Educational
Financial Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from Randomized Trials
Roland Fryer
Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2011, Pages 1755-1798
Abstract:
This article describes a series of school-based field experiments in over 200 urban schools across three cities designed to better understand the impact of financial incentives on student achievement. In Dallas, students were paid to read books. In New York, students were rewarded for performance on interim assessments. In Chicago, students were paid for classroom grades. I estimate that the impact of financial incentives on student achievement is statistically 0, in each city. Due to a lack of power, however, I cannot rule out the possibility of effect sizes that would have positive returns on investment. The only statistically significant effect is on English-speaking students in Dallas. The article concludes with a speculative discussion of what might account for intercity differences in estimated treatment effects.
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Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City
Will Dobbie & Roland Fryer
NBER Working Paper, December 2011
Abstract:
Charter schools were developed, in part, to serve as an R&D engine for traditional public schools, resulting in a wide variety of school strategies and outcomes. In this paper, we collect unparalleled data on the inner-workings of 35 charter schools and correlate these data with credible estimates of each school's effectiveness. We find that traditionally collected input measures -- class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree -- are not correlated with school effectiveness. In stark contrast, we show that an index of five policies suggested by over forty years of qualitative research -- frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations -- explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness. Our results are robust to controls for three alternative theories of schooling: a model emphasizing the provision of wrap-around services, a model focused on teacher selection and retention, and the "No Excuses'' model of education. We conclude by showing that our index provides similar results in a separate sample of charter schools.
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David Welsch & David Zimmer
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the competitive effects of a unique school choice program implemented in the late 1990s, Wisconsin's Open Enrollment Program, which allows families to send their children to schools outside their home district. In contrast to other school choice programs, districts not only face negative consequences from losing students and state funding, but they also stand to gain in the event of student emigration from other districts. The identification approach exploits differences in the number of schools in bordering districts, which affects inter-district ease-of-transfer. Estimates produce three main conclusions. First, districts that experience student out-migration produce higher standardized test scores in the subsequent year. Second, these effects are most evident among districts for which out-migration, expressed as a percentage of enrollment, falls in the upper quartile of all districts under consideration. Third, districts do not appear to respond to in-migration, indicating that districts place more emphasis on (and have more control over) preventing out-migration, as opposed to encouraging in-migration. These findings provide evidence that schools respond to competitive forces by improving quality
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The 9th Grade Shock and the High School Dropout Crisis
Nikolas Pharris-Ciurej, Charles Hirschman & Joseph Willhoft
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Retrospective questions on educational attainment in national surveys and censuses tend to over-estimate high school graduation rates by 15 to 20 percentage points relative to administrative records. Administrative data on educational enrollment are, however, only available at the aggregate level (state, school district, and school levels) and the recording of inter-school transfers are generally incomplete. With access to linked individual-level administrative records from a very large "West Coast metropolitan school district" we track patterns of high school attrition and on-time high school graduation of individual students. Even with adjustments for the omission of out-of-district transfers (estimates of omission are presented), the results of this study show that failure in high school, as indexed by retention and attrition, are almost as common as on-time high school graduation. In addition to the usual risk factors of disadvantaged background, we find that the "9th grade shock" - an unpredicted decline in academic performance upon entering high school - is a key mechanism behind the continuing crisis of high school attrition.
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Family Income and Higher Education Choices: The Importance of Accounting for College Quality
Josh Kinsler & Ronni Pavan
Journal of Human Capital, Winter 2011, Pages 453-477
Abstract:
In the examination of the determinants of educational choices, little attention has been devoted to the relationship between family income and the quality of higher education. Using the 1979 and 1997 waves of the NLSY, we show that family income significantly affects the quality of higher education, especially for high-ability individuals. While the impact of family income on college quality is significant in both samples, it has declined considerably over time for high-ability students. Overall, the trends we observe are highly consistent with increases in tuition across the quality spectrum, coupled with more generous merit-based aid at high-quality institutions.
