School choices
School District Lines Stratify Educational Opportunity by Race and Poverty
Jennifer Ayscue & Gary Orfield
Race and Social Problems, March 2015, Pages 5-20
Abstract:
School segregation has serious consequences for educational opportunity and success. Across the nation, school segregation by race and poverty is deepening and varies by state. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, this study explores the relationship between fragmentation - the degree to which metropolitan areas are split into many separate school districts - and segregation. Three measures of segregation - exposure, concentration, and evenness - are employed to analyze state- and metropolitan-level data between 1989 and 2010 in four states with different school district structures. Findings in this exploratory study indicate that states and metropolitan areas with more fragmented district structures are associated with higher levels of segregation. In comparison with the less fragmented states of North Carolina and Virginia, in the highly fragmented states of New York and New Jersey, the typical black and Latino student are exposed to smaller shares of white students, the typical white student is more isolated with other white peers, there are greater disparities in exposure to low-income students by race, the share of non-white segregated schools is substantially larger, and levels of multiracial unevenness are higher. (These states were selected from a set of in-depth state studies by the Civil Rights Project of the states from Maine to North Carolina; comparable data are not available for many other states.) Highly fragmented states and metropolitan areas with numerous small school districts cannot confront segregation by exclusively focusing their efforts within districts; in these areas, segregation is fundamentally occurring among districts rather than within districts. Instead, highly fragmented areas could use regional strategies, such as interdistrict transfer programs, regional magnet schools, and district consolidation, to make progress in desegregating their schools across school district lines.
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College Access, Initial College Choice and Degree Completion
Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz & Jonathan Smith
NBER Working Paper, February 2015
Abstract:
The relatively low degree completion rate of U.S. college students has prompted debate over the extent to which the problem is attributable to the students or to their choice of colleges. Estimating the impact of initial college choice is confounded by the non-random nature of college selection. We solve this selection problem by studying the universe of SAT-takers in the state of Georgia, where minimum SAT scores required for admission to the four-year public college sector generate exogenous variation in initial college choice. Regression discontinuity estimates comparing the relatively low-skilled students just above and below this minimum threshold show that access to this sector increases enrollment in four-year colleges, largely by diverting students from two-year community colleges. Most importantly, access to four-year public colleges substantially increases bachelor's degree completion rates, particularly for low-income students. Conditional on a student's own academic skill, the institutional completion rate of his initial college explains a large fraction of his own probability of completion. Consistent with prior research on college quality and the two-year college penalty, these results may explain part of the labor market return to college quality.
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Inequality, marketisation and the left: Schools policy in England and Sweden
Timothy Hicks
European Journal of Political Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is argued in this article that the marketisation of schools policy has a tendency to produce twin effects: an increase in educational inequality, and an increase in general satisfaction with the schooling system. However, the effect on educational inequality is very much stronger where prevailing societal inequality is higher. The result is that cross-party political agreement on the desirability of such reforms is much more likely where societal inequality is lower (as the inequality effects are also lower). Counterintuitively, then, countries that are more egalitarian - and so typically thought of as being more left-wing - will have a higher likelihood of adopting marketisation than more unequal countries. Evidence is drawn from a paired comparison of English and Swedish schools policies from the 1980s to the present. Both the policy history and elite interviews lend considerable support for the theory in terms of both outcomes and mechanisms.
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Missed Signals: The Effect of ACT College-Readiness Measures on Post-Secondary Decisions
Andrew Foote, Lisa Schulkind & Teny Shapiro
Economics of Education Review, June 2015, Pages 39-51
Abstract:
In the face of shrinking government budgets and a growing need to train a high-skilled labor force, policymakers have become increasingly interested in cost-effective measures that induce more students to apply to and enroll in college. In this paper, we use a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of students receiving information about their own college-readiness after taking the ACT on their subsequent college enrollment decisions. Using data from Colorado, where all high school students are required to take the ACT, we find that students who receive information that they are college-ready are no more likely to attend college than those that do not receive this information. We discuss possible reasons for these findings.
