Actionable Insights from Observational Data: The Case of Advanced Classes in K-12 Education

Nabit Bajwa, Seth B. Hunter, Sanmay Das

A fundamentally challenging question in K-12 education is about the effects of taking more advanced or challenging classes. It is particularly complex because students (and/or their parents) choose whether to enroll in these classes, making causal analysis challenging. In this paper, we begin to tackle this question by taking advantage of a novel dataset from a public school system in the US. This dataset records students' course enrollment decisions, prior academic histories, demographics, and subsequent outcomes around the time of a district-wide change that introduced optional open-enrollment advanced middle-school courses in subject areas. This is a rich observational dataset, but enrollment in advanced classes is driven by student characteristics and choices rather than random assignment. This creates a core identification challenge: the same factors that influence enrollment in advanced courses are also predictive of academic outcomes. As a result, simple comparisons between enrolled and non-enrolled students are confounded, and naive estimates may reflect underlying differences in student ability, motivation, or support rather than the impact of coursework itself. Our…