Job Market Paper

No Hitting: Effects of a Ban on Corporal Punishment for Students with Disabilities.

This project is funded by the American Educational Research Association and the National Science Foundation.

Corporal punishment—paddling, spanking, and other physical discipline—remains legal in public schools in fifteen states and occurs disproportionately for students with disabilities. Five Southern states have recently exempted students with disabilities from corporal punishment. Prior evidence on state corporal punishment bans has been inconclusive because state bans were historically moot, and there has been little to no research on corporal punishment bans for students with disabilities. We do not know how closely schools complied and whether banning corporal punishment led schools to increase suspensions, another form of punitive discipline. This study fills this gap using a quadruple difference-in-differences methodology and federal data on student outcomes. I address two research questions: (1) To what extent did schools comply with Louisiana’s ban on corporal punishment for students with disabilities? (2) To what extent did the ban increase in-school-suspensions (ISS), out-of-school suspensions (OSS), and expulsions for students with disabilities? I advance the discipline reform literature by providing evidence on compliance with discipline bans beyond suspensions, examining unintended consequences across discipline outcomes, and assessing a potential lever to close disparities for students with disabilities.

Works in Progress

Racial Disparities and Black Parents’ School Preferences: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

with Chantal Hailey, Jeremy Prim, and Janeria Easley

This work is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the SICSS-Howard/Mathematica Excellence in Computational Social Science Research Fund.

Public school choice is widespread for Black parents. Although a large school choice literature has documented White parent’s aversion to schools with high shares of Black students, the evidence on how race factors into Black parents’ school preferences is small and mixed. In survey experiments, Black parents were much less sensitive to school racial composition and more willing than White parents to give up a same-race majority for higher school performance. However, qualitative literature suggests that Black parents navigate concerns about racial inequity when choosing between majority White schools with high-performance and lower performing schools where they worry less about their children being singled out. This seeming discrepancy might be resolved by focusing on school racial climate. Our 2x2 factorial survey experiment manipulates racial gaps in student outcomes as a hypothesized proxy for school racial climate. We conduct the first survey experiment to randomly vary gaps in test scores and suspension rates between Black students and their peers using two national samples totaling more than 1,900 Black parents. We assess how test score and suspension gaps affect Black parents’ desire to enroll and anticipation of school racial climate using hypothetical school profiles modeled after state-run school search websites.

Turnover, Quality, and Safety Violations in Child Care Centers

with Daphna Bassok and Justin Doromal

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Hall, T., Fares, I., Markowitz, A.J., & Miller-Bains, K., Bassok, D. (2023). Compensation and Staffing Challenges in Child Care: Statewide Evidence from Pandemic Relief Applications. Education Finance and Policy.

Hall, T., Bassok, D., Doromal, J. B., & Markowitz, A. J. (2023). A Director Like Me: Teacher-Leader Racial/Ethnic Match and Job Outcomes in Child Care Centers. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 62, 369-384.

Anglin, K., Boguslav, A., & Hall, T. (2022). Improving the Science of Annotation for Natural Language Processing: The Use of the Single-Case Study for Piloting Annotation Projects. Journal of Data Science, 20(3).

Hall, T. (2018). Restaurant Tipping and Discrimination: Exploring the Implications of Automatic Gratuities. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly 59, no. 3. 296–303.