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The Impact of Voluntary Youth Service on Future Outcomes: Evidence from Teach For America
Will Dobbie & Roland Fryer
B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper provides causal estimates of the impact of service programs on those who serve, using data from a web-based survey of former Teach For America (TFA) applicants. We estimate the effect of voluntary youth service using a discontinuity in the TFA application process. Participating in TFA increases racial tolerance, makes individuals more optimistic about the life prospects of poor children, and makes them more likely to work in education.
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Mind-Set Interventions Are a Scalable Treatment for Academic Underachievement
David Paunesku et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The efficacy of academic-mind-set interventions has been demonstrated by small-scale, proof-of-concept interventions, generally delivered in person in one school at a time. Whether this approach could be a practical way to raise school achievement on a large scale remains unknown. We therefore delivered brief growth-mind-set and sense-of-purpose interventions through online modules to 1,594 students in 13 geographically diverse high schools. Both interventions were intended to help students persist when they experienced academic difficulty; thus, both were predicted to be most beneficial for poorly performing students. This was the case. Among students at risk of dropping out of high school (one third of the sample), each intervention raised students’ semester grade point averages in core academic courses and increased the rate at which students performed satisfactorily in core courses by 6.4 percentage points. We discuss implications for the pipeline from theory to practice and for education reform.
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Jason Fletcher
Social Science Research, July 2015, Pages 494–507
Abstract:
This paper provides some of the first evidence of peer effects in college enrollment decisions. There are several empirical challenges in assessing the influences of peers in this context, including the endogeneity of high school, shared group-level unobservables, and identifying policy-relevant parameters of social interactions models. This paper addresses these issues by using an instrumental variables/fixed effects approach that compares students in the same school but different grade-levels who are thus exposed to different sets of classmates. In particular, plausibly exogenous variation in peers’ parents’ college expectations are used as an instrument for peers’ college choices. Preferred specifications indicate that increasing a student’s exposure to college-going peers by ten percentage points is predicted to raise the student’s probability of enrolling in college by 4 percentage points. This effect is roughly half the magnitude of growing up in a household with married parents (vs. an unmarried household).
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Jennifer Delaney & Tyler Kearney
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study considers the impact of state-level guaranteed tuition programs on postsecondary tuition levels. The analytic framework argues that state-level laws requiring flat tuition rates for four years contain inflationary risk, which encourages institutions to set tuition higher than they otherwise would with annual adjustments. To empirically test this idea, this study uses a national panel dataset and a quasi-experimental difference-in-difference methodological approach, with Illinois’ Truth-in-Tuition law serving as the treatment condition. On average, institutions subject to this law increased annual tuition by approximately 26-30% and aggregate four-year tuition by approximately 6-7% in excess of the amount predicted by the trend for institutions not subject to the law. These findings are robust to multiple alternative specifications and support the idea that state-level guaranteed tuition programs encourage large institutional tuition increases. Implications of these findings for state policymakers, higher education institutional leaders, and college-age students and their families are also discussed.
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College Expansion and Curriculum Choice
Michael Kaganovich & Xuejuan Su
Indiana University Working Paper, April 2015
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the impact of college enrollment expansion on student academic achievements and labor market outcomes in the context of competition among colleges. When public policies promote “access” to college education, colleges adjust their curricula: Less selective public colleges adopt a less demanding curriculum in order to accommodate the influx of less able students. As we argue in the paper, this adjustment benefits low-ability college students at the expense of those of medium ability. At the same time, this reduces the competitive pressure faced by elite colleges, as less selective colleges become a less appealing alternative for the medium ability students. The selective, elite colleges therefore adopt a more demanding curriculum to better serve their most able students, again at the expense of medium ability students. The model offers an explanation to two sets of empirical phenomena: (i) the observed U-shaped earnings growth profile among college-educated workers in the U.S. and (ii) the diverging selectivity trends of American colleges.
