In the know
No Pass No Drive: Education and Allocation of Time
Rashmi Barua & Marian Vidal-Fernandez
Journal of Human Capital, Winter 2014, Pages 399-431
Abstract:
Around one-third of students in the United States, mostly boys and blacks, fail to graduate from high school each year. Since the late 1980s, several states have introduced minimum academic requirements for teenagers to obtain driver's licenses. Using data from the American Community Survey, we find that these so-called No Pass No Drive laws have a positive and significant effect on high school completion and educational attainment among males and blacks, but not among females. Data from Monitoring the Future suggest that students who remained in school increased time allocated to schoolwork at the expense of leisure and work hours.
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Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson & Claudia Persico
NBER Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
Since Coleman (1966), many have questioned whether school spending affects student outcomes. The school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused some of the most dramatic changes in the structure of K-12 education spending in US history. To study the effect of these school-finance-reform-induced changes in school spending on long-run adult outcomes, we link school spending and school finance reform data to detailed, nationally-representative data on children born between 1955 and 1985 and followed through 2011. We use the timing of the passage of court-mandated reforms, and their associated type of funding formula change, as an exogenous shifter of school spending and we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts that were differentially exposed to school finance reforms, depending on place and year of birth. Event-study and instrumental variable models reveal that a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for all twelve years of public school leads to 0.27 more completed years of education, 7.25 percent higher wages, and a 3.67 percentage-point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty; effects are much more pronounced for children from low-income families. Exogenous spending increases were associated with sizable improvements in measured school quality, including reductions in student-to-teacher ratios, increases in teacher salaries, and longer school years.
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Accountability Pressure and Non-Achievement Student Behaviors
John Holbein & Helen Ladd
Duke University Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
In this paper we examine how failing to make adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and the accountability pressure that ensues, affects various non-achievement student behaviors. Using administrative data from North Carolina and leveraging a discontinuity in the determination of school failure, we examine the causal impact of accountability pressure both on student behaviors that are incentivized by NCLB and on those that are not. We find evidence that, as NCLB intends, pressure encourages students to show up at school and to do so on time. Accountability pressure also has the unintended effect, however, of increasing the number of student misbehaviors such as suspensions, fights, and offenses reportable to law enforcement. Further, this negative response is most pronounced among minorities and low performing students, who are the most likely to be left behind.
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The Maine Question: How Is 4-Year College Enrollment Affected by Mandatory College Entrance Exams?
Michael Hurwitz et al.
Educational Evaluation And Policy Analysis, March 2015, Pages 138-159
Abstract:
We use a difference-in-differences analytic approach to estimate postsecondary consequences from Maine's mandate that all public school juniors take the SATR. We find that, overall, the policy increased 4-year college-going rates by 2- to 3-percentage points and that 4-year college-going rates among induced students increased by 10-percentage points.
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Gregory Gilpin, Joseph Saunders & Christiana Stoddard
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Over the last two decades, for-profit colleges (FPCs) have substantially increased their share of the higher education market. One potential explanation is that FPC sector may be more responsive to labor market changes than public competitors. Using panel datasets of Associate's degree students, we examine the effects of changes in labor market conditions across various employment fields on enrollment and degree completion in related majors. The results indicate that enrollment and degree completion in the FPC sector is positively related to employment growth and wages in related occupations, while public institutions remain largely unresponsive. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that these relationships are similar across groups of students by gender and ethnicity. Furthermore, the results also indicate that students in public institutions are non-responsive to changes in labor markets associated with requiring an Associate's or Bachelor's degree.
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When Should Children Start School?
Dionissi Aliprantis
Journal of Human Capital, Winter 2014, Pages 481-536
Abstract:
This paper studies causal effects informative for deciding the age when children should start kindergarten. I present evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) that standard instrumental variable strategies do not identify effects of delaying kindergarten entry for any subpopulation of interest. I propose and implement a new strategy for identifying individual-level education production function parameters. Estimates indicate that there can be decreasing and even negative returns to relative age: For the oldest children in a cohort, educational achievement in third grade decreases as their age relative to that of their classmates increases.
