International | SRI · Center for Learning and Development

Many early childhood education (ECE) programs seek to enhance parents' capacities to support their children's development. Using a meta-analytic database of 46 studies of ECE programs that served children age three to five-years-old, we examine the benefits to children's cognitive and pre-academic skills of adding parenting education to ECE program...

Early childhood education research often compares a group of children who receive the intervention of interest to a group of children who receive care in a range of different care settings. In this paper, we estimate differential impacts of an early childhood intervention by alternative care type, using data from the Head Start Impact Study, a larg...

In February 2005, Illinois became the first U.S. state to grant home-based child care providers (HBCPs) the right to form a labor union in order to bargain collectively with the state government. This policy inspired similar efforts across the country and represents a potentially important direction for child care policy. To date, the implications...

Objectives This study investigates whether the response of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants to a 30% incentive on fruit and vegetable spending varies with their access to food retailers. Methods The analysis exploits the random assignment of SNAP households in Hampden County, MA, to an intervention group that earned th...

Preschool children subjected to suspension and expulsion miss valuable educational opportunities and are more likely to experience academic failure and grade retention. These forms of exclusionary discipline are more frequent in preschool settings than in K–12 education classrooms. Previous research has examined the prevalence and influencing facto...

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the experiences of young children and their caregivers over the past year. SRI Education and the National Center on Children in Poverty partnered with the Arkansas Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education (DCCECE) to examine early care and education programs throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This br...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the provision of early childhood education in Arkansas and across the United States. SRI Education and the National Center on Children in Poverty partnered with the Arkansas Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education (DCCECE) to examine early care and education programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The...

In this article, Todd Grindal, Laura Schifter, Gabriel Schwartz, and Thomas Hehir examine race/ethnicity differences in students' special education identification and subsequent placement in segregated educational settings. Using individual-level data on the full population of K–12 public school students in three states, the authors find that racia...

The study’s goal was to understand the extent to which providing access to media resources focused on critical science and engineering concepts can help children living in low-income households learn. Exposure to The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! resources had meaningful impacts on 4- to 5-year-old children’s physical science knowledge and...

Evidence suggests that participating in career and technical education (CTE) in high school, on average, positively affects general education students when transitioning from education to the workforce. Yet, almost no large-scale causal research has explored whether academic benefits also accrue to students with disabilities in CTE. This omission i...

This study used a nationally representative parent survey, combined with in-depth interviews and home visits with a smaller sample of families, to learn how parents of young children, particularly low-income parents, encourage and take part in their children’s learning,especially their science learning. This study also investigated parent perceptio...

Although nearly all Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are redeemed, a moderate share of Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) benefits go unredeemed. Some hypothesize that the redemption rate differences are due to the lower density of WIC-authorized retailers. For the 2012 Summer Electronic B...

Interactive tool illustrates how to calculate the bounds for principal causal effects (as discussed in Miratrix , Fuery, Feller, Grindal, & 2017). The bounds identify the range of possible values of the principal causal effects that are consistent with the observed data. While the calculations needed to solve for the bounds are relatively straightf...

Much of the research on food deserts has focused on the relationship between the food retail environment and nutrition and health outcomes. Intermediary differences in food shopping patterns are often implicitly assumed to drive these relationships (environment hypothetically affects shopping, which hypothetically affects consumption). Research is...

Estimating treatment effects for subgroups defined by post-treatment behavior (i.e., estimating causal effects in a principal stratification framework) can be technically challenging and heavily reliant on strong assumptions. We investigate an alternate path: using bounds to identify ranges of possible effects that are consistent with the data. Thi...

Increasingly, researchers are interested in questions regarding treatment-effect variation across partially or fully latent subgroups defined not by pretreatment characteristics but by postrandomization actions. One promising approach to address such questions is principal stratification. Under this framework, a researcher defines endogenous subgro...

Project LAUNCH (Linking Actions for Unmet Needs in Children's Health) is a federal grant program administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to promote the social-emotional, cognitive, physical and behavioral health of children from birth to eight years of age (SAMHSA, 2008). Grantees are funded to pursue...

In 2011, Massachusetts Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, Dr. Mitchell D. Chester, commissioned Thomas Hehir and Associates to conduct a review of special education in the Commonwealth. The purpose of this review was to develop a comprehensive understanding of the identification, placement, and academic performance of students with...

Early childhood education research often compares a group of children who receive the intervention of interest to a group of children who receive care in a range of different care settings. In this paper, we estimate differential impacts of an early childhood intervention by alternative care setting, using data from the Head Start Impact Study, a l...

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has long been a leader in the education of students with disabilities. Programs located outside of traditional school districts have been a critical source of education for Massachusetts students with disabilities for almost two centuries. Today, four decades after the passage of Chapter 766, and subsequently the f...

Evidence suggests that participating in career and technical education (CTE) in high school, on average, positively impact general education students when transitioning from education to the workforce. Yet, almost no large-scale causal research has explored whether academic benefits also accrue to students with disabilities in CTE. This omission is...

We conducted this study at the behest of Massachusetts Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, Dr. Mitchell D. Chester. The commissioner was concerned about the relatively high numbers of students with disabilities identified in the commonwealth and the degree to which those identification rates were beneficial to students given the hig...

Current Debates and Issues in Pre-Kindergarten Education. Brookes Publishing Company. Baltimore, MD.

Review of special education identification placement and performance among students enrolled in the Houston Independent School District.