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The Impact of Chicago's Small High School Initiative
Lisa Barrow, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach & Amy Claessens
Journal of Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This project examines the effects of the introduction of new small high schools on student performance in the Chicago Public School (CPS) district. Specifically, we investigate whether students attending small high schools have better graduation/enrollment rates and achievement than similar students who attend regular CPS high schools. We show that students who choose to attend a small school are more disadvantaged on average, including having prior test scores that are about 0.2 standard deviations lower than their elementary school classmates. To address the selection problem, we use an instrumental variables strategy and compare students who live in the same neighborhoods but differ in their residential proximity to a small school. In this approach, one student is more likely to sign up for a small school than another statistically identical student because the small school is located closer to the student's house and therefore the "cost" of attending the school is lower. The distance-to-small-school variable has strong predictive power to identify who attends a small school. We find that small schools students are substantially more likely to persist in school and eventually graduate. Nonetheless, there is no positive impact on student achievement as measured by test scores.
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Victor Lavy
NBER Working Paper, February 2015
Abstract:
The long term effect of teachers' pay for performance is of particular interest, as critics of these schemes claim that they encourage teaching to the test or orchestrated cheating by teachers and schools. In this paper, I address these concerns by examining the effect of teachers' pay for performance on long term human capital outcomes, in particular attainment and quality of higher education, and labor market outcomes at adulthood, in particular employment and earnings. I base this study on an experiment conducted a decade and a half ago in Israel and present evidence that the pay for performance scheme increased a wide range of long run human capital measures. Treated students are 4.3 percentage points more likely to enroll in a university and to complete an additional 0.17 years of university schooling, a 60 percent increase relative to the control group mean. These gains are mediated by overall improvements in the high school matriculation outcomes due to the teachers' intervention at 12th grade. The pay scheme led also to a significant 7 percent increase in annual earnings, to a 2 percent reduction in claims for unemployment benefits, and a 1 percent decline in eligibility for the government disability payment.
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How the Time of Day Affects Productivity: Evidence from School Schedules
Nolan Pope
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Increasing the efficiency of the school system is a primary focus of policy makers. I analyze how the time of day affects students' productivity and if efficiency gains can be obtained by rearranging the order of tasks performed throughout the school day. Using a panel data set of nearly two million 6th through 11th grade students in Los Angeles county, I perform within teacher, class type, and student estimation of the time-of-day effect on students' learning as measured by GPA and state test scores. I find that given a school start time students' learn more in the morning than later in the school day. Having a morning instead of afternoon math or English class increases a student's GPA by 0.072 (0.006) and 0.032 (0.006) respectively. A morning math class increases state test scores by an amount equivalent to increasing teacher quality by one-fourth standard deviation or half of the gender gap. Rearranging school schedules can lead to increased academic performance.
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Peer Turnover and Student Achievement: Implications for Classroom Assignment Policy
Marc Luppino
Economics of Education Review, June 2015, Pages 98-111
Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of peer turnover on academic achievement using random variation in classroom composition induced by Tennessee's Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) experiment. In central city school districts, I find that first graders benefit from greater peer turnover. Conversely, turnover is found to have a negative effect on young students in schools outside of central city districts. These results are consistent with a model of classroom learning in which the educational returns to having a stronger social network depend on neighborhood context. They suggest that a richer understanding of peer continuity effects is essential for designing optimal classroom assignment policies.
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The Paradox of Success at a No-Excuses School
Joanne Golann
Sociology of Education, April 2015, Pages 103-119
Abstract:
No recent reform has had so profound an effect as no-excuses schools in increasing the achievement of low-income black and Hispanic students. In the past decade, no-excuses schools - whose practices include extended instructional time, data-driven instruction, ongoing professional development, and a highly structured disciplinary system - have emerged as one of the most influential urban school-reform models. Yet almost no research has been conducted on the everyday experiences of students and teachers inside these schools. Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside one no-excuses school and interviews with 92 school administrators, teachers, and students, I argue that even in a school promoting social mobility, teachers still reinforce class-based skills and behaviors. Because of these schools' emphasis on order as a prerequisite to raising test scores, teachers stress behaviors that undermine success for middle-class children. As a consequence, these schools develop worker-learners - children who monitor themselves, hold back their opinions, and defer to authority - rather than lifelong learners. I discuss the implications of these findings for market-based educational reform, inequality, and research on noncognitive skills.
