About

Thomas Kane is an economist and the Walter H. Gale Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He serves as the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research, a university-wide research center that collaborates with school districts and state agencies. His work spans both K–12 and higher education, focusing on topics such as the design of school accountability systems, teacher recruitment and retention, financial aid for college, race-conscious college admissions, and the earnings impacts of community colleges. Kane has held significant roles including serving as the senior economist for labor, education, and welfare policy issues within President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 1996, and has been a faculty member at the Kennedy School of Government. He has also been a professor of public policy at UCLA and held visiting fellowships at the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His research and contributions are profiled in Harvard Magazine, and he is recognized for his expertise in education policy, reform, and evidence-based interventions.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Economics
• Political science
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• School's in for Summer: A Scalable and Effective Post-Pandemic Academic Intervention

  2025-12-01

  reportOpen access

  This brief summarizes findings from studies of summer school programs delivered in 2022 and 2023 across ten large school districts. These districts participated in the Road to Recovery research practice partnership with researchers from NWEA, CALDER at the American Institutes of Research, and Harvard University. These districts collectively serve nearly 450,000 students. Six districts participated in both years of the study, and four participated only in one year. We first estimate the impact of summer school on students’ test scores and its contribution to districts’ overall recovery. We then take a broader view to describe the design and implementation of post-pandemic summer school programs and highlight differences from recommended best practices that may have hindered program effectiveness. Finally, we contextualize summer school's value by comparing it to other academic interventions in terms of scale and impact. Key Findings: 1. Summer school consistently boosted students’ math achievement in 2022 and 2023 but had no impact on reading. The math gains were modest, equivalent to about 2 to 3 weeks of learning during the school year. 2. Districts offered optional programs that generally fell short of best-practice recommendations for duration and intensity. 3. Summer school’s scalability and consistent impacts across districts nevertheless make it a reliable intervention for supporting district-wide math recovery.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Summer School as an Academic Recovery Strategy After COVID-19: Evidence from Summer 2023

  2025-08-01

  reportOpen access

  Many school districts have turned to summer school as a strategy for addressing persistent declines in student achievement after COVID-19. We examine the impact of 2023 summer programs on academic recovery across 400,000 students in eight large U.S. districts. Using value-added models, we find modest but significant improvements in student math achievement (average effect = 0.024 SD), and no significant improvements in reading. Effects were similar to 2022, despite small declines in participation and dosage. In four districts, we also examine differences in summer 2023 impacts for students who attended the districts’ summer school the prior year and those who did not. Students attending for a second consecutive summer generally benefited as much or more than first-time attendees.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Why Does Value-Added Work? Implications of a Dynamic Model of Student Achievement

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-08-01

  reportOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• School District and Community Factors Associated with Test Score Declines During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2025-07-01 · 1 citations

  article

  Using data from approximately 7,800 school districts, we show that test score declines during the pandemic were large and highly variable. We find that test score declines were larger in lower-income and minority districts, but that within districts, White students and non–economically disadvantaged students lost about the same amount of ground as Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students. We find that the test score declines were larger in districts where more of the 2020–2021 school year was spent in remote or hybrid instructional modalities, where students had less access to broadband access at home, where the pandemic led to larger disruptions to local social and economic activity, and in communities where trust in government institutions was low.

  PublisherDOI

• What do changes in state NAEP scores imply for birth cohorts’ later life outcomes?

  Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · 2025-06-06 · 4 citations

  articleCorresponding

  Abstract Since 1990, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been the primary benchmark for tracking the progress of state education reform. The focus on math and reading achievement is motivated by the cross‐sectional relationship between test scores and adult outcomes, such as earnings and college completion. But do changes in NAEP scores predict changes in long‐term economic and social outcomes for future earners—or do they reflect other factors unrelated to earnings such as teaching to the test? We investigate by linking long‐term outcomes by year and state of birth to NAEP scores. We find that more recent birth cohorts in states with large increases in NAEP math achievement enjoyed higher incomes, improved educational attainment, and declines in teen motherhood, incarceration, and arrest rates compared to those in states with smaller increases. In fact, the relationship between changes in NAEP achievement and cohort earnings is about two thirds the size of the cross‐sectional relationship observed in prior research: a 6% to 8% rise in earnings per standard deviation rise in 8th grade math. The results are not sensitive to controls for student demographics, labor market conditions, or measures of children's health (such as low birthweight).

