Educational Outcomes
The Unexpected Long-Run Impact of the Minimum Wage: An Educational Cascade
Richard Sutch
NBER Working Paper, September 2010
Abstract:
Neglected, but significant, the long-run consequence of the minimum wage - which was made national policy in the United States in 1938 - is its stimulation of capital deepening. This took two forms. First, the engineered shortage of low-skill, low-paying jobs induced teenagers to invest in additional human capital - primarily by extending their schooling - in an attempt to raise their productivity to the level required to gain employment. Second, employers faced with an inability to legally hire low-wage workers, rearranged their production processes to substitute capital for low-skill labor and to innovate new technologies. This paper explores the impact of the minimum wage on enrollments between 1950 and 2003. I describe an upward ratcheting mechanism which triggers an "educational cascade." My estimate is that the average number of years of high school enrollment would have risen to only 3.5 years, rather than 3.7 years, for men born in 1951. Thereafter, enrollment rates would have trended down to about 3.2 years for the cohort born in 1986, rather than slowly rising to around 3.9 years. The cumulative effect of the minimum wage increases beginning in 1950 was to add 0.7 years to the average high school experience of men born in 1986.
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Preparing the Next Generation for Electoral Engagement: Social Studies and the School Context
Rebecca Callahan, Chandra Muller & Kathryn Schiller
American Journal of Education, August 2010, Pages 525-556
Abstract:
In an era of accountability focused primarily on academic outcomes, it may be useful to reconsider the other original aim of U.S. schools: citizenship development. Using longitudinal, nationally representative data (Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study [AHAA] and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health [Add Health]), we employ multilevel models to investigate the effects of social science programs and other measures of school context on young adult voting and voter registration. Findings suggest that school social science context directly influences young adult electoral engagement to the extent that peers' social science performance can counteract an individual's low level of social connection to produce an active voter in young adulthood.
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Tracing Transitions: The Effect of High School Closure on Displaced Students
Ben Kirshner, Matthew Gaertner & Kristen Pozzoboni
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, September 2010, Pages 407-429
Abstract:
Although closure is an increasingly common response to the problems of chronically underperforming urban schools, few studies have examined the effect of closure on displaced students. The authors used multiple methods to study the academic performance and experiences of Latino and African American high school students in the year following the closure of their school. Quantitative analyses show declines in the transition cohort's academic performance after transferring to new schools. Qualitative findings help explain this pattern by describing students' interpretations of the closure and their experiences transitioning to new schools. Overall, the case study suggests that closure added stressors to students who were already contending with challenges associated with urban poverty.
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Variation in Educational Outcomes and Policies across Countries and of Schools within Countries
Richard Freeman, Stephen Machin & Martina Viarengo
NBER Working Paper, August 2010
Abstract:
This study examines the variation in educational outcomes across and within countries using the TIMSS mathematics tests. It documents the wide cross-country variation in the level and dispersion of test scores. Countries with the highest test scores are those with the least inequality in scores, which suggests a "virtuous" equity-efficiency trade-off in improving educational outcomes. Analyzing the association of gender, immigrant status, and family background factors with scores, we find large cross-country differences in the relation between those factors and scores.
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Wayne Grove & Andrew Hussey
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
While a substantial literature has established returns to college major and to school quality, we offer the first such estimates for Master's of Business Administration (MBAs). To control for their nonrandom selection of fields, we estimate the returns to MBA concentrations using both ordinary least squares (OLS) with detailed control variables and including individual fixed effects. We find approximately 7% returns for most MBAs but roughly double that for finance and management information systems (MIS). Thus, MBA area of study can matter as much or more than program quality: only attending a top 10, but not 11-25, MBA program trumped studying finance and MIS at a nontop 25 program.
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Is the Supply of Mathematics and Science Teachers Sufficient?
Richard Ingersoll & David Perda
American Educational Research Journal, September 2010, Pages 563-594
Abstract:
This study seeks to empirically ground the debate over mathematics and science teacher shortages and evaluate the extent to which there is, or is not, sufficient supply of teachers in these fields. The authors' analyses of nationally representative data from multiple sources show that math and science are the fields most difficult to staff, but the factors behind these problems are complex. There are multiple sources of new teachers; those with education degrees are a minor source compared to those with degrees in math and science and the reserve pool. Over the past two decades, graduation requirements, student course taking, and teacher retirements have all increased for math and science, yet the new supply has more than kept pace. However, when preretirement teacher attrition is factored in, there is a much tighter balance between supply and demand. Unlike fields such as English, for math and science, there is not a large cushion of new supply relative to losses - resulting in staffing problems in schools with higher turnover.