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John Papay & Matthew Kraft
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We present new evidence on the relationship between teacher productivity and job experience. Econometric challenges require identifying assumptions to model the within-teacher returns to experience with teacher fixed effects. We describe the identifying assumptions used in past models and in a new approach that we propose, and we demonstrate how violations of these assumptions can lead to substantial bias. Consistent with past research, we find that teachers experience rapid productivity improvement early in their careers. However, we also find evidence of returns to experience later in the career, indicating that teachers continue to build human capital beyond these first years.
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Risky business: An analysis of teacher risk preferences
Daniel Bowen et al.
Education Economics, July/August 2015, Pages 470-480
Abstract:
A range of proposals aim to reform teacher compensation, recruitment, and retention. Teachers have generally not embraced these policies. One potential explanation for their objections is that teachers are relatively risk averse. We examine this hypothesis using a risk-elicitation task common to experimental economics. By comparing preferences of new teachers with those entering other professions, we find that individuals choosing to teach are significantly more risk averse. This suggests that the teaching profession may attract individuals who are less amenable to certain reforms. Policy-makers should take into account teacher risk characteristics when considering reforms that may clash with preferences.
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Does early schooling narrow outcome gaps for advantaged and disadvantaged children?
Agne Suziedelyte & Anna Zhu
Economics of Education Review, April 2015, Pages 76-88
Abstract:
This paper explores how starting school at a younger age affects the developmental score gaps between relatively advantaged and disadvantaged children. While previous findings suggest that delaying school entry may improve school readiness, less is known about whether it has differential effects for advantaged and disadvantaged children. For disadvantaged children, starting school early may be a better alternative to staying at home for longer as school provides a more stable and educational environment than the family home, overcompensating for the penalties of starting school early. This may be less applicable to relatively advantaged children who generally have greater access to resources in the home and who are more likely to utilise formal pre-school services. We use the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to investigate if there is support for this hypothesis. The endogeneity of school starting age is addressed using the regression discontinuity design. We find that an early school start generally improves children's cognitive skills, which is even more pronounced for disadvantaged children. In contrast, an early school start tends to negatively affect children's non-cognitive skills with both advantaged and disadvantaged children affected in similar ways. Thus, our findings suggest that an earlier school entry may narrow the gaps in cognitive skills, whereas the gaps in non-cognitive skills are not affected by the school starting age.
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The distributional effects of the multi-track year-round calendar: A quantile regression approach
Steven McMullen, Kathryn Rouse & Justin Haan
Applied Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
Year-round school (YRS) calendars that redistribute the 180 school days more evenly across the calendar year are growing in popularity. Learning loss theory predicts student response to year-round calendars could vary substantially across achievement levels. Existing research on the heterogeneous effects of YRS focuses on estimating mean treatment effects by subgroup. We instead use a quantile regression approach with school and grade-by-year fixed effects to estimate the distributional impact of year-round calendars using a natural experiment setting in Wake County, NC. Contrary to the prior literature, we find evidence of a positive impact of year-round calendars for the lowest-performing students. However, even for these students, the estimated academic impact is small.
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Effects of professorial tenure on undergraduate ratings of teaching performance
Dorothy Cheng
Education Economics, May/June 2015, Pages 338-357
Abstract:
This study estimates the effect of professorial tenure on undergraduate ratings of learning, instructor quality, and course quality at the University of California, San Diego from Summer 2004 to Spring 2012. During this eight-year period, 120 assistant professors received tenure and 83 associate professors attained full rank. A differences-in-differences model controlling for teaching experience, study hours, response rate, and unobserved heterogeneity among terms, courses, and professors suggests that for a given professor, tenure does not have a significant impact on student ratings of teaching performance, at least in the immediate years after advancement. The results are similar for the promotion from associate to full professor.