  PublisherDOI

• Federal Pandemic Relief and Academic Recovery

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-09-01 · 5 citations

  reportOpen access

  We measure the effect of district use of federal pandemic relief during the 2022-23 school year for a sample of more than 5000 districts in 29 states.We rely on several plausibly exogenous sources of variation in federal grants: differences in state Title I funding formulas, estimation error in Census local area poverty rates and differences in eligibility for federal Title I and subsidized lunch eligibility.We find that each $1000 in spending per student was associated with a .0086SD improvement in math and a .0049SD improvement in reading.Both are consistent with a recent meta-analysis of spending impacts by Jackson and Mackevicius (2023).As a placebo test, we find no relationship between federal dollars that were not yet spent during the 2022-23 year.We also find similar results using synthetic control group methods to compare high-poverty districts with high and low amounts of federal aid, but with similar trends in achievement through 2022.Because the federal aid was targeted at higher poverty districts, we find the federal dollars not only contributed to the recovery, but also helped narrow the gaps in achievement which had widened during the pandemic.

  PublisherDOI

• The Educational Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction during the Pandemic

  American Economic Review Insights · 2023-08-31 · 43 citations

  article

  Using testing data from over two million students in nearly 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus the District of Columbia), we investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty. We find that remote instruction was a primary driver of the widening gaps. Math gaps did not widen in areas that remained in person (although reading gaps did). We estimate that high-poverty districts that went remote in 2020–2021 will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on helping students recover from pandemic-related academic achievement losses. (JEL H75, I12, I21, I24, I32, J15)

  PublisherDOI

• The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-05-01 · 147 citations

  reportOpen access

  Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus D.C.), we investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty. We find that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps. Math gaps did not widen in areas that remained in-person (although there was some widening in reading gaps in those areas). We estimate that high-poverty districts that went remote in 2020-21 will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related achievement losses.

  PublisherDOI

• What Do Changes in State Test Scores Imply for Later Life Outcomes?

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-12-01 · 12 citations

  reportOpen access

  In the three decades before the pandemic, mean achievement of U.S. 8th graders in math rose by more than half a standard deviation on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Between 2019 and 2022, U.S. students had forfeited 40 percent of that rise. To anticipate the consequences of the recent decline, we investigate the past relationship between NAEP scores and students' later life outcomes by year and state of birth. We find that a standard deviation improvement in a birth cohort's 8th grade math achievement was associated with an 8 percent rise in income, as well as improved educational attainment and declines in teen motherhood, incarceration and arrest rates. If allowed to become permanent, our findings imply that the recent losses would represent a 1.6 percent decline in present value of lifetime earnings for the average K-12 student (or $19,400), totaling $900 billion for the 48 million students enrolled in public schools during the 2020-21 school year.

  PublisherDOI

• The Uncertain Role of Educational Software in Remediating Student Learning: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Three Local Education Agencies

  Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness · 2022-11-30

  article

  Educators must balance the needs of students who start the school year behind grade level with their obligation to teach grade-appropriate content to all students. Educational software could help educators strike this balance by targeting content to students’ differing levels of mastery. Using a regression discontinuity design and detailed software log and administrative data, we compare two versions of an online mathematics program used by students in three education agencies. We find that although students assigned the modified curriculum did progress through content objectives more quickly than students assigned the default curriculum, they did not perform better on pre- and post-objective quizzes embedded in the software, and most never progressed far enough to reach the grade-level content. Furthermore, there was no statistically significant effect of the modified curriculum on formative test scores. These findings suggest policymakers and practitioners should exercise caution when assigning exclusively remedial content to students who start the school year behind grade level, even though this is a common feature of many math educational software programs.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Douglas O. Staiger

  Dartmouth College

  234 shared

• Justine Hastings

  Coventry University

  84 shared

• David Deming

  Harvard University

  71 shared

• Brian Jacob

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  55 shared

• Jonah Rockoff

  Columbia University

  50 shared

• John A. Mack

  National Park Service

  36 shared

• Martha Sandweiss

  Princeton University

  36 shared

• Robert V. Hine

  36 shared

Education

• Phd Public Policy, GSAS

  Harvard University

  1991

• MA, Economics

  University of Michigan

  1986

• Bachelors, Economics

  University of Notre Dame

  1983

Awards & honors

• Professor of the Year, UCLA School of Public Affairs, Public…