Extracurricular
Susannah Anderson & Briana Mezuk
Journal of Adolescence, October 2012, Pages 1225-1235
Abstract:
This study investigates the relationship between participating in a high school debate program on college-readiness in the Chicago Public School district over a 10-year period. At-risk school students were identified using an index including 8th grade achievement, poverty status, and enrollment in special education. Regression analyses were used to assess the association between debate participation and graduation and ACT performance. Overall, debaters were 3.1 times more likely to graduate from high school (95% confidence interval: 2.7-3.5) than non-debaters, and more likely to reach the college-readiness benchmarks on the English, Reading, and Science portions of the ACT. This association was similar for both low-risk and at-risk students. Debate intensity was positively related to higher scores on all sections of the ACT. Findings indicate that debate participation is associated with improved academic performance for at-risk adolescents.
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Alternative Approaches to Measuring MRP: Are All Men's College Basketball Players Exploited?
Erin Lane, Juan Nagel & Janet Netz
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
College men's basketball players have alleged that the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) cap on athletic scholarships is illegal and leads to lower scholarships than would prevail in a free market. Recently, the NCAA increased the limit on athletic scholarships. The authors compare the marginal revenue product (MRP) of men's basketball players to athletic scholarship caps. The authors estimate MRPs using players' playing statistics; information on the distribution of pro salaries; and players' future draft status. The authors find that players' MRPs are greater than the athletic scholarship caps for about 60% of men's basketball players, not just the star players.
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Learning about Academic Ability and the College Dropout Decision
Todd Stinebrickner & Ralph Stinebrickner
Journal of Labor Economics, October 2012, Pages 707-748
Abstract:
Research examining the educational attainment of low-income students has often focused on financial factors such as credit constraints. We use unique longitudinal data to provide direct evidence about a prominent alternative explanation - that departures from school arise as students learn about their academic ability or grade performance. Examining college dropout, we find that this explanation plays a very prominent role; our simulations indicate that dropout between the first and second years would be reduced by 40% if no learning occurred about grade performance/academic ability. The article also contributes directly to the understanding of gender differences in educational attainment.
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The impact of Chile's school feeding program on education outcomes
Patrick McEwan
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Chile operates one of the oldest and largest school feeding programs in Latin America, targeting higher-calorie meals to relatively poorer schools. This paper evaluates the impact of higher-calorie meals on the education outcomes of public, rural schools and their students. It applies a regression-discontinuity design to administrative data, including school enrollment and attendance, first-grade enrollment age and grade repetition, and fourth-grade test scores. There is no evidence, across a range of specifications and samples, that additional calories affect these variables. The paper suggests that the focus of Chilean policy should further shift to the nutritional composition of school meals, rather than the caloric content.
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Tournament Incentives for Teachers: Evidence from a Scaled-Up Intervention in Chile
Dante Contreras & Tomás Rau
Economic Development and Cultural Change, October 2012, Pages 219-246
Abstract:
In this article we evaluate the effects of the introduction of group monetary incentives for teachers, based on a school performance tournament in Chile. This is particularly relevant to analyze since it is the only scaled-up incentive program for teachers in the world. We evaluate the tournament effect, that is, the effect of introducing the incentive scheme on all participant schools, both winning and losing. We compare public and private subsidized schools to private fee-paying schools following a matched difference in difference and using three different empirical approaches. We explore the heterogeneous impact of the treatment through the distribution of the probability of winning. The results indicate a positive and significant tournament effect especially for schools that are very likely to win, which we call "on the money."
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Ignorance Is Not Bliss: On the Role of Education in Subjective Well-Being
Pavel Yakovlev & Susane Daniels-Leguizamon
Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study estimates the impact of education on self-reported happiness across 50 American states using the recently available Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (WBI). A 3SLS model is used to estimate the simultaneous impact of education, income, and health on aggregated subjective well-being (SWB) as measured by state-level WBI. Over 80 percent of the variation in SWB across states can be explained by differences in education, income, health, age, trust, stress, temperature, religion, and rainfall. Higher education (college degree) has a relatively strong positive effect on SWB, but secondary education (high school) does not. We find no statistically significant educational spillover on SWB across state borders, which suggests that the positive effect of higher education on SWB is mostly due to private non-monetary benefits rather than positive externalities.
