About

Helen F. Ladd is the Susan B. King Distinguished Professor Emerita of Public Policy and Professor Emerita of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy. She is also an affiliate of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. Her contact information includes her email hladd@duke.edu and her office located at 117 Sanford Building, Durham, NC 27708. Her professional role emphasizes her distinguished status within the field of public policy, contributing to academic and policy discussions through her research and teaching.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Economic growth
• Demographic economics
• Mathematics education
• Medicine
• Management
• Marketing
• Public relations
• Developmental psychology
• Business
• Medical education
• Demography
• Pedagogy

Selected publications

• State differences in pathways to school leadership and in achievement growth

  Economics of Education Review · 2025-08-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• School Segregation in the Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence and School Choice

  UNC Libraries · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen access

  The decades-long resistance to federally imposed school desegregation entered a new phase at the turn of the new century. At that time, federal courts stopped pushing racial balance as a remedy for past segregation and adopted in its place a color-blind approach to evaluating school district assignment plans. Using data that span 1998 to 2016 from North Carolina, one of the first states to come under this color-blind dictum, we examine the ways in which households and policymakers took actions that had the effect of reducing the amount of interracial contact in K-12 schools within counties. We divide these reductions in interracial contact into portions due to the private school and charter school sectors, the existence of multiple school districts, and racial disparities between schools within districts and sectors. For most counties, the last of these proves to be the biggest, though in some counties private schools, charter schools, or multiple districts played a deciding role. In addition, we decompose segregation in the state's 11 metropolitan areas, finding that more than half can be attributed to racial disparities inside school districts. We also measure segregation by economic status, finding that it, like racial segregation, increased in the largest urban counties, but elsewhere changed little over the period.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Regulating Entry Requirements Lead to More Effective Principals?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Pre-K enrollments and teaching environments in North Carolina elementary schools

  Children and Youth Services Review · 2024-08-07 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding Heterogeneity in the Impact of Public Preschool Programs

  Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · 2023-06-01 · 31 citations

  articleOpen access

  We examine the North Carolina Pre-K (NC Pre-K) program to test the hypothesis that observed variation in effects resulting from exposure to the program can be attributed to interactions with other environmental factors that occur before, during, or after the pre-k year. We examine student outcomes in 5th grade and test interaction effects between NC's level of investment in public pre-k and moderating factors. Our main sample includes the population of children born in North Carolina between 1987 and 2005 who later attended a public school in that state, had valid achievement data in 5th grade, and could be matched by administrative record review (n = 1,207,576; 58% White non-Hispanic, 29% Black non-Hispanic, 7% Hispanic, 6% multiracial and Other race/ethnicity). Analyses were based on a natural experiment leveraging variation in county-level funding for NC Pre-K across NC counties during each of the years the state scaled up the program. Exposure to NC Pre-K funding was defined as the per-4-year-old-child state allocation of funds to a county in a year. Regression models included child-level and county-level covariates and county and year fixed effects. Estimates indicate that a child's exposure to higher NC Pre-K funding was positively associated with that child's academic achievement 6 years later. We found no effect on special education placement or grade retention. NC Pre-K funding effects on achievement were positive for all subgroups tested, and statistically significant for most. However, they were larger for children exposed to more disadvantaged environments either before or after the pre-k experience, consistent with a compensatory model where pre-k provides a buffer against the adverse effects of prior negative environmental experiences and protection against the effects of future adverse experiences. In addition, the effect of NC Pre-K funding on achievement remained positive across most environments, supporting an additive effects model. In contrast, few findings supported a dynamic complementarity model. Instrumental variables analyses incorporating a child's NC Pre-K enrollment status indicate that program attendance increased average 5th grade achievement by approximately 20% of a standard deviation, and impacts were largest for children who were Hispanic or whose mothers had less than a high school education. Implications for the future of pre-k scale-up and developmental theory are discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Racial Differences in Student Access to High-Quality Teachers