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Cognitive Skills, Personality, and Economic Preferences in Collegiate Success
Stephen Burks et al.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We collected multiple measures from 100 students at a small public undergraduate liberal arts college in the Midwestern US and later assessed their academic success. The "proactive" (hard-working, persistent) aspect of the Big Five trait of Conscientiousness and not its "inhibitive" (organized, careful) aspect is a large positive predictor for two graduation outcomes and grade point average (GPA). The Big Five trait of Agreeableness ("pro-sociality") is a large and negative predictor for graduation outcomes. A non-standard cognitive skill measure (a backward-induction game) positively predicts graduation outcomes, in parallel with its success in predicting vocational student job success (Burks et al., 2009). Patient time preferences predict one graduation outcome and GPA.
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Heterogeneous trends in U.S. teacher quality 1980-2010
Jeremiah Richey
Education Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper documents changes in the entire ability distribution of individuals entering the teaching profession using the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and a constructed Armed Force Qualifying Test score that allows direct comparison of ability between cohorts. Such direct comparison between cohorts was previously not possible due to a lack of directly comparable measures of ability. I find there are minimal differences in the ability distribution between cohorts. However, this similarity masks vast differences within specific demographics. I then also decompose these changes into cohort-wide shifts and within-cohort shifts of teachers.
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The Impact of State Supreme Court Decisions on Public School Finance
Sarah Hill & Roderick Kiewiet
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, March 2015, Pages 61-92
Abstract:
Beginning with Serrano v. Priest in 1971, equity-based decisions issued by state supreme courts led to a decrease in cross-district inequality in per pupil expenditures. In subsequent years, more state supreme courts overturned existing systems of public school finance for failing to provide adequate education to students living in poor school districts. Adequacy-based decisions have not produced measurable changes in cross-district inequality in expenditures, but have led to higher overall levels of funding for public education. The nationwide increase in per pupil expenditures over the past several decades is, however, largely the product of growth in personal incomes and a decline in the relative size of the cohort of school-age children, and not of court-ordered finance reforms. In California, after Serrano and the most far-reaching equalization reforms implemented anywhere in the country, the association between the wealth of a school district and educational quality remains strong and persistent. If one's concern is the quality of education that students receive and not the amount of money spent on them, the victories that reformers have won in the courts have been hollow victories.
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Demographic changes and education expenditures: A reinterpretation
Haydar Kurban, Ryan Gallagher & Joseph Persky
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Several empirical studies have estimated a negative relationship between the share of an area's elderly population and per-pupil education spending. These findings have often been interpreted as evidence that an aging population has hindered the growth in per-pupil expenditures. We offer a reinterpretation of these oft-cited estimates and demonstrate that the population has aged in a way not reflected in these earlier studies' empirical designs. After fully accounting for actual U.S. population trends, we demonstrate that a rise in the elderly share of the population has resulted in a rise in per-pupil education spending, not a decline.
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Motivation and Incentives in Education: Evidence from a Summer Reading Experiment
Jonathan Guryan, James Kim & Kyung Park
NBER Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
For whom and under what conditions do incentives work in education? In the context of a summer reading program called Project READS, we test whether responsiveness to incentives is positively or negatively related to the student's baseline level of motivation to read. Elementary school students were mailed books weekly during the summer, mailed books and also offered an incentive to read, or assigned to a control group. We find that students who were more motivated to read at baseline were more responsive to incentives, suggesting that incentives may not effectively target the students whose behavior they are intended to change.
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Rachel Plak, Cornelia Kegel & Adriana Bus
Development and Psychopathology, February 2015, Pages 69-79
Abstract:
In this randomized controlled trial, 508 5-year-old kindergarten children participated, of whom 257 were delayed in literacy skills because they belonged to the lowest quartile of a national standard literacy test. We tested the hypothesis that some children are more susceptible to school-entry educational interventions than their peers due to their genetic makeup, and thus whether the dopamine receptor D4 gene moderated intervention effects. Children were randomly assigned to a control condition or one of two interventions involving computer programs tailored to the literacy needs of delayed pupils: Living Letters for alphabetic knowledge and Living Books for text comprehension. Effects of Living Books met the criteria of differential susceptibility. For carriers of the dopamine receptor D4 gene seven-repeat allele (about one-third of the delayed group), the Living Books program was an important addition to the common core curriculum in kindergarten (effect size d = 0.56), whereas the program did not affect the other children (d = -0.09). The same seven-repeat carriers benefited more from Living Letters than did the noncarriers, as reflected in effect sizes of 0.63 and 0.34, respectively, although such differences did not fulfill the statistical criteria for differential susceptibility. The implications of differential susceptibility for education and regarding the crucial question "what works for whom?" are discussed.
