Educated guess
What Can Be Done to Improve Struggling High Schools?
Julie Berry Cullen et al.
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2013, Pages 133-152
Abstract:
In spite of decades of well-intentioned efforts targeted at struggling high schools, outcomes today are little improved. A handful of innovative programs have achieved great success on a small scale, but more generally, the economic futures of the students at the bottom of the human capital distribution remain dismal. In our view, expanding access to educational options that focus on life skills and work experience, as opposed to a focus on traditional definitions of academic success, represents the most cost-effective, broadly implementable source of improvements for this group.
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Late Interventions Matter Too: The Case of College Coaching New Hampshire
Scott Carrell & Bruce Sacerdote
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
We present evidence from an ongoing field experiment in college coaching/mentoring. The experiment is designed to ask whether mentoring plus cash incentives provided to high school students late in their senior year have meaningful impacts on college going and persistence. For women, we find large impacts on the decision to enroll in college and to remain in college. Intention to treat estimates are an increase in 15 percentage points in the college going rate (against a base rate of 50 percent) while treatment on the treated estimates are 30 percentage points. Offering cash bonuses alone without mentoring has no effect. There are no effects for men in the sample. The absence of effects for men is not explained by an interaction of the program with academic ability, work habits, or family and guidance support for college applications. However, differential returns to college and/or occupational choice may explain some of the differences in treatment effects for men and women.
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Jennifer Graves
American Economic Review, May 2013, Pages 279-283
Abstract:
This paper presents evidence that school districts' use of an alternative academic calendar, the year-round school calendar, results in a reduction in maternal employment for women with school-aged children that varies in magnitude across racial groups. Negative employment effects are larger in districts with a particularly high proportion white and smaller in districts with a particularly high proportion of minorities. The larger effects in primarily white school districts is not likely to be explained by income differences, yet could potentially be explained by the lower reliance on relatives for child care among whites than minorities.
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James Heckman & Lakshmi Raut
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
This paper formulates a structural dynamic programming model of preschool investment choices of altruistic parents and then empirically estimates the structural parameters of the model using the NLSY79 data. The paper finds that preschool investment significantly boosts cognitive and non-cognitive skills, which enhance earnings and school outcomes. It also finds that a standard Mincer earnings function, by omitting measures of non-cognitive skills on the right hand side, overestimates the rate of return to schooling. From the estimated equilibrium Markov process, the paper studies the nature of within generation earnings distribution and intergenerational earnings and schooling mobility. The paper finds that a tax financed free preschool program for the children of poor socioeconomic status generates positive net gains to the society in terms of average earnings and higher intergenerational earnings and schooling mobility.
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The Relationship between Schooling and Migration: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws
Peter McHenry
Economics of Education Review, August 2013, Pages 24-40
Abstract:
I estimate the effect of schooling on the propensity to migrate by exploiting variation in schooling due to compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) in the United States. I obtain negative estimates of this effect among those with relatively little schooling. In contrast, previous research estimates positive schooling effects on migration at higher levels of schooling. I speculate that additional schooling at low levels enhances local labor market contacts and thereby increases the opportunity cost of migration (leaving those contacts behind).
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Making College Worth It: A Review of Research on the Returns to Higher Education
Philip Oreopoulos & Uros Petronijevic
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
Recent stories of soaring student debt levels and under-placed college graduates have caused some to question whether a college education is still a sound investment. In this paper, we review the literature on the returns to higher education in an attempt to determine who benefits from college. Despite the tremendous heterogeneity across potential college students, we conclude that the investment appears to payoff for both the average and marginal student. During the past three decades in particular, the earnings premium associated with a college education has risen substantially. Beyond the pecuniary benefits of higher education, we suggest that there also may exist non-pecuniary benefits. Given these findings, it is perhaps surprising that among recent cohorts college completion rates have stagnated. We discuss potential explanations for this trend and conclude by succinctly interpreting the evidence on how to make the most out of college.
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Parental Credit Constraints and Children's College Education
Olga Sorokina
Journal of Family and Economic Issues, June 2013, Pages 157-171
Abstract:
What fraction of college-age youths in the United States comes from liquidity-constrained families? This question is important because such youths may have difficulties borrowing for college education and be less likely to enroll. While most earlier studies have concluded that credit constraints in education are not pervasive, these studies have relied on indirect measures and data sources from the 1980s. The contribution of this descriptive study is the use of parents' reports of borrowing limitations in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) Young Adult Supplement to evaluate the pervasiveness of credit constraints in the early 2000s. The results indicate that about 20 percent of college-age youths are potentially credit-constrained and are less likely to attend college.