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Victor Lavy
NBER Working Paper, September 2012
Abstract:
In this paper, I examine how student academic achievements and behavior were affected by a school finance policy experiment undertaken in elementary schools in Israel. Begun in 2004, the funding formula changed from a budget set per class to a budget set per student, with more weight given to students from lower socioeconomic and lower educational backgrounds. The experiment altered teaching budgets, the length of the school week, and the allocation of time devoted to core subjects. The results suggest that spending more money and spending more time at school and on key tasks all lead to increasing academic achievements with no behavioral costs. I find that the overall budget per class has positive and significant effects on students' average test scores and that this effect is symmetric and identical for schools that gained or lost resources due to the funding reform. Separate estimations of the effect of increasing the length of the school week and the subject-specific instructional time per week also show positive and significant effects on math, science, and English test scores. However, no cross effects of additional instructional time across subjects emerge, suggesting that the effect of overall weekly school instruction time on test scores reflects only the effect of additional instructional time in these particular subjects. As a robustness check of the validity of the identification strategy, I also use an alternative method that exploits variation in the instruction time of different subjects. Remarkably, this alternative identification strategy yields almost identical results to the results obtained based on the school funding reform. Additional results suggest that the effect on test scores is similar for boys and girls but it is much larger for pupils from low socioeconomic backgrounds and it is also more pronounced in schools populated with students from homogenous socioeconomic backgrounds. The evidence also shows that a longer school week increases the time that students spend on homework without reducing social and school satisfaction and without increasing school violence.
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Worker Absence and Productivity: Evidence from Teaching
Mariesa Herrmann & Jonah Rockoff
Journal of Labor Economics, October 2012, Pages 749-782
Abstract:
A significant amount of work time is lost each year due to worker absence, but evidence on the productivity losses from absenteeism remains scant due to difficulties with identification. We use uniquely detailed data on the timing, duration, and cause of absences among teachers to address many of the potential biases from the endogeneity of worker absence. Our analysis indicates that worker absences have large negative impacts: the expected loss in daily productivity from employing a temporary substitute is on par with replacing a regular worker of average productivity with one at the 10th-20th percentile of productivity.
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Arts enrichment and preschool emotions for low-income children at risk
Eleanor Brown & Kacey Sax
Early Childhood Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
No studies to date examine the impact of arts-integrated preschool programming on the emotional functioning of low-income children at risk for school problems. The present study examines observed emotion expression and teacher-rated emotion regulation for low-income children attending Settlement Music School's Kaleidoscope Preschool Arts Enrichment Program. At a level of p < .001, results indicate the following. First, within Kaleidoscope, children showed greater observed positive emotions such as interest, happiness, and pride, in music, dance, and visual arts classes, as compared to traditional early learning classes. Second, children at Kaleidoscope showed greater observed positive emotions than peers attending a comparison preschool that did not include full integration of the arts. Third, across the school year, children at Kaleidoscope showed greater growth in teacher-rated levels of positive and negative emotion regulation. The implication is that arts enrichment may promote social-emotional readiness to learn for low-income children at risk for school problems.
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Lídia Farré, Roger Klein & Francis Vella
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, October 2012, Pages 676-690
Abstract:
This article investigates the degree of intergenerational transmission of education for individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Rather than identifying the causal effect of parental education via instrumental variables we exploit the feature of the transmission mechanism responsible for its endogeneity. More explicitly, we assume the intergenerational transfer of unobserved ability is invariant to the economic environment. This, combined with the heteroskedasticity resulting from the interaction of unobserved ability with socioeconomic factors, identifies the causal effect. We conclude that the observed intergenerational educational correlation reflects both a causal parental educational effect and a transfer of unobserved ability.