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The Intergenerational Conflict over the Provision of Public Education
Dennis Epple, Richard Romano & Holger Sieg
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the intergenerational conflict over the provision of public education. This conflict arises because older households without children have weaker incentives to support the provision of high quality educational services in a community than younger households with school-age children. We develop an overlapping generations model for households in a system of multiple jurisdictions. This model captures the differences in preferred policies over the life-cycle. We show that the observed inequality in educational policies across communities is not only the outcome of stratification by income, but is also determined by the stratification by age and a political process that is dominated by older voters in many urban communities with low quality of educational services. The mobility of older households creates a positive fiscal externality since it creates a larger tax base per student. This positive tax externality can dominate the negative effects that arise because older households tend to vote for lower educational expenditures. As a consequence sorting by age can reduce the inequality in educational outcomes that is driven by income sorting.
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Permanent Income and the Black-White Test Score Gap
Jesse Rothstein & Nathan Wozny
NBER Working Paper, November 2011
Abstract:
Analysts often examine the black-white test score gap conditional on family income. Typically only a current income measure is available. We argue that the gap conditional on permanent income is of greater interest, and we describe a method for identifying this gap using an auxiliary data set to estimate the relationship between current and permanent income. Current income explains only about half as much of the black-white test score gap as does permanent income, and the remaining gap in math achievement among families with the same permanent income is only 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations in two commonly used data sets. When we add permanent income to the controls used by Fryer and Levitt (2006), the unexplained gap in 3rd grade shrinks below 0.15 standard deviations, less than half of what is found with their controls.
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The Impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black Achievement
Daniel Aaronson & Bhashkar Mazumder
Journal of Political Economy, October 2011, Pages 821-888
Abstract:
The black-white gap in schooling among southern-born men narrowed sharply between the world wars. From 1914 to 1931, nearly 5,000 schools were constructed as part of the Rosenwald Rural Schools Initiative. Using census data and World War II records, we find that the Rosenwald program accounts for a sizable portion of the educational gains of rural southern blacks. We find significant effects on school attendance, literacy, years of schooling, cognitive test scores, and northern migration. The gains are highest in the most disadvantaged counties, suggesting that schooling treatments have the largest impact among those with limited access to education.
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Returns to education in professional football
René Böheim & Mario Lackner
Economics Letters, March 2012, Pages 326-328
Abstract:
After three years in college, football players face a trade-off between spending more time in college and pursuing a career in the National Football League (NFL). We analyze the salaries for rookies in the NFL and instrument the endogenous decision to enter the professional market with the month of birth (relative age effect). A player enjoys a 6 percent higher starting salary in the NFL for each additional year with the college team. The returns to education in professional sports are sizable and similar to returns to formal education.
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General Social Capital, Education-Related Social Capital, and Choosing Charter Schools
Kent Tedin & Gregory Weiher
Policy Studies Journal, November 2011, Pages 609-629
Abstract:
Proponents of charter schools credit them with many advantages over traditional schools. One claim is that school choice yields increased parental participation in voluntary school activities - which we shall call education-related social capital. In this article we test for the independent effect of school choice on education-related social capital, controlling for general social capital and other potentially confounding variables. Studies of school choice invariably show that choosing parents have a greater level of general social capital than non-choosing parents. Consequently, any increase in education-related social capital could be spurious - due to the fact that choice parents start with atypically high levels of general social capital. We find under controlled conditions that school choice has a small but statistically significant effect on education-related social capital. However, its effect is considerably smaller than for general social capital, as well as for other traditional predictors such as parental education and the school-related home resources that parents may provide.
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Whose fault is it? Assigning blame for grade inflation in higher education
Todd Jewell, Michael McPherson & Margie Tieslau
Applied Economics, Spring 2013, Pages 1185-1200
Abstract:
This study attempts to isolate the potential sources of grade inflation and to measure their relative importance. We incorporate existing models of grade inflation into a model of grade inflation at the department level. Our data comprise 1683 separate courses taught in 28 different academic departments by 3176 distinct instructors at a large public university over two decades. Our results suggest that incentives to inflate grades vary according to characteristics of academic departments. However, the vast majority (over 90%) of grade inflation observed in our data is estimated to be a result of either university-level factors or instructor-specific characteristics.