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Information and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Cellular Phone Experiment
Roland Fryer
NBER Working Paper, June 2013
Abstract:
This paper describes a field experiment in Oklahoma City Public Schools in which students were provided with free cellular phones and daily information about the link between human capital and future outcomes via text message. Students' reported beliefs about the relationship between education and outcomes were influenced by treatment, and treatment students also report being more focused and working harder in school. However, there were no measureable changes in attendance, behavioral incidents, or test scores. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which students cannot translate effort into measureable output, though other explanations are possible.
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How fair is access to more prestigious UK universities?
Vikki Boliver
British Journal of Sociology, June 2013, Pages 344-364
Abstract:
Now that most UK universities have increased their tuition fees to £9,000 a year and are implementing new Access Agreements as required by the Office for Fair Access, it has never been more important to examine the extent of fair access to UK higher education and to more prestigious UK universities in particular. This paper uses Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) data for the period 1996 to 2006 to explore the extent of fair access to prestigious Russell Group universities, where ‘fair' is taken to mean equal rates of making applications to and receiving offers of admission from these universities on the part of those who are equally qualified to enter them. The empirical findings show that access to Russell Group universities is far from fair in this sense and that little changed following the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and their initial increase to £3,000 a year in 2006. Throughout this period, UCAS applicants from lower class backgrounds and from state schools remained much less likely to apply to Russell Group universities than their comparably qualified counterparts from higher class backgrounds and private schools, while Russell Group applicants from state schools and from Black and Asian ethnic backgrounds remained much less likely to receive offers of admission from Russell Group universities in comparison with their equivalently qualified peers from private schools and the White ethnic group.
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Do First Impressions Matter? Improvement in Early Career Teacher Effectiveness
Allison Atteberry, Susanna Loeb & James Wyckoff
NBER Working Paper, June 2013
Abstract:
Educational policymakers struggle to find ways to improve the quality of the teacher workforce. The early career period represents a unique opportunity to identify struggling teachers, examine the likelihood of future improvement, and make strategic pre-tenure investments in improvement as well as dismissals to increase teaching quality. To date, only a little is known about the dynamics of teacher performance in the first five years. This paper asks how much teachers vary in performance improvement during their first five years of teaching and to what extent initial job performance predicts later performance. We find that, on average, initial performance is quite predictive of future performance, far more so than typically measured teacher characteristics. Predictions are particularly powerful at the extremes. We employ these predictions to explore the likelihood of personnel actions that inappropriately distinguish performance when such predictions are mistaken as well as the much less discussed costs of failure to distinguish performance when meaningful differences exist. The results have important consequences for improving the quality of the teacher workforce.
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Sarena Goodman & Lesley Turner
Journal of Labor Economics, April 2013, Pages 409-420
Abstract:
Teacher compensation schemes are often criticized for lacking a performance-based component. Proponents argue that teacher incentive pay can raise student achievement and stimulate system-wide innovation. We examine a group-based teacher incentive scheme implemented in New York City and investigate whether specific features of the program contributed to its ineffectiveness. Although overall the program had little effect on student achievement, we show that in schools where incentives to free ride were weakest, the program led to small increases in math achievement. Our results underscore the importance of carefully considering the design of teacher incentive pay programs.
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Todd Stinebrickner & Ralph Stinebrickner
NBER Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
We estimate a dynamic learning model of the college dropout decision, taking advantage of unique expectations data to greatly reduce our reliance on assumptions that would otherwise be necessary for identification. We find that forty-five percent of the dropout that occurs in the first two years of college can be attributed to what students learn about their about academic performance, but that this type of learning becomes a less important determinant of dropout after the midpoint of college We use our model to quantify the importance of the possible avenues through which poor grade performance could influence dropout. Our simulations show that students who perform poorly tend to learn that staying in school is not worthwhile, not that they fail out or learn that they are more likely (than they previously believed) to fail out in the future. We find that poor performance both substantially decreases the enjoyability of school and substantially influences beliefs about post-college earnings.
