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Tasminda K. Dhaliwal

Soledad De Gregorio, Tasminda K. Dhaliwal, Ann Owens, Gary Painter.

Homelessness is rising among public school students in large cities across the US. Using nine years of student-level administrative data, we examine how homelessness affects students’ mathematics and attendance outcomes within the Los Angeles Unified School District, including the differential effects of homelessness based on duration and timing of their homeless experiences. Results using inverse probability of treatment weighting find that homeless students score 0.13 SD lower on math assessments and miss 5.8 additional days of school than students who never experience homeless. Results suggest that current homelessness has larger negative impacts on math achievement and attendance than former homelessness, and that transitory homelessness has larger negative impacts than persistent homelessness on the same outcomes.

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Mark J. Chin, David M. Quinn, Tasminda K. Dhaliwal, Virginia S. Lovison.

Theory suggests that teachers’ implicit racial attitudes affect their students, but we lack large-scale evidence on US teachers’ implicit biases and their correlates. Using nationwide data from Project Implicit, we find that teachers’ implicit White/Black biases (as measured by the implicit association test) vary by teacher gender and race. Teachers’ adjusted bias levels are lower in counties with larger shares of Black students. In the aggregate, counties in which teachers hold higher levels of implicit and explicit racial bias have larger adjusted White/Black test score inequalities and White/Black suspension disparities.

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