Jon Valant

Research indicates that efforts to reform school discipline practices through policy have seen mixed success. In 2018, the District of Columbia (DC) passed the Student Fair Access to School Act, which sought to significantly limit schools' use of suspensions and promote alternative discipline practices, among other reforms. To date, there has not been any research on the implementation of those reforms across 70 education agencies, including DC Public Schools and all public charter systems, ...

The Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) has prioritized raising early-grade literacy, particularly for economically disadvantaged students. This project will support the state's goals by exploring socioeconomic gaps in literacy levels at kindergarten entry and third-grade completion and examining two of the state's key programs designed to improve academic outcomes for young children. The first is the state's longstanding pre-kindergarten (preK) program, which provides limited funding s...

Across the U.S., many students have opportunities to attend schools other than their own traditional neighborhood public schools. These opportunities are commonly referred to as “school choice” and include such practices as open enrollment (both intra- and inter-district), magnet schools, charter schools including virtual schools, and public financial supports for attending private schools (e.g., vouchers, tax credit funded scholarships, education savings accounts, personal tax credits a...

The Stanford University Predoctoral Training Program in Quantitative Educational Policy Analysis has been designed to provide doctoral students in social science disciplines (especially Economics, Sociology, Political Science, and Psychology) and in the School of Education with advanced training in state-of-the-art quantitative methods of discipline-based educational policy analysis.