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Erik Meyer & Chris Van Klaveren
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Policies that aim at improving student achievement frequently increase instructional time, for example by means of an extended day program. There is, however, hardly any evidence that these programs are effective, and the few studies that allow causal inference indicate that we should expect neutral to small effects of such programs. This study conducts a randomized field experiment to estimate the effect of an extended day program in seven Dutch elementary schools on math and language achievement. The empirical results show that this three-month program had no significant effect on math or language achievement.
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Education, Cognition and Health: Evidence from a Social Experiment
Costas Meghir, Mårten Palme & Emilia Simeonova
NBER Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
In this paper we examine how an education policy intervention - the introduction of a comprehensive school in Sweden that increased the number of compulsory years of schooling, affected cognitive and non-cognitive skills and long-term health. We use detailed administrative data combined with survey information to create a data set with background information, child ability and long-term adult outcomes. We show that extra education results in significant gains in skills among children, but the effects on long-term health are overall negligible. However, we demonstrate that the schooling reform had heterogeneous effects across family socio-economic backgrounds and initial skill endowments, with significant improvements in cognition and skills for lower Socio-economic status individuals and lower ability people.
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Class-size effects on adolescents' mental health and well-being in Swedish schools
Niklas Jakobsson, Mattias Persson & Mikael Svensson
Education Economics, Spring 2013, Pages 248-263
Abstract:
This paper analyzes whether class size has an effect on the prevalence of mental health problems and well-being among adolescents in Swedish schools. We use cross-sectional data collected in year 2008 covering 2755 Swedish adolescents in ninth grade from 40 schools and 159 classes. We utilize different econometric approaches to address potential between- and within-school endogeneity including school-fixed effects and regression discontinuity approaches. Our results indicate no robust effects of class size on the prevalence of mental health problems and well-being, and we cannot reject the hypothesis that class size has no effect on mental health and well-being at all.
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Universities Scale Like Cities
Anthony van Raan
PLoS ONE, March 2013
Abstract:
Recent studies of urban scaling show that important socioeconomic city characteristics such as wealth and innovation capacity exhibit a nonlinear, particularly a power law scaling with population size. These nonlinear effects are common to all cities, with similar power law exponents. These findings mean that the larger the city, the more disproportionally they are places of wealth and innovation. Local properties of cities cause a deviation from the expected behavior as predicted by the power law scaling. In this paper we demonstrate that universities show a similar behavior as cities in the distribution of the ‘gross university income' in terms of total number of citations over ‘size' in terms of total number of publications. Moreover, the power law exponents for university scaling are comparable to those for urban scaling. We find that deviations from the expected behavior can indeed be explained by specific local properties of universities, particularly the field-specific composition of a university, and its quality in terms of field-normalized citation impact. By studying both the set of the 500 largest universities worldwide and a specific subset of these 500 universities - the top-100 European universities - we are also able to distinguish between properties of universities with as well as without selection of one specific local property, the quality of a university in terms of its average field-normalized citation impact. It also reveals an interesting observation concerning the working of a crucial property in networked systems, preferential attachment.
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Prelude to the Common Core: Internationally Benchmarking a State's Math Standards
Christopher Woolard
Educational Policy, July 2013, Pages 615-644
Abstract:
As states struggle with the notion of international competitiveness, the quality and rigor of academic content standards has come into question. While Ohio's content standards are well regarded, the state initiated a process to revise the standards and eventually joined with the majority of states in adopting a voluntary set of national standards - the Common Core. This study uses the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) methodology to examine Ohio's current math content standards in comparison to TIMSS, PISA, high performing international counterparts, and the recently released Common Core. Specifically, it examines whether the state's standards are "a mile wide and inch deep." Second, this study analyzes whether high performing countries' standards are more aligned to Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) through the SEC lens of topic and cognitive expectations. Ohio's standards generally are less focused than the international comparisons, not very aligned to TIMSS and PISA, and have lower cognitive expectations. The CCSS have greatly increased that focus by reducing the number of topics in the analyzed grade levels while increasing the levels of cognitive expectations. These results provide a baseline for comparison to the full implementation of the Common Core. Once fully implemented, policy makers will have a reference point for evaluation of policy goals.
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Donghee Yvette Wohn et al.