  Education Finance and Policy · 2023-01-01 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract Access to high-quality teachers in K–12 schools differs systematically by racial group. This policy brief reviews the academic research documenting these differences and the labor market forces and segregation patterns that solidify them. It also presents new analysis of differential exposure in North Carolina of white, black, and Hispanic students to teachers with different quality-related credentials across five grade–subject combinations. White students are most often in classrooms taught by teachers with strong credentials and least often by those with weak credentials, not only across the state as a whole, but also within most of the state's counties, especially those whose schools are most segregated by race. To address such disparities, decision makers at all three levels—state, district, and school—have various policy options to consider, with each level having an important role to play.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do Teacher Assistants Improve Student Outcomes? Evidence From School Funding Cutbacks in North Carolina

  UNC Libraries · 2022-02-09

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines the influence of teacher assistants and other personnel on outcomes for elementary school students during a period of recession-induced cutbacks in teacher assistants. Using panel data from North Carolina, we exploit the state’s unique system of financing its local public schools to identify the causal effects of teacher assistants, controlling for other staff, on measures of student achievement. We find consistent evidence of positive effects of teacher assistants, an understudied staffing category, on student performance in reading and math. We also find larger positive effects of teacher assistants on achievement outcomes for students of color and students in high-poverty schools than for White students and students in more affluent schools. We conclude that teacher assistants are a cost-effective means of raising student achievement, especially in reading.

  PublisherDOI

• School Segregation in the Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence and School Choice

  Urban Affairs Review · 2021-12-06 · 16 citations

  article

  The decades-long resistance to federally imposed school desegregation entered a new phase at the turn of the new century. At that time, federal courts stopped pushing racial balance as a remedy for past segregation and adopted in its place a color-blind approach to evaluating school district assignment plans. Using data that span 1998 to 2016 from North Carolina, one of the first states to come under this color-blind dictum, we examine the ways in which households and policymakers took actions that had the effect of reducing the amount of interracial contact in K-12 schools within counties. We divide these reductions in interracial contact into portions due to the private school and charter school sectors, the existence of multiple school districts, and racial disparities between schools within districts and sectors. For most counties, the last of these proves to be the biggest, though in some counties private schools, charter schools, or multiple districts played a deciding role. In addition, we decompose segregation in the state's 11 metropolitan areas, finding that more than half can be attributed to racial disparities inside school districts. We also measure segregation by economic status, finding that it, like racial segregation, increased in the largest urban counties, but elsewhere changed little over the period.

  PublisherDOI

• Status versus growth: The distributional effects of school accountability policies

  Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2021-08-14

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Although the federal No Child Left Behind program judges the effectiveness of schools based on their students’ achievement status, many policy analysts argue that schools should be measured, instead, by their students’ achievement growth. Using a ten-year student-level panel dataset from North Carolina, we examine how school-specific pressure associated with the two approaches to school accountability affects student achievement at different points in the prior-year achievement distribution. Achievement gains for students below the proficiency cut point emerge in response to both types of accountability systems. In contrast to prior research highlighting the possibility of educational triage, we find little or no evidence that schools in North Carolina ignore the students far below proficiency under either approach. Importantly, we find that the status, but not the growth, approach reduces the reading achievement of higher performing students, with the losses in the aggregate exceeding the gains at the bottom. Our analysis suggests that the distributional effects of accountability pressure depend not only on the type of pressure for which schools are held accountable (status or growth), but also the tested subject.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do Teacher Assistants Improve Student Outcomes? Evidence From School Funding Cutbacks in North Carolina

  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis · 2021-02-16 · 30 citations

  articleOpen access

  This article examines the influence of teacher assistants and other personnel on outcomes for elementary school students during a period of recession-induced cutbacks in teacher assistants. Using panel data from North Carolina, we exploit the state’s unique system of financing its local public schools to identify the causal effects of teacher assistants, controlling for other staff, on measures of student achievement. We find consistent evidence of positive effects of teacher assistants, an understudied staffing category, on student performance in reading and math. We also find larger positive effects of teacher assistants on achievement outcomes for students of color and students in high-poverty schools than for White students and students in more affluent schools. We conclude that teacher assistants are a cost-effective means of raising student achievement, especially in reading.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Charles T. Clotfelter

  Duke University

  140 shared

• Jacob L. Vigdor

  University of Washington

  107 shared

• Edward B. Fiske

  27 shared

• Steven W. Hemelt

  W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

  26 shared

• John Ýinger

  20 shared

• Susanna Loeb

  19 shared

• Howard S. Bloom

  Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation

  16 shared

• Harry Brighouse

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  15 shared