Healthcare services outside of school can impact the likelihood of receiving school-based special education identification and services. Using Massachusetts administrative data on public school students, this paper employs the difference-in-differences method to examine the impacts of expanded Medicaid coverage for mental and behavioral healthcare resulting from the Rosie D. lawsuit of 2009. Rosie D. caused a 0.3 percentage point (15%) increase in emotional disorder (ED) identification among low-income grade 9–12 students. After Rosie D., students with ED were more likely to be Black or multiracial. Students were also more likely to have experienced suspension or chronic absenteeism before ED identification. Finally, students with ED in grades K–8 were educated in less inclusive settings.
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Department of Education
Christopher Cleveland
Assistant Professor of Education and Education Policy
Room 234
Spring 2026 Office Hours
Wednesdays 4-5 PM
Biography
Dr. Christopher Cleveland is an Assistant Professor of Education and Education Policy, holding a joint appointment in the Education Department and Annenberg Institute. His research and teaching focus on quantitative policy analysis in school finance, gifted and special education, and human capital.
Before joining Brown University, Christopher was a Research Assistant Professor at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development and a Consulting Manager at Education Resource Strategies.
Christopher Cleveland has a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Program Evaluation from Harvard University; an Ed.M. in Education Policy and Management from Harvard Graduate School of Education; an A.M. in Education from Harvard University; and an A.B. in Sociology with a Secondary in Mind, Brain, & Behavior from Harvard College.
Recent News
A growing body of research shows that students benefit when they demographically match their teachers. However, little is known about how matching affects social-emotional development. Professor Christopher Cleveland and his co-authors use student-fixed effects to exploit changes over time in the proportion of teachers within a school grade who demographically match a student to estimate the effect on social-emotional measures, test scores, and behavioral outcomes
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The Brown Daily Herald
RI education department releases special education blueprint amid federal funding cuts
The Rhode Island Department of Education recently released its "Blueprint & Strategic Plan for Differently-Abled Students’ Success." Professor Christopher Cleveland spoke with The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. about some of his 'kudos' and 'questions' regarding the plan.
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This fall, Providence’s Classical High School began offering its entrance exam in Spanish for the first time in the public school’s 182-year history. Professors Tricia Kelly and Christopher Cleveland provided commentary.
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“One of the central concerns with gifted education, in particular with the younger ages, are considerations for which students are going to be able to be identified as gifted. This is a clear concern when the system has an opt-in policy, where it might require families to sign up for some like outside assessment to be identified as gifted, and not all families might have the resources or the knowledge to do that,” said Christopher Cleveland, assistant professor of education and education policy at Brown University.
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Professor Christopher Cleveland and co-authors examine the predictive power of various student metrics on long-term educational success, finding that while survey-based cognitive and self-regulation measures initially correlate with high school and college outcomes, traditional indicators like test scores, GPA, and attendance-related factors provide stronger and more reliable predictions.
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