Computers & Education, April 2013, Pages 424-436
Abstract:
Using survey data collected from a sample of high school students in the United States (N = 504), this study examined how different types of social capital associated with parents, close friends, and Facebook Friends were related to students' confidence about their knowledge of the college application process and their expectations about succeeding in college. We found that social media use plays a significant role only for first-generation students - students whose parents did not graduate from college. For first-generation students, finding information about college through social media was associated with higher levels of efficacy about college application procedures. Having access via social media to a broader network of people who could actively answer questions and provide informational support was positively related with first-generation students' expectations about their ability to be successful in college, but was not the case for non first-generations.
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Sabine Krolak-Schwerdt, Matthias Böhmer & Cornelia Gräsel
Social Psychology of Education, June 2013, Pages 215-239
Abstract:
Research on teachers' judgments of student performance has demonstrated that educational assessments may be biased or may more correctly take the achievements of students into account depending on teachers' motivations while making the judgment. Building on research on social judgment formation the present investigation examined whether the accountability of teachers has an influence on judgment formation. We predicted that unaccountable teachers would activate social categories and use them for the assessment, whereas accountable teachers' attention would be directed to individual attributes of students. Using secondary school teachers as participants, three studies investigating teachers' assessments, inferences and memory for students' attributes supported these hypotheses. Thus, accountability appears to be a moderator of social information processing and judgment formation in the domain of educational assessments.
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Katherin Barg
European Sociological Review, June 2013, Pages 565-579
Abstract:
In France, the transition from lower to upper secondary education is quite particular: families are involved in an institutionalized dialogue with the school. In the first step of this dialogue, the families pronounce a school track request; in the second step, the staff meeting formulates a school track proposition. As a third step, the families have the option to reject the staff's decision and if they do so, they are invited to discuss their request with the headmaster. Based on this obligatory talk, a decision is taken by the headmaster. This article investigates the influence of students' social background on the second step, i.e. the staff meeting's proposition. Based on rational action theory, first, a model is developed to explain the staff's decision-making and, second, this model is empirically tested with rich longitudinal data. In sum, the findings reveal that the staff's decisions are extremely driven by families' requests and, thus, reproduce the social class differentials that emerge through families' decision-making. Moreover, given the same request and school performance, the staff is even more likely to propose the general school track to families from higher social classes. Finally, the results show a notable impact of parental involvement on school staff's decision-making.
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Asmus Leth Olsen
Judgment and Decision Making, May 2013, Pages 365-371
Abstract:
Numerical performance information is increasingly important to political decision-making in the public sector. Some have suggested that biases in citizens' processing of numerical information can be exploited by politicians to skew citizens' perception of performance. I report on an experiment on how citizens evaluate numerical performance information from a public school context. The experiment is conducted with a large and diverse sample of the Danish population (N=1156). The analysis shows a strong leftmost-digit-bias in citizens' evaluation of school grading information. Thus, very small changes in reported average grades, which happen to shift the leftmost grade digit, can lead to very large shifts in citizens' evaluation of performance. The rightmost digit on the grade is almost fully ignored.
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Central School Exit Exams and Labor-Market Outcomes
Marc Piopiunik, Guido Schwerdt & Ludger Woessmann
European Journal of Political Economy, September 2013, Pages 93-108
Abstract:
Many countries use centralized exit exams as a governance devise of the school system. While abundant evidence suggests positive effects of central exams on achievement tests, previous research on university-bound students shows no effects on subsequent earnings. We suggest that labor-market effects may be more imminent for students leaving school directly for the labor market and, on rigid labor markets, for unemployment. Exploiting variation in exit-exam systems across German states, we find that central exams are indeed associated with higher earnings for students from the school type directly bound for the labor market, as well as with lower unemployment.
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Schools and Location: Tiebout, Alonso, and Governmental Finance Policy
Eric Hanushek & Kuzey Yilmaz
Journal of Public Economic Theory, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many discussions of school finance policy fail to consider how households respond to policies that change the attractiveness of different residential locations. We develop a general equilibrium model that incorporates workplace choice, residential choice, and political choice of tax and expenditure levels. Importantly, we consider multiple workplaces, a fundamental feature of today's metropolitan landscape. This basic model permits investigating how accessibility and public goods interact in a metropolitan area. The model is used to analyze two conventional policy initiatives: school district consolidation and district power equalization. The surprising conclusion is that school quality and welfare can fall for all families when these restrictions on choice are introduced.