This dissertation applies the tools of applied microeconomics to study how public policies affect the wellbeing of students and teachers. By examining a suite of federal, state, and school district-level policies, I show that even marginal changes in our approach to education and food policy can yield important benefits for children. In the first chapter, I study the effect of food access on student achievement in school using a student-level panel following over 250,000 students per year in the metro-Atlanta area. By leveraging changes in distance to federally-funded summer meal sites as a natural experiment, I show that increasing a student’s distance to the nearest meal site by 1 mile decreases achievement on math and reading exams by 1-3% of a standard deviation. I identify treatment effects by isolating the exogenous component of distance change driven by site openings and closings with a fixed-effects instrumental variables strategy, constructing a synthetic instrument that measures how far a student would have lived from the nearest site had they never moved addresses. I also provide evidence on the accessibility of summer meal sites. I show that 80% of low-income students live within walking distance of a meal site but that site locations are highly unstable over time, making them harder to use for needy students and families. In the second chapter, I use teacher-level data from Texas to study the effect of transitioning from a five-day school week to a four-day school week (4DSW) on teacher retention and sorting. I estimate causal effects of the 4DSW by leveraging the staggered adoption of the policy across Texas between school year (SY) 2016 and SY 2025 with a difference-in-differences approach. I find that districts adopting a 4DSW experience modest declines of 2.5 percentage points in teacher turnover and recruit slightly larger shares of their incoming teacher cohorts from other public school districts in Texas, but experience few other benefits. I also introduce the Google PageRank algorithm as a revealed preference method for quantifying the attractiveness of a school district to teachers by tracking teacher flows between pairs of districts. My results show that districts adopting the 4DSW see their rank in the state attractiveness distribution increase by 5 percentiles, driven largely by a retention effect.
In the third chapter (written with Tim Sass), I study how trends in teacher effectiveness changed after the transition to online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. I quantify teacher effectiveness by estimating a series of value-added models that measure a teacher’s contribution to student test score growth over a fall semester. I find that overall variance in teacher effectiveness increased during remote learning, driven by teachers in grades K-2. In addition, I show that more experienced teachers were relatively more effective than their less experienced peers during remote instruction but that the most effective in-person teachers were more likely to see large decreases in their relative effectiveness compared to an in-person baseline.