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For Better or Worse: Organizational turnaround in New York City schools
Nathan Favero & Amanda Rutherford
Public Management Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The performance of public organizations has become a more salient issue as the popularity of accountability policies has grown. Though organizations are often defined as underperforming, little is known about the effectiveness of various strategies commonly recommended for agency turnaround. This study provides a large-N test of three common categories of turnaround mechanisms - retrenchment, repositioning, and reorganization - in nearly 300 failing New York City schools between 2008 and 2011. Models show that none of the three turnaround strategies appear to be significantly associated with improvements in core organizational performance from an administrative perspective, although repositioning appears to improve client satisfaction.
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Extracurricular associations and college enrollment
Benjamin Gibbs et al.
Social Science Research, March 2015, Pages 367-381
Abstract:
There is consistent evidence that student involvement in extracurricular activities (EAs) is associated with numerous academic benefits, yet understanding how peer associations within EAs might influence this link is not well understood. Using Add Health's comprehensive data on EA participation across 80 schools in the United States, we develop a novel measure of peer associations within EA activities. We find that EA participation with high achieving peers has a nontrivial link to college enrollment, even after considering individual, peer, and school-level factors. This suggests that school policies aimed at encouraging student exposure to high achieving peers in EAs could have an important impact on a student's later educational outcomes.
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What High-Achieving Low-Income Students Know About College
Caroline Hoxby & Sarah Turner
NBER Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
Previous work (Hoxby and Avery 2014) shows that low-income higher achievers tend not to apply to selective colleges despite being extremely likely to be admitted with financial aid so generous that they would pay less than they do to attend the non-selective schools they usually attend. The Expanding College Opportunities project is a randomized controlled trial that provides such students with individualized information about the college application process and colleges' net prices. In other work (Hoxby and Turner 2013), we show that the informational intervention substantially raises students' probability of applying to, being admitted at, enrolling at, and progressing at selective colleges. In this study, we show that the intervention actually changes students' informedness on key topics such as the cost of college, the availability of the curricula and peers they seek, and the different types of colleges available to them. We highlight topics on which the control students, who experienced no intervention, are seriously misinformed.
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Positioning Charter Schools in Los Angeles: Diversity of Form and Homogeneity of Effects
Douglas Lee Lauen, Bruce Fuller & Luke Dauter
American Journal of Education, February 2015, Pages 213-239
Abstract:
The debate over charter school effectiveness relies largely on neoclassical logic: individual parents or students express demand for a widening array of school types and then experience variable levels of organizational quality. We argue that market-like behavior is nested in segments of local organizational fields with different types of charter school operators seeking market niches to reduce resource uncertainties. We first describe the emergence of three legally defined charter types in the Los Angeles Unified School District between 2002 and 2008. We show how these charter segments became stratified, as gauged by demographic attributes and quite different baseline achievement levels. While this structuration could also plausibly condition uneven achievement effects, we find that, in this initial period of charter expansion, all three types failed to raise achievement, compared with the achievement growth trajectories displayed by peers attending regular public schools.
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Saahoon Hong & Wonseok Choi
Children and Youth Services Review, February 2015, Pages 62-70
Abstract:
Open enrollment was expected to provide students in urban school settings with equal opportunity to access schools with abundant educational resources that led to improved student achievement. The One-way ANOVA and Linear Mixed Models used a propensity score matching method were administered to identify to what extent urban students utilized inter-district open enrollment in a Midwestern city and to compare their performances on standardized tests before and after the school transfer had occurred. The results indicated that open enrollment provided black students and students in the child welfare system with equal access to racially and socioeconomically integrated schools. However, these students' academic performance was not significantly enhanced by their open enrollment, except the 3rd grade student achievement in math. The results raised questions about the characteristics of open enrollment. Recommendations for future research are made; study limitations are addressed.