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Dara Shifrer et al.
Youth & Society, May 2015, Pages 295-318
Abstract:
The long touted athlete advantage in college enrollment has been tempered by assertions that this advantage is actually due to characteristics that precede participation. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the benefits of sports extend into contemporary times and apply equally to female and racial minority athletes. This study uses three nationally representative longitudinal data sets of students who were 10th graders in 1980, 1990, and 2002. We find that high school sports participation was positively associated with college enrollment, even with the utilization of propensity score modeling, for White boys and girls, Black boys, and Latino boys and girls during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The most important gender and race differences include Black female athletes' college-going disadvantage in the 1980s and 1990s, and girls' persistently lower rates of high school sports participation than boys'.
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Spillovers from Universities: Evidence from the Land-Grant Program
Shimeng Liu
Journal of Urban Economics, May 2015, Pages 25-41
Abstract:
This paper estimates the short- and long-run effects of universities on geographic clustering of economic activity, labor market composition and local productivity and presents evidence of local spillovers from universities. I treat the designation of land-grant universities in the 1860s as a natural experiment after controlling for the confounding factors with a combination of synthetic control methods and event-study analyses. Three key results are obtained. First, the designation increased local population density by 6 percent within 10 years and 45 percent in 80 years. Second, the designation did not change the relative size of local manufacturing sector. Third, the designation enhanced local manufacturing output per worker by $2136 (1840 dollars; 57 percent) in 80 years while the short-run effects were negligible. This positive effect on the productivity in non-education sectors suggests the existence of local spillovers from universities. Over an 80-year horizon, my results indicate that the increase in manufacturing productivity reflects both the impact of direct spillovers from universities and general agglomeration economies that arise from the increase in population.
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Irmak Sirer et al.
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Spring 2015, Pages 358-377
Abstract:
Existing research highlights that families face geographic, social, and psychological constraints that may limit the extent to which competition can take hold in school choice programs. In this paper, we address the implications of such findings by creating a network of student flows from 11 cohorts of eighth-grade students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). We applied a custom algorithm to group together schools with similar sending and receiving patterns, and calculated the difference in mean achievement between a student's attended and assigned high schools. For all identified school groupings, we found that the students were on average moving to higher achieving schools. We also found that the movement toward higher achieving schools of the top achievement quartile of students was over twice as large as that of the bottom quartile, but that the flows of both the highest and lowest achieving student quartiles were toward higher achieving destinations. Our results suggest that student movements in CPS between the years of 2001 to 2005 were consistent with creating market pressure for improvement as well as increasing segregation by achievement. However, further research into how schools responded to those movements is required to make inferences about the level or consequences of competition generated by choice-related reforms during that time.
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Peggy Keller et al.
Journal of Educational Psychology, February 2015, Pages 236-245
Abstract:
Adequate sleep is essential for child learning. However, school systems may inadvertently be promoting sleep deprivation through early school start times. The current study examines the potential implications of early school start times for standardized test scores in public elementary schools in Kentucky. Associations between early school start time and poorer school performance were observed primarily for schools serving few students who qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches. Associations were controlled for teacher-student ratio, racial composition, and whether the school was in the Appalachian region. Findings support the growing body of research showing that early school start times may influence student learning but offer some of the first evidence that this influence may occur for elementary school children and depend on school characteristics.
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Grade-Specific Experience, Grade Reassignments, and Teacher Turnover
Ben Ost & Jeffrey Schiman
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study documents that teacher turnover is strongly related to the pattern of grades that a teacher is asked to teach. Elementary teachers in North Carolina that teach the same grade in their first two years are approximately 20% more likely to stay than teachers who teach two different grades in their first two years of teaching. More generally, within total experience categories, teachers with the fewest years of grade-specific experience have the highest probability of turnover. We argue that this pattern is driven both by the disruption caused by grade reassignment and by the fact that teachers with stable grade assignments have effectively smaller workloads since they can reuse lesson plans and, more generally, apply grade-specific skills.
