Our work aims to substantiate and extend earlier findings on the effects of student-teacher race matching on academic achievement using longitudinal data for students in Grades 3 through 8 in Tennessee. We examine heterogenous effects not only by racial subgroup and student preparedness, as explored in prior literature, but also by levels of teacher effectiveness, drawing on data from the state's teacher evaluation system. We find that student-teacher race congruence does not have a significant overall effect on test scores. However, subgroup analyses reveal a positive, significant race-match effect in elementary school math. We observe meaningful effects for Black students in both reading and math, race-matched students in the bottom-most preparedness quartile in math, and race-matched students assigned to teachers in the middle two teacher performance quartiles in math. Our results align with prior findings, emphasizing that race-match effects transcend state borders. Findings support policy efforts to diversify the educator labor force.

Through the lens of administrative burden and ordeals, we investigate challenges that low‐income families face in accessing health and human services critical for their children's healthy development. We employ a mixed methods approach—drawing on administrative data on economically disadvantaged children in Tennessee, publicly available data on resource allocations and expenditures, and data collected in purposive and randomly sampled interviews with public and nonprofit agencies across the state—to analyze the distribution of resources relative to children's needs and provide rich descriptions of the experiences of organizations striving to overcome administrative burdens and support families. We also scrutinize the place‐based resource deserts and environmental contexts of resource gaps and deficiencies in public policies governing the distribution of public resources that exacerbate administrative burdens and inequities in access to public resources. Our insights into the costs imposed on individuals and organizations and how they impede or spill over into other aspects of organizational work point to specific state and local program and policy changes that could be implemented to address resource constraints and alleviate burdens on organizations and poor families.

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This exploratory study investigates the world of whistleblowing. The topic has produced a great deal of discussion but little clear understanding of the contexts in which whistleblowers act or the paths they follow, or even a critical understanding of whistleblowing as a social and legal practice. The study articulates some of these boundaries through a mixed-method analysis. The authors reviewed extant quantitative data and conducted a series of interviews in order to be able to sketch a plausible picture of the current state of whistleblowing. The results were used to construct a typology of whistleblowers that provides a conceptual shorthand for the goals, motivations, and contexts that define whistleblowing.

Elected representatives' place of residence can reveal information about their socioeconomic status, their likely social networks, and potential biases in the constituencies they represent. Using data on home addresses we collected from local elections offices, we investigate the geographic distribution of school board candidates', including winners', places of residence across two election cycles for 610 school districts in Ohio. We employ geographic information systems (GIS) to identify census block group and school enrollment zones associated with each candidate's residence. We document differences among block groups and schools with more and less school board representation, including a robust association between the relative affluence of a neighborhood and the likelihood of school board members residing in that area. We find that more citizens from affluent areas run for school board, and because a large proportion of school board elections feature minimal competition, these higher propensities to run explain disparities in representation.