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Estimating the Distributional Effects of Education Reforms: A Look at Project STAR
Erika Jackson & Marianne Page
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most evaluations of education policies focus on their mean impacts; when distributional effects are investigated it is usually by comparing mean impacts across demographic subgroups. We argue that such estimates may overlook important treatment effect heterogeneity; in order to appreciate the full extent of a policy's distributional impacts one should also exploit alternative methods. We demonstrate this using data from Project STAR, where we find evidence of substantial treatment effect heterogeneity across achievement quantiles. While all children appear to benefit from being placed in small classes, the largest test score gains are at the top of the achievement distribution. This result seems to be at odds with previous evidence that smaller classes benefit disadvantaged children most, but the discrepancy is reconciled by the fact that there are similar patterns of treatment effect heterogeneity within demographic groups, and that gains for disadvantaged students are larger throughout much of the achievement distribution.
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Vocational or university education? A new look at their effects on economic growth
Tam Bang Vu, David Hammes & Eric Iksoon Im
Economics Letters, November 2012, Pages 426-428
Abstract:
This paper shows that the effect of vocational education on economic growth appears to be greater than that of university education. Additionally, the reversed effect of economic growth on vocational education seems to be stronger than on university education.
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Andrew Crookston & Gregory Hooks
Sociology of Education, October 2012, Pages 350-372
Abstract:
In the decades following World War II, a significant expansion of community colleges occurred throughout the United States. As the baby boom generation came of age, demand for higher education spiked, and policy makers allocated the requisite funding to expand institutions of higher education. This expansion, including vigorous funding from federal, state, and local units of government, was politically popular. This openhanded support ended in the latter decades of the twentieth century as hostility to paying taxes and to public spending mounted. In recent decades, community colleges have competed with other social expenditures, such as prisons and health care demands, for scarce public resources. And, in a number of states, community colleges have fared poorly in this competition. Using multivariate analyses and data gathered from several sources, including the American Association of Community Colleges, the authors examine the impacts of community colleges on local employment trends. Their research focuses on rural counties over four time periods between 1976 and 2004. This focus is important, as rural areas have faced severe and chronic economic decline over the study period. Their research (specifically for the 1976-1983 and 1991-1997 panels) provides evidence that established community colleges made a significant contribution to employment growth. However, for the most recent panel (i.e., 1998-2004), the coefficient for community colleges is negative. An examination of the interaction between community colleges and states' fiscal contexts provides evidence that this decline may be the result of states cutting back their funding levels for community colleges.
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Do Teachers Matter? Measuring the Variation in Teacher Effectiveness in England
Helen Slater, Neil Davies & Simon Burgess
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, October 2012, Pages 629-645
Abstract:
Using a unique primary dataset for the UK, we estimate the effect of individual teachers on student outcomes, and the variability in teacher quality. This links 7,305 pupils to the individual teachers who taught them, in each of their compulsory subjects in the high-stakes exams at age 16. We use point-in-time fixed effects and prior attainment to control for pupil heterogeneity. We find considerable variability in teacher effectiveness, a little higher than the estimates found in the few US studies. We also corroborate recent findings that observed teachers' characteristics explain very little of the differences in estimated teacher effectiveness.
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Laurie Powers et al.
Children and Youth Services Review, November 2012, Pages 2179-2187
Abstract:
Youth in foster care disproportionately receive special education services and those in foster care and special education are at compounded disadvantage as they attempt to transition from high school to adult life. Given enhanced self-determination has been associated with improved transition outcomes for youth in special education, the purpose of this longitudinal, randomized trial was to evaluate the efficacy of the TAKE CHARGE self-determination intervention for improving the transition outcomes of those highly at-risk youth who are in both foster care and special education. The intervention included coaching for youth in the application of self-determination skills to achieve youth-identified goals, and youth participation in mentoring workshops with near peer foster care alumni. Sixty-nine youth, ages 16.5 to 17.5, were randomly assigned to TAKE CHARGE or to the foster care independent living program. Assessment at baseline, post-intervention and at one year follow-up revealed moderate to large effect sizes at post-intervention and one year follow-up for the differences between groups in self-determination, quality of life, and utilization of community transition services. Youth in the intervention group also completed high school, were employed, and carried out independent living activities at notably higher rates than the comparison group. Self-determination was confirmed as a partial mediator of enhanced quality of life. Implications of the findings for supporting youth in foster care, with and without disabilities, as well as future research directions are discussed.