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Capitalization of Charter Schools into Residential Property Values
Scott Imberman, Michael Naretta & Margaret O'Rourke
NBER Working Paper, February 2015
Abstract:
While prior research has found clear impacts of schools and school quality on property values, little is known about whether charter schools have similar effects. Using sale price data for residential properties in Los Angeles County from 2008 to 2011 we estimate the neighborhood level impact of charter schools on housing prices. Using an identification strategy that relies on census block fixed-effects and variation in charter penetration over time, we find little evidence that the availability of charter schools affect housing prices on average. However, we do find that when restricting to charter schools located in the same school district as the household, housing prices outside Los Angeles Unified School District fall in response to an increase in nearby charter penetration.
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State Merit-Based Financial Aid Programs and College Attainment
David Sjoquist & John Winters
Journal of Regional Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the effects of state merit-based student aid programs on college attendance and degree completion. Our primary analysis uses microdata from the 2000 United States Census and 2001-2010 American Community Survey to estimate the effects of exposure to merit programs on educational outcomes for 25 states that adopted such programs by 2004. We also utilize administrative data for the University System of Georgia to look more in depth at the effects of exposure to the HOPE Scholarship on degree completion. We find strong consistent evidence that exposure to state merit aid programs have no meaningfully positive effect on college completion.
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School Quality and Educational Attainment: Japanese American Internment as a Natural Experiment
Martin Saavedra
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 1942, the United States incarcerated all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, including children, in internment camps. Using non-West Coast Japanese Americans and non-Japanese Asians as control groups, I estimate the effect of attending a War Relocation Authority school on educational attainment. Non-linear difference-in-differences estimates suggest that attending school within the internment camps decreased the probability of receiving a post-collegiate education by approximately 4 to 5 percentage points and decreased the probability of receiving a college degree by between 2 and 7 percentage points. I find some evidence that attending a WRA school may have decreased the returns to education as well. By using un-incarcerated birth cohorts and races, placebo tests find no evidence that the identifying assumptions are violated.
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Salaries in Space: The Spatial Dimensions of Teacher Compensation
Jacob Fowles
Public Finance Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article, drawing on a rich panel of administrative data comprising all public school teachers employed in Kentucky from 1997 to 2005, utilizes methods developed in spatial econometrics to test for spatial interdependence in the teacher remuneration policies utilized by public school districts. The results of the best fitting model suggest that a 1 percentage point increase in the salary generosity of a particular district's distance-weighted neighbors yields a 0.57 percentage point increase in the generosity of salaries within that district, even after controlling for relevant district characteristics and including time and district fixed effects. The results are discussed within the context of state education finance reforms, the school choice movement as well as the continued national focus on improving teacher quality as a primary mechanism to increase student achievement.
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Blissful Ignorance? A Natural Experiment on the Effect of Feedback on Students' Performance
Oriana Bandiera, Valentino Larcinese & Imran Rasul
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We provide evidence on whether providing university students with feedback on their past exam performance affects their future exam performance. Our identification strategy exploits a natural experiment in a leading UK university where different departments have historically different rules on the provision of feedback to their students. We find the provision of feedback has a positive effect on students' subsequent test scores: the mean impact corresponds to 13% of a standard deviation in test scores. The impact of feedback is stronger for more able students and for students who have less information to start with about the academic environment, while no subset of individuals is found to be discouraged by feedback. Our findings suggest that students have imperfect information on how their effort translates into test scores and that the provision of feedback might be a cost-effective means to increase students' exam performance.
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Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance
Louis-Philippe Beland & Richard Murphy
Louisiana State University Working Paper, December 2014
Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of removing mobile phones from classrooms. Combining administrative data on student performance with a unique survey of school mobile phone policies in four cities in England, we investigate the impact of introducing a ban on mobile phones on student performance, exploiting variations in schools' autonomous decisions to ban mobile phones. Our results indicate that there is an increase in student performance after a school bans the use of mobile phones and that these gains are driven by the lowest-achieving students. This suggests that restricting mobile phone use can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequality.