Ph.D. candidate Alexandra Cooperstock was awarded an early career scholar grant from the Russell Sage Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation for her project "Place-Based Education Investment: Promise Neighborhoods and Student Academic Outcomes." This grant targets research on improving education and reducing inequality that deepen our understanding of educational opportunity and success. Read more about the award here.
Cooperstock’s project will focus on the largest federal place-based education policy, the U.S. Department of Education's Promise Neighborhoods program. Employing quasi-experimental methods, Cooperstock will estimate Promise Neighborhood effects on student academic outcomes, including standardized test scores, using data from the Stanford Education Data Archive at the school-level and administrative Texas Schools Project data at the student-level. Because place-based policies have the potential to transform neighborhood conditions, in both favorable and unfavorable ways, they have important implications for durable spatial inequalities in the U.S. that are congruent with academic achievement gaps. This research project will explore the spatial clustering of disadvantage and the ways that these conditions shape educational outcomes and access to opportunity.
