Yeah, honestly: “parental rights” are starting to sound more like “property rights.”

Unfortunately, direct certification-based measures are not widely available yet. We find no easy solutions to measuring school/student economic disadvantage using publicly-available data, and discuss more in this book chapter: books.google.com/books?hl=en&...

Ungated version here: ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper...

The White House wants to axe funding programs for:
-English learners
-Homeless students
-Migrant students
-Teacher PD
-Civics ed.
-Literacy
-Arts ed.
-Preschoolers with disabilities
-Adult learners
-Rural schools
-School desegregation
-Alaska/Hawaii Native students
www.edweek.org/policy-polit...

Paper links:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1138 (working paper)

For more technical details, including how we handle students with missing income, check out the online appendix.

Or bug me, @michspieg.bsky.social, @andrewpenner.bsky.social, @emilykpenner.bsky.social, or @t-h-a-d.bsky.social to discuss further!

We use the Uneven Exposure Index to compare peer income exposure across classroom and school peer groups, and across grade levels. Sorting across schools–-in parallel with income sorting across neighborhoods and towns–-is the driver of the uneven peer income distributions we document.

Note that an even average distribution is a necessary-–but not sufficient–-condition for truly even peer income exposure. There are schools, especially in urban settings, with high concentrations of poverty. But there are low-income students everywhere, not just in cities.

The logic behind the Uneven Exposure Index is that if students were evenly distributed by income, they would have 1% of peers in each percentile. We sum up the distance from the even distribution across all 100 percentiles, and divide by 2 to derive Uneven Exposure.

While more than one-quarter of very high-income peers, on average, would need to be swapped for peers in lower percentiles to achieve an even distribution for very high-income students, students around the 60th income percentile have remarkably even peer income distributions.

We love the transparency of the basic stats, but for a more succinct summary, we created an Uneven Exposure Index. This is interpreted as the min. proportion of peers, on average, that would have to be swapped with peers in other income percentiles to achieve an even distribution of peer income.