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Does Small High School Reform Lift Urban Districts? Evidence From New York City
Leanna Stiefel, Amy Ellen Schwartz & Matthew Wiswall
Educational Researcher, April 2015, Pages 161-172
Abstract:
Research finds that small high schools deliver better outcomes than large high schools for urban students. An important outstanding question is whether this better performance is gained at the expense of losses elsewhere: Does small school reform lift the whole district? We explore New York City’s small high school reform in which hundreds of new small high schools were built in less than a decade. We use rich individual student data on four cohorts of New York City high school students and estimate effects of schools on student outcomes. Our results suggest that the introduction of small schools improved outcomes for students in all types of schools: large, small, continuously operating, and new. Small school reform lifted all boats.
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Teachers’ Unions, Compensation, and Tenure
Kristine West
Industrial Relations, April 2015, Pages 294–320
Abstract:
In this paper I show that school districts in which teachers negotiate via collective bargaining have greater returns to experience and grant tenure earlier than districts without collective bargaining. Districts that are unionized, either with or without legal collective bargaining protections, have higher returns to degrees and higher starting salaries than districts without a union. Unionization is not strongly correlated with the existence of output-based pay for performance but is correlated with the use of output-based measures in tenure decisions. Unionization is positively correlated with the number of junior teachers dismissed for poor performance but not strongly correlated with the number of senior teachers dismissed for poor performance.
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Do Student Loan Borrowers Opportunistically Default? Evidence from Bankruptcy Reform
Rajeev Darolia & Dubravka Ritter
Federal Reserve Working Paper, April 2015
Abstract:
Bankruptcy reform in 2005 eliminated debtors’ ability to discharge private student loan debt in bankruptcy. This law aimed to reduce costly defaults by diminishing the perceived incentive of some private student loan borrowers to declare bankruptcy even if they had sufficient income to service their debt. Using a unique, nationally representative sample of anonymized credit bureau files, we examine the bankruptcy filing and delinquency rates of private student loan borrowers in response to the 2005 bankruptcy reform. We do not find evidence that the nondischargeability provision reduced the likelihood of filing bankruptcy among private student loan borrowers as compared with other debtors whose incentives were not directly affected by the policy.
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The Cost of Financing Education: Can Student Debt Hinder Entrepreneurship?
Karthik Krishnan & Pinshuo Wang
Northeastern University Working Paper, March 2015
Abstract:
Student loans can impose a significant cost of undertaking risky endeavors such as starting up businesses. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), we find evidence supportive of the recent policy decisions to reduce the burden of student debt to promote entrepreneurship. First, we find that a greater amount of student debt is negatively related to the propensity to start a firm. Second, conditional on starting up a firm, individuals having more student debt have less profitable firms. Further, these effects are stronger among younger cohorts and for individuals in high-technology industries. Using the Higher Education Amendments of 1992, which made federal Stafford loans more widely available, as an exogenous shock to student debt, we find that student debt negatively impact entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial success. The negative relation between student debt and entrepreneurship is stronger when the individual has a dependent spouse. Further, we find that student debt reduces the tendency of high-reward and high risk-preferring individuals to take on entrepreneurial ventures. Our evidence indicates that student debt may inhibit entrepreneurship by reducing the expected payoff of these ventures to individuals by exacerbating the effect of negative outcomes on the individual. Given the high value of student loans outstanding (more than $1 trillion) and its potentially significant impact on entrepreneurship, we believe that our results shine some light on an important phenomenon.
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An axiomatization of multiple-choice test scoring
Andriy Zapechelnyuk
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This note axiomatically justifies a simple scoring rule for multiple-choice tests. The rule permits choosing any number, k, of available options and grants 1/k-th of the maximum score if one of the chosen options is correct, and zero otherwise. This rule satisfies a few desirable properties: simplicity of implementation, non-negative scores, discouragement of random guessing, and rewards for partial answers. This is a novel rule that has not been discussed or empirically tested in the literature.
