Erudition
Effects of Scaling Up Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students
David Figlio, Cassandra Hart & Krzysztof Karbownik
NBER Working Paper, February 2020
Abstract:
Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and a student fixed effect design, we explore how the massive scale-up of a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes. Expansion of the program produced modestly larger benefits for students attending public schools that had a larger initial degree of private school options, measured prior to the introduction of the voucher program. These benefits include higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well.
The Returns to College(s): Estimating Value-Added and Match Effects in Higher Education
Jack Mountjoy & Brent Hickman
University of Chicago Working Paper, January 2020
Abstract:
Students who attend different colleges in the United States end up with vastly different educational and labor market outcomes. We estimate value-added of individual postsecondary institutions to disentangle causal impacts of colleges from student sorting in producing these disparate outcomes. Linking administrative registries of high school records, college applications, admissions decisions, enrollment spells, degree completions, and quarterly earnings spanning the Texas population, we identify college value-added across the diverse distribution of thirty Texas public universities by comparing the outcomes of students who apply to and are admitted by the same set of institutions, as this approach strikingly balances student ability measures across college treatments and delivers value-added estimates impervious to additional controls. We find that differences in causal value-added play a much smaller role, relative to student sorting, in producing observed outcome differences across colleges. The distribution of value-added is not degenerate, however, and while it has little relationship with selectivity, we find that non-peer college inputs like instructional spending and the faculty-student ratio do covary positively with value-added, especially conditional on selectivity. Examining potential mechanisms, colleges that ultimately boost earnings also tend to boost persistence, BA completion, and STEM degrees along the way. Finally, we probe the potential for (mis)match effects by allowing value-added to vary flexibly by student characteristics, including race, gender, family income, and pre-college measures of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. At first glance, black students appear to face small negative returns to attending more selective colleges, but this pattern of modest “mismatch” is driven by two large historically black universities in Texas that have low selectivity but above-average value-added. Across the non-HBCUs, black students face similar returns to selectivity as their peers from other backgrounds.
Does Progressive Finance Alter School Organizations and Raise Achievement? The Case of Los Angeles
Joon-Ho Lee & Bruce Fuller
Educational Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
State finance reforms have raised per-pupil spending and elevated the achievement of disadvantaged students over the past half-century. But we know little about how fresh funding may alter teacher staffing or the social and curricular organization of schools, mediating gains in learning. We find that US$1.1 billion in new yearly funding — arriving to Los Angeles high schools after California enacted a progressive weighted-pupil formula in 2013 — led schools to rely more on novice and probationary teachers. Schools that enjoyed greater funding modestly reduced average class size and the count of teaching periods assigned to staff in five subsequent years. Yet, high-poverty schools receiving higher budget augmentations more often assigned novice teachers to English learners (ELs) and hosted declining shares of courses that qualified graduates for college admission. Mean achievement climbed overall, but EL and poor students fell further behind in schools receiving greater funding.
Teacher Expectations Matter
Nicholas Papageorge, Seth Gershenson & Kyung Min Kang
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We show that tenth-grade teacher expectations affect students' likelihood of college completion. Our approach leverages a unique feature of a nationally representative dataset: two teachers provided their educational expectations for each student. Identification exploits teacher disagreements about the same student, an idea we formalize using a measurement error model. We estimate an elasticity of college completion with respect to teachers' expectations of 0.12. On average, teachers are overly optimistic, though white teachers are less so with black students. More accurate beliefs are counterproductive if there are returns to optimism or sociodemographic gaps in optimism. We find evidence of both.
School Effects on Socio-emotional Development, School-Based Arrests, and Educational Attainment
Kirabo Jackson et al.
NBER Working Paper, February 2020
Abstract:
Using value-added models, we find that high schools impact students’ self-reported socioemotional development (SED) by enhancing social well-being and promoting hard work. Conditional on schools’ test score impacts, schools that improve SED reduce school-based arrests, and increase high-school completion, college-going, and college persistence. Schools that improve social well-being have larger effects on attendance and behavioral infractions in high school, while those that promote hard work have larger effects on GPA. Importantly, school SED value-added is more predictive of school impacts on longer-run outcomes than school test-score value-added. As such, for the longer-run outcomes, using both SED and test score value-added more than doubles the variance of the explained school effect relative to using test score value-added alone. Results suggest that adolescence can be a formative period for socioemotional growth, high-school impacts on SED can be captured using self-report surveys, and SED can be fostered by schools to improve longer-run outcomes. These findings are robust to tests for plausible forms of selection.