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Knowledge Assessment: Squeezing Information From Multiple-Choice Testing
Raymond Nickerson, Susan Butler & Michael Carlin
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, forthcoming
Abstract:
Knowledge assessment via testing can be viewed from two vantage points: that of the test administrator and that of the test taker. From the administrator's perspective, the objective is to discover what an individual knows about a domain of interest. From that of the test taker, the challenge is to reveal what one knows. In this article we describe a procedure for administering and scoring multiple-choice tests that satisfies both of these objectives and we present experimental data that demonstrate its effectiveness. The method allows test takers to provide specific information about their confidence that each alternative for an item is the correct answer and makes guessing not only unnecessary but detrimental. From this information the administrator can derive measures of both knowledge and confidence, which, we argue, provides better estimates than systems that do not allow measurement of partial knowledge. The use of such measures for purposes of evaluation both of individual test takers' knowledge of a subject of interest and of the effectiveness of instruction with respect to that subject is discussed.
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Can Online Learning Bend the Higher Education Cost Curve?
David Deming et al.
NBER Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
We examine whether online learning technologies have led to lower prices in higher education. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, we show that online education is concentrated in large for-profit chains and less-selective public institutions. Colleges with a higher share of online students charge lower tuition prices. We present evidence that real and relative prices for full-time undergraduate online education declined from 2006 to 2013. Although the pattern of results suggests some hope that online technology can "bend the cost curve" in higher education, the impact of online learning on education quality remains uncertain.
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Expectations on Track? High School Tracking and Adolescent Educational Expectations
Kristian Bernt Karlson
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the role of adaptation in expectation formation processes by analyzing how educational tracking in high schools affects adolescents' educational expectations. I argue that adolescents view track placement as a signal about their academic abilities and respond to it in terms of modifying their educational expectations. Applying a difference-in-differences approach to the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, I find that being placed in an advanced or honors class in high school positively affects adolescents' expectations, particularly if placement is consistent across subjects and if placement contradicts tracking experiences in middle school. My findings support the hypothesis that adolescents adapt their educational expectations to ability signals sent by schools.
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Howard Wainer & Richard Feinberg
Significance, February 2015, Pages 16-21
Abstract:
The longer the test, the more reliable it is - up to a point. Howard Wainer and Richard Feinberg expose the costs and hours lost in pursuit of marginal gains and worthless subscores.
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Subjective Performance Evaluation in the Public Sector: Evidence from School Inspections
Iftikhar Hussain
Journal of Human Resources, Winter 2015, Pages 189-221
Abstract:
This paper investigates the effects of being evaluated under a novel subjective assessment system where independent inspectors visit schools at short notice, disclose their findings, and sanction schools rated fail. I demonstrate that a fail inspection rating leads to test score gains for primary school students. I find no evidence to suggest that fail schools are able to inflate test score performance by gaming the system. Relative to purely test-based accountability systems, this finding is striking and suggests that oversight by evaluators who are charged with investigating what goes on inside the classroom may play an important role in mitigating such strategic behavior. There appear to be no effects on test scores following an inspection for schools rated highly by the inspectors. This suggests that any effects from the process of evaluation and feedback are negligible for nonfailing schools, at least in the short term.
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Clara Muschkin, Helen Ladd & Kenneth Dodge
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines the community-wide effects of investments in two early childhood initiatives in North Carolina (Smart Start and More at Four) on the likelihood of a student being placed into special education. We take advantage of variation across North Carolina counties and years in the timing of the introduction and funding levels of the two programs to identify their effects on third-grade outcomes. We find that both programs significantly reduce the likelihood of special education placement in the third grade, resulting in considerable cost savings to the state. The effects of the two programs differ across categories of disability, but do not vary significantly across subgroups of children identified by race, ethnicity, and maternal education levels.
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Patrick Denice
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the recent growth of for-profit colleges, scholars are only beginning to understand the labor market consequences of attending these institutions. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I find that for-profit associate's degree holders encounter lower hourly earnings than associate's degree holders educated at public or private, nonprofit colleges, and earnings that are not significantly different than high school graduates. However, individuals who complete a bachelor's degree by attending college in either the for-profit or nonprofit sectors encounter positive returns. These findings, robust to model selection, suggest that the distinction between for-profit and nonprofit colleges constitutes an important axis in the horizontal dimension of education at the sub-baccalaureate level, and complicate notions of vertical stratification such that higher levels of educational attainment do not necessarily guarantee a wage premium.