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Curricular Policy as a Collective Effects Problem: A Distributional Approach
Andrew Penner et al.
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Current educational policies in the United States attempt to boost student achievement and promote equality by intensifying the curriculum and exposing students to more advanced coursework. This paper investigates the relationship between one such effort -- California’s push to enroll all 8th grade students in Algebra -- and the distribution of student achievement. We suggest that this effort is an instance of a “collective effects” problem, where the population-level effects of a policy are different from its effects at the individual level. In such contexts, we argue that it is important to consider broader population effects as well as the difference between “treated” and “untreated” individuals. To do so, we present differences in inverse propensity score weighted distributions to investigate how this curricular policy changed the distribution of student achievement more broadly. We find that California’s attempt to intensify the curriculum did not raise test scores at the bottom of the distribution, but did lower scores at the top of the distribution. These results highlight the efficacy of inverse propensity score weighting approaches for estimating collective effects, and provide a cautionary tale for curricular intensification efforts and other policies with collective effects.
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The Underutilized Potential of Teacher-to-Parent Communication: Evidence from a Field Experiment
Matthew Kraft
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Parental involvement is correlated with student performance, though the causal relationship is less well established. This experiment examined an intervention that delivered weekly one-sentence individualized messages from teachers to the parents of high school students in a credit recovery program. Messages decreased the percentage of students who failed to earn course credit from 15.8% to 9.3% – a 41% reduction. This reduction resulted primarily from preventing drop-outs, rather than from reducing failure or dismissal rates. The intervention shaped the content of parent-child conversations with messages emphasizing what students could improve, versus what students were doing well, producing the largest effects. We estimate the cost of this intervention per additional student credit earned to be less than one-tenth the typical cost per credit earned for the district. These findings underscore the value of educational policies that encourage and facilitate teacher-to-parent communication to empower parental involvement in their children's education.
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Can Improvements in Schools Spur Neighborhood Revitalization? Evidence from Building Investments
Keren Horn
Regional Science and Urban Economics, May 2015, Pages 108–118
Abstract:
For most households in the U.S. the public school to which they send their children is tied to the geographic location of their home. Economic theory predicts that households take into account the quality of the public school when making residential decisions. A large body of literature has documented that school quality alters the demand for housing in a neighborhood as measured by the capitalization of school quality into house prices. Demand for schools may also affect the quality of the housing stock by creating incentives for property owners to better maintain their buildings and units. Exploration of this potential relationship has been absent from the discussion on how schools influence communities. I attempt to fill this gap through investigating the relationship between school quality and capital investments in the housing stock. To investigate whether a relationship exists between schools and property owner capital investment activity, I rely on detailed building level investment data in New York City as well as measures of school performance. I explore whether consistent measures of school performance are associated with higher levels of investment activity. To identify whether this relationship is causal, that good schools can spur investment activity, I incorporate a boundary discontinuity identification strategy. Further, I test whether households respond to changes in school performance, exploring whether improvements in test scores over a five-year period are associated with higher levels of residential investments. Finally, I control for differences in populations across attendance zone boundaries through incorporating information on the composition of students at each school. My results suggest a significant relationship between performance in math and English Language Arts and property owner capital investment behavior. In my preferred specification, I estimate that a one standard deviation improvement in test scores is associated with a 2.5 percent increase in dollars invested in a building.
