Body mass index (BMI) screening and reporting programs have been implemented in the U.S. for over a decade to combat rising childhood obesity, yet these initiatives have raised significant public concerns about potential negative impacts on students’ socioemotional outcomes. Existing evidence is limited and often constrained by small sample sizes due to challenges in collecting socioemotional data. This study leverages data from the New York City (NYC) School Survey from 2010 to 2014 to examine the effects of receiving obesity notices on eight socioemotional outcomes among middle school girls in NYC. Using a regression discontinuity design, we assess student perceptions of bullying, harassment, physical fights, feelings of being welcomed and respected by teachers and peers, as well as attendance and chronic absenteeism. We find no evidence of negative impacts on any of the eight outcomes examined for middle school girls, both overall and across individual race/ethnicity groups and grades, and our results are robust across various sensitivity analyses and robustness checks. These findings speak specifically to the socioemotional effects of obesity notification rather than the broader impacts of the BMI reporting program in NYC.

Interim assessments are widely adopted in school districts across the U.S. to help predict student performance on end-of-year (EOY) state summative assessments, yet although several studies have examined their predictive validity, most do not account for students’ prior state test performance. Using data from South Carolina, we assess the added predictive value of interim assessments for forecasting performance levels and gains on EOY state tests. We find that while fall and winter interim assessments offer only modest improvements in predicting state test performance levels, they significantly enhance predictions of performance gains, for which past performance alone provides little information. Additionally, we observe that the longer i-Ready and MAP assessments add more predictive power than the shorter Star assessment.

During the pandemic, schools faced significant pressure to sustain student learning and mitigate learning loss. This paper examines the role of social-emotional competencies in supporting academic learning during this period and documents trends in student social-emotional learning (SEL) as students transition from elementary to middle school. We find that pre-COVID social-emotional competencies—growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness—are positively associated with math and English language arts test scores during the COVID-19 pandemic, even after accounting for pre-COVID test scores, student demographics, and school fixed effects. Notably, we observe disparities in SEL development from grades 4 to 6 across student subgroups, as well as meaningful differences in the associations between SEL and academic performance across grades and subgroups. These findings highlight the importance of policy efforts to strengthen students’ social-emotional competencies, particularly for historically underserved subgroups such as students with disabilities, during times of crisis.

While the central goal of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was to close achievement gaps, the extent to which school accountability pressure under NCLB has helped disadvantaged students catch up to their more advantaged peers remains surprisingly unclear. This paper investigates this critical research question and explores potential underlying mechanisms to inform the design of future school accountability policies. Utilizing administrative data from Title I public elementary and middle schools in North Carolina, I employ a difference-in-differences strategy, estimated using the method proposed by Gardner (2022). To validate the underlying identification assumption, I conduct event studies that reveal similar pre-trends. The findings indicate that, among Title I schools, accountability pressure in math significantly boosts math scores for traditionally low-performing student subgroups, including Black, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged students, and students with disabilities. Furthermore, these larger effects in math for disadvantaged groups are primarily driven by the policy’s greater impact on low-performing students, who constitute a significant portion of these groups. In contrast, the effects of reading accountability pressure on reading scores are smaller, with the most substantial gains observed among Hispanic students.