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Using Student Test Scores to Measure Principal Performance
Jason Grissom, Demetra Kalogrides & Susanna Loeb
Educational Evaluation And Policy Analysis, March 2015, Pages 3-28
Abstract:
Expansion of the use of student test score data to measure teacher performance has fueled recent policy interest in using those data to measure the effects of school administrators as well. However, little research has considered the capacity of student performance data to uncover principal effects. Filling this gap, this article identifies multiple conceptual approaches for capturing the contributions of principals to student test score growth, develops empirical models to reflect these approaches, examines the properties of these models, and compares the results of the models empirically using data from a large urban school district. The article then assesses the degree to which the estimates from each model are consistent with measures of principal performance that come from sources other than student test scores, such as school district evaluations. The results show that choice of model is substantively important for assessment. While some models identify principal effects as large as 0.18 standard deviations in math and 0.12 in reading, others find effects as low as 0.0.05 (math) or 0.03 (reading) for the same principals. We also find that the most conceptually unappealing models, which over-attribute school effects to principals, align more closely with nontest measures than do approaches that more convincingly separate the effect of the principal from the effects of other school inputs.
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Benjamin Marx & Lesley Turner
NBER Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
We use regression discontinuity and regression kink designs to estimate the impact of need-based grant aid on the borrowing and educational attainment of students enrolled in a large public university system. Pell Grant aid substantially reduces borrowing: among students who would borrow in the absence of a Pell Grant, every dollar of Pell Grant aid crowds-out over $1.80 of loans. A simple model illustrates that our findings are consistent with students facing a fixed cost of incurring debt. The presence of such a fixed cost may lead to the unintended consequence of additional grant aid decreasing some students' attainment. Empirically, we rule out all but modest average impacts of Pell Grant aid on attainment, and we provide suggestive evidence of heterogeneous effects consistent with our fixed-borrowing-cost model. We estimate an augmented Tobit model with random censoring thresholds to allow for heterogeneous fixed borrowing costs, and find that eliminating the fixed cost would increase borrowing by over 250 percent.
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The Effects of Vouchers on School Results: Evidence from Chile's Targeted Voucher Program
Juan Correa, Francisco Parro & Loreto Reyes
Journal of Human Capital, Winter 2014, Pages 351-398
Abstract:
We use data from Chile's targeted voucher program to test the effects of vouchers on school results. Targeted vouchers have delivered extra resources to low-income, vulnerable students since 2008. Moreover, under this scheme, additional resources are contingent on the completion of specific education reforms. Using a difference-in-differences approach and a market-level empirical analysis, we find a positive and significant effect of vouchers on standardized test scores. Additionally, our results highlight the importance of conditioning the delivery of resources to some specific academic goals in markets with institutional characteristics that prevent public schools from behaving as profit-maximizing firms.
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Enhancing inferential abilities in adolescence: New hope for students in poverty
Jacquelyn Gamino et al.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, December 2014
Abstract:
The ability to extrapolate essential gist through the analysis and synthesis of information, prediction of potential outcomes, abstraction of ideas, and integration of relationships with world knowledge is critical for higher-order learning. The present study investigated the efficacy of cognitive training to elicit improvements in gist reasoning and fact recall ability in 556 public middle school students (grades seven and eight), vs. a sample of 357 middle school students who served as a comparison group, to determine if changes in gist reasoning and fact recall were demonstrated without cognitive training. The results showed that, in general, cognitive training increased gist reasoning and fact recall abilities in students from families in poverty as well as students from families living above poverty. However, the magnitude of gains in gist reasoning varied as a function of gender and grade level. Our primary findings were that seventh and eighth grade girls and eighth grade boys showed significant increases in gist reasoning after training regardless of socioeconomic status (SES). There were no significant increases in gist reasoning or fact recall ability for the 357 middle school students who served as a comparison group. We postulate that cognitive training in middle school is efficacious for improving gist reasoning ability and fact recall in students from all socioeconomic levels.