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The Relative Costs of New York City's New Small Public High Schools of Choice
Robert Bifulco
Syracuse University Working Paper, October 2014
Abstract:
Building on prior research by two of the present authors, which uses lottery-like features in New York City’s high school admissions process to rigorously demonstrate that new small public high schools in the district are markedly improving graduation prospects for disadvantaged students, the present paper demonstrates that these graduation benefits do not come at the cost of higher expenditures per graduate. The basis for these findings are two cost comparisons: (1) a "descriptive" comparison of per-pupil operating costs for the new small high schools with those for all other district high schools, and (2) an "experimental" comparison of per-pupil operating costs for the new small high schools with those attended by their control group counterparts. The descriptive comparison demonstrates that the new small schools spend a little more per pupil than the average district high school and a lot more than the largest of these other schools. By contrast, results of the experimental comparisons together with previous findings of two of the present authors about the substantial positive effects of the new small schools on high school graduation rates indicate that the cost per high school graduate is substantially lower for the small-school enrollees than for their control group counterparts. This seemingly counterintuitive result occurs because control group counterparts (1) attend high schools with annual per-pupil costs that are about the same as those for the new small schools, (2) are more likely to attend a fifth year of high school because they do not graduate in four years, and (3) are less likely to graduate from high school at all.
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Need-Based Aid and College Persistence: The Effects of the Ohio College Opportunity Grant
Eric Bettinger
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, May 2015, Pages 102S-119S
Abstract:
This article exploits a natural experiment to estimate the effects of need-based aid policies on first-year college persistence rates. In fall 2006, Ohio abruptly adopted a new state financial aid policy that was significantly more generous than the previous plan. Using student-level data and very narrowly defined sets of students, I estimate a difference-in-differences model to identify the program effects. Students who benefited from the program received awards about US$800 higher than they would have received under the prior program. These students’ drop-out rates fell by 2% as a result of the program. The new program also increased the likelihood that students attend 4-year campuses and increased their first-year grade point averages. The program may not have been cost-effective given the combination of its generosity and inability to target the marginal students who would be most sensitive to financial aid.
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Howard Bloom & Christina Weiland
MDRC Working Paper, March 2015
Abstract:
This paper uses data from the Head Start Impact Study (HSIS), a nationally representative multisite randomized trial, to quantify variation in effects of Head Start during 2002-2003 on children’s cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes relative to the effects of other local alternatives, including parent care. We find that (1) treatment and control group differences in child care and educational settings varied substantially across Head Start centers (program sites); (2) Head Start exhibited a compensatory pattern of program effects that reduced disparities in cognitive outcomes among program-eligible children; (3) Head Start produced a striking pattern of subgroup effects that indicates it substantially compensated dual language learners and Spanish-speaking children with low pretest scores (two highly overlapping groups) for their limited prior exposure to English; and (4) Head Start centers ranged from much more effective to much less effective than their local alternatives, including parent care.
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Disruption, learning, and the heterogeneous benefits of smaller classes
Graham McKee, Katharine Sims & Steven Rivkin
Empirical Economics, May 2015, Pages 1267-1286
Abstract:
Prior research suggests that the benefits from smaller classes may vary along multiple dimensions. In this paper we develop a flexible model of education production that incorporates the classroom-level time lost to disruption and the rate of learning during productive time as a function of teacher quality and individual propensity to acquire knowledge. We then investigate heterogeneity in class size effects by school poverty share, family income, teacher experience, and achievement percentile using data from Project STAR. We find that the benefits of small classes are consistently higher in schools with a larger low-income enrollment share. Conditional on school poverty share, we find little or no evidence that lower-income or lower-achieving students tend to realize larger benefits of smaller classes. Instead, we find that the return to smaller classes tends to increase with achievement regardless of school poverty share. Given the generally higher levels of disruption reported in higher poverty schools, this set of findings is consistent with, though not direct evidence of, the notion that reduced time lost to disruption is a primary mechanism through which smaller classes raise achievement and a compelling explanation for the empirical finding that class-size effects tend to be larger for lower-income children.