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Jang Jin & Lawrence Jin
Education Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of university education on economic growth across 34 developed countries. Professors' research output is used as a proxy for the quality of education at the university level. To allow for some degree of difficulties in learning English across countries, an English weight has been constructed. We found that disparities in English proficiency across countries no longer matter in academic publications. The research outputs in science and engineering appear to have a positive and significant effect on economic growth. Economics and business researches also have immediate growth effects, although these effects are a bit smaller. The results are, in general, consistent with the findings of Aghion et al. (2005) and Vandenbussche et al. (2006), although their quality measure of tertiary education is different from the one used here.
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Eva Van de gaer et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, November 2012, Pages 1205-1228
Abstract:
Academic self-concept and achievement are positively related among students from the same school and country. Yet negative associations between these variables may be found at the level of schools and countries. In the present article, we propose how this apparent paradox can be explained in terms of reference group effects, in which high standards, norms, or benchmarks act to decrease academic self-concept, whereas low ones have the contrary effect. Multilevel regression analyses of the PISA 2006 data consisting of 353,403 students, 13,886 schools from 53 countries revealed an interesting pattern of relationships. Within schools, students' science achievement and science self-concept were positively related although the size of this relationship varied considerably between countries, whereas between schools and between countries, this association was negative. Consistent with our hypothesis, the size of the between-school relationship was larger in countries with a higher percentage of selective schools. At the country level, the negative relationship between country mean achievement and self-concept was explained by country differences in educational benchmarks, standards, and norms next to country differences in response styles. In this article, we also discuss the implications for the validity of cross-cultural comparisons of self-concept.
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Jeffrey Grigg
Sociology of Education, October 2012, Pages 388-404
Abstract:
Students in the United States change schools often, and frequent changes are associated with poor outcomes along numerous dimensions. These moves occur for many reasons, including both promotional transitions between educational levels and nonpromotional moves. Promotional student mobility is less likely than nonpromotional mobility to suffer from confounding due to unobserved factors. Using panel data from students enrolled in grades 3 to 8 in the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools during the implementation of a major change in school attendance policies, this article investigates the potential influence of four types of school changes - including promotional student mobility - on test score growth in reading and mathematics. All types of changes are associated with lower achievement growth during the year the enrollment change occurred, representing approximately 6 percent of expected annual growth, or 10 days of instruction. This incremental deficit is particularly concerning for disadvantaged students since they change schools more frequently. The results suggest that being new to a school does influence student achievement net of other factors; they also imply that important social ties are ruptured when students change schools.
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The Role of Social Capital in Educational Aspirations of Rural Youth
Soo-yong Byun et al.
Rural Sociology, September 2012, Pages 355-379
Abstract:
Drawing on a recent national survey of rural high school students, this study investigated the relationship between social capital and educational aspirations of rural youth. Results showed that various process features of family and school social capital were important for predicting rural youths' educational aspirations beyond sociodemographic background. In particular, parents' and teachers' educational expectations for their child and student, respectively, were positively related to educational aspirations of rural youth. In addition, discussion with parents about college was positively related to educational aspirations of rural youth. On the other hand, there was little evidence to suggest that number of siblings and school proportions of students eligible for free lunch and minority students are related to educational aspirations of rural youth, after controlling for the other variables. We highlight unique features of rural families, schools, and communities that may combine to explain the complexity of the role of social capital in shaping educational aspirations of rural youth.
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Mikaela Dufur, Toby Parcel & Kelly Troutman
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
A relatively neglected problem is how individuals derive social capital from more than one context and the extent to which they benefit from the capital in each. We examine whether social capital created at home and at school has differing effects on child academic achievement. We hypothesize that children derive social capital from both their families and their schools and that capital from each context promotes achievement. Using data from the National Longitudinal Education Study and structural equation modeling, we show that capital from each context is helpful, with social capital in the family more influential than social capital at school. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on child achievement and for studies of inequality generally.