Selected Works

Lu, A., Loeb, S, and Waymack, N. (2025) “Business Not as Usual: Understanding Factors for Organizational Change after a Crisis.” Teachers College Record: Special Issue, The COVID Effect: Unlocking the Education Potential for a Generation of Learners

Drawing on the crisis management cycle (CMC) framework, this study examines the organizational adjustments made by school systems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on the implementation of high-impact tutoring (HIT) to address the pandemic’s academic impacts. Critical to navigating these pathways are stakeholder alignment, external partnerships, access to expertise, effective resource allocation, and organizational readiness for adaptation. Our research highlights how these factors collectively determine an educational institution’s resilience and capacity for long-term structural adjustment following a crisis. By elucidating the mechanisms that enable or impede organizational learning and change, this paper contributes insights into overcoming entrenched practices, thereby enhancing schools’ preparedness and response capabilities for future crises and current policy challenges.

Lu, A. and Matheny, K. (2025) “Equal Inputs, Unequal Outputs: How Capacity Constrains Policy Implementation.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

As education researchers continue to investigate policies at scale and across diverse contexts, scholars must develop a better understanding of mechanisms shaping policy effects. In this study, we use the case of a federal initiative allowing high school students to use the Pell Grant for dual enrollment to investigate how institutions’ capacities shaped policy efficacy. We find that colleges’ capacities for policy implementation depended on their pre-existing resources (“foundational capacity”), the resources to execute the policy given policy-induced constraints (“execution capacity”), and the resources to provide the target population with access to the policy (“provision capacity”). We contend that institutions that may benefit the most from equitable policies also have the least capacity to implement them.

Bridgeforth, J., Lu, A., and Pickett, A. (2025) “Reclaiming Educational Fraud and Waste: A Conceptual Framework to Locate the True Sources of Resource Leakage and Harm in The U.S. K-12 System.” Working Paper.

The recent dismantling of federal educational institutions has been legitimated under the banner of “eliminating fraud and waste.” In this paper, we reclaim these terms to locate the sources of potential fraud and waste in the U.S. K-12 education system through a novel conceptual framework that centers both structural components and the actions of educational actors. We posit that overdiagnosing failure within the public education system, coupled with a lack of regulation of private actors, are the true sources of potential fraud and waste in the system. We apply this framework to the Arizona charter school market to illuminate how it can be used by policymakers and researchers to understand particular contexts in which fraud and waste are prevalent.