Which Educational Investments Improve Achievement, SEL, and Attainment for Black, Hispanic, and Low-Income Students? A Meta-Analysis of 307 U.S. Experiments

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Research in Education

Year: 2026

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Which Educational Investments Improve Achievement, SEL, and Attainment for Black, Hispanic, and Low-Income Students? A Meta-Analysis of 307 U.S. Experiments

Dr. David Blazar, Danett Song, Antoinette J. Waller, Nandi Carson, Jiehui Zhao, Claudia Galindo

ABSTRACT:

We conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of U.S. experiments to assess how educational investments affect outcomes for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students facing longstanding opportunity gaps and an accumulated educational debt. Similar to prior reviews, we find that investments that increase the dosage of schooling and instruction (e.g., early childhood education, tutoring) improve short-run outcomes (up to ~0.3 standard deviation [SD]) and raise longer-run attainment (up to ~5 percentage points [pp]). More importantly, programs designed to shift longer-run trajectories by strengthening social-emotional learning (SEL) and bridging home–school contexts (e.g., SEL curricula, family engagement, teacher–student race matching) yield some of the largest short- and long-run benefits, especially for Black and Hispanic students (up to ~0.6 SD on SEL outcomes and ~10 pp in high school graduation and college-going). By contrast, economics-based reforms—school choice and financial incentives—show mostly small or null effects.

Keywords: Equity, Opportunity Gap, Meta-Analysis, Randomized Controlled Trials, Black, Hispanic, Low-Income, Achievement, Social-Emotional Learning, Educational Attainment