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The Effect of Primary School Size on Academic Achievement
Seth Gershenson & Laura Langbein
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, May 2015, Pages 135S-155S
Abstract:
Evidence on optimal school size is mixed. We estimate the effect of transitory changes in school size on the academic achievement of fourth- and fifth-grade students in North Carolina using student-level longitudinal administrative data. Estimates of value-added models that condition on school-specific linear time trends and a variety of teacher-by-school, student, and school-by-year fixed effects suggest that, on average, there is no causal relationship between school size and academic performance. However, two subgroups of interest are significantly harmed by school size: socioeconomically disadvantaged students and students with learning disabilities. The largest effects are observed among students with learning disabilities: A 10-student increase in grade size is found to decrease their math and reading achievement by about 0.015 test-score standard deviations.
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William Mangino, Marc Silver & Jonathan Cavalieri
Studies in Educational Evaluation, June 2015, Pages 46–54
Abstract:
This paper demonstrates that ‘failure’ is not a direct reflection of student knowledge. Using five years of New York State school-level data, we compare passing rates to raw-scores. We find, first, that when ‘cut scores’ are raised, more students fail even if raw scores are increasing. Second, increasing cut scores disproportionately fails more poor students than non-poor students, despite that poor students have the fastest rates of raw score improvement. Third, raised cut scores transform the smallest raw score gaps between high- and low-poverty schools into the largest passing gaps. Thus, while students in poor schools know more than they did previously, and although they have learned at superior rates, they are recast as the biggest ‘failures’ they have ever been.
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Spatial Variation in Higher Education Financing and the Supply of College Graduates
John Kennan
NBER Working Paper, April 2015
Abstract:
In the U.S. there are large differences across States in the extent to which college education is subsidized, and there are also large differences across States in the proportion of college graduates in the labor force. State subsidies are apparently motivated in part by the perceived benefits of having a more educated workforce. The paper extends the migration model of Kennan and Walker (2011) to analyze how geographical variation in college education subsidies affects the migration decisions of college graduates. The model is estimated using NLSY data, and used to quantify the sensitivity of migration and college enrollment decisions to differences in expected net lifetime income, focusing on how cross-State differences in public college financing affect the educational composition of the labor force. The main finding is that these differences have substantial effects on college enrollment, with no evidence that these effects are dissipated through migration.
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The Uneven Performance of Arizona’s Charter Schools
Matthew Chingos & Martin West
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, May 2015, Pages 120S-134S
Abstract:
Arizona enrolls a larger share of its students in charter schools than any other state in the country, but no comprehensive examination exists of the impact of those schools on student achievement. Using student-level data covering all Arizona students from 2006 to 2012, we find that the performance of charter schools in Arizona in improving student achievement varies widely, and more so than that of traditional public schools (TPS). On average, charter schools at every grade level have been modestly less effective than TPS in raising student achievement in some subjects. But charter schools that closed during this period have been lower performing than schools that remained open, a pattern that is not evident in the traditional public sector.
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The Growing Segmentation of the Charter School Sector in North Carolina
Helen Ladd, Charles Clotfelter & John Holbein
NBER Working Paper, April 2015
Abstract:
A defining characteristic of charter schools is that they introduce a strong market element into public education. In this paper, we examine the evolution of the charter school sector in North Carolina between 1999 and 2012 through the lens of a market model. We examine trends in the mix of students enrolled in charter schools, the racial imbalance of charter schools, the quality of the match between parental preferences in charter schools relative to the quality of match in traditional public schools, and the distribution of test score performance across charter schools relative those in traditional public schools serving similar students over time. Taken together, our findings imply that the charter schools in North Carolina are increasingly serving the interests of relatively able white students in racially imbalanced schools.
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Anders Böhlmark & Mikael Lindahl
Economica, forthcoming
Abstract:
We estimate effects on educational outcomes from the expansion of the independent school sector in Sweden, which followed as a consequence of the radical 1992 voucher reform. Using variation in this expansion across municipalities, we find that an increase in the share of independent school students improves average short- and long-run outcomes, explained primarily by external effects (e.g. school competition). For most outcomes, we observe significant effects first a decade after the reform. By using regional level TIMSS data, we can reconcile our results with the negative national trend for Swedish students in international achievement tests.