This article was originally published on the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy website on March 30, 2023.
Sarah Komisarow received the Thomas A. Downes Best Paper Award for authoring the top journal article published in 2022 in Education Finance and Policy, the flagship journal of the Association for Education Finance and Policy.
In the paper, "Comprehensive Support and Student Success: Can Out of School Time Make a Difference?," Komisarow finds that students who won random lotteries to enroll in a program offering extra summer and after-school educational and social support had better grades and less chance of being suspended than similar students who did not participate.
“Sarah's groundbreaking study is the first to establish that comprehensive out-of-school support for low-achieving middle school students can be effective in reducing longstanding achievement gaps,” said colleague Charles Clotfelter, Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics and Law at Duke. “Her study applies the soundest statistical methods to a policy challenge of the greatest importance to this country.”
"An exciting side point about Sarah’s excellent paper is that a Sanford School undergraduate played a major role in the development of Student U, the program that she evaluated," added Helen "Sunny" Ladd, Susan B. King Distinguished Professor Emerita of Public Policy at Duke. "Inspired by Tony Brown’s Social Entrepreneurship class and encouraged by my education policy seminar, Dan Kimberg (Class of 2007) took the lead in setting up the program in 2005."