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Paying to Learn: The Effect of Financial Incentives on Elementary School Test Scores
Eric Bettinger
NBER Working Paper, September 2010
Abstract:
Policymakers and academics are increasingly interested in applying financial incentives to individuals in education. This paper presents evidence from a pay for performance program taking place in Coshocton, Ohio. Since 2004, Coshocton has provided cash payments to students in grades three through six for successful completion of their standardized testing. Coshocton determined eligibility for the program using randomization, and using this randomization, this paper identifies the effects of the program on students' academic behavior. We find that math scores improved about 0.15 standard deviations but that reading, social science, and science test scores did not improve.
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Policy Feedback and Preschool Funding in the American States
Andrew Karch
Policy Studies Journal, May 2010, Pages 217-234
Abstract:
The early childhood education policy community has been described as a "divided constituency" in which groups with the same underlying goals sometimes work at cross purposes. This article examines how this internal division affects the contemporary funding of preschool education. It finds that states with a relatively large Head Start community are significantly more likely not to fund preschool education and significantly less likely to dedicate preschool funding exclusively to a freestanding state program. These results suggest that the creation and political solidification of Head Start generated policy feedback. They contributed to an ongoing tension within the early education community as Head Start beneficiaries viewed the creation of a freestanding preschool program as a political threat. This political dynamic illustrates the more general way in which the existence of a public policy can alter the dynamics of future political action.
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Stymied Mobility or Temporary Lull?: The Puzzle of Lagging Hispanic College Degree Attainment
Sigal Alon, Thurston Domina & Marta Tienda
Social Forces, June 2010, Pages 1807-1832
Abstract:
We assess the intergenerational educational mobility of recent cohorts of high school graduates to consider whether Hispanics' lagging post-secondary attainment reflects a temporary lull due to immigration of low education parents or a more enduring pattern of unequal transmission of social status relative to whites. Using data from three national longitudinal studies, a recent longitudinal study of Texas high school seniors and a sample of students attending elite institutions, we track post-secondary enrollment and degree attainment patterns at institutions of differing selectivity. We find that group differences in parental education and nativity only partly explain the Hispanic-white gap in college enrollment, and not evenly over time. Both foreign-and native-born college-educated Hispanic parents are handicapped in their abilities to transmit their educational advantages to their children compared with white parents. We conclude that both changing population composition and unequal ability to confer status advantages to offspring are responsible for the growing Hispanic-white degree attainment gap.
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Yasser Arafat Payne & Tara Brown
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, August 2010, Pages 316-338
Abstract:
This Participatory Action Research (PAR) project worked with four active street-life-oriented Black men to document how a community sample of street-life-oriented Black boys between the ages of 16 and 19 frame and use "street life" as a site of resilience inside schools. Qualitative data were collected in the form of written responses on 156 surveys, 10 individual interviews, and one group interview. Data were primarily collected inside the street communities of Harlem, New York City and Paterson, New Jersey. Qualitative findings reveal the young men, overall, hold positive views of formal education and its significance in their lives. Yet they hold negative attitudes regarding previous and current educational experiences. Also, results demonstrate the young men ultimately position their street orientation as an adaptive identity to have inside schools.
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Head Start's Comparative Advantage: Myth or Reality?
William Gormley, Deborah Phillips, Shirley Adelstein & Catherine Shaw
Policy Studies Journal, August 2010, Pages 397-418
Abstract:
In recent years, Head Start's prominent role in preparing low-income 4-year-olds for school has been affected by rapid growth in state-funded pre-K programs, some of which are based in public schools. This has led to questions about the comparative advantages of these two approaches to early education. An analysis of data from Tulsa, Oklahoma, indicates that the school-based pre-K program is more effective in improving early literacy outcomes, while Head Start is more effective in improving health outcomes. The two programs are comparable with regard to early math learning. Social-emotional effects are more subtle, but the school-based pre-K program has demonstrable positive effects, while the Head Start program does not.
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Claudia Goldin & Lawrence Katz
NBER Working Paper, August 2010
Abstract:
The history of coeducation in U.S. higher education is explored through an analysis of a database containing information on all institutions offering four-year undergraduate degrees that operated in 1897, 1924, 1934, or 1980, most of which still exist today. These data reveal surprises about the timing of coeducation and the reasons for its increase. Rather than being episodic and caused by financial pressures brought about by wars and recessions, the process of switching from single-sex to coeducational colleges was relatively continuous from 1835 to the 1950s before it accelerated (especially for Catholic institutions) in the 1960s and 1970s. We explore the empirical implications of a model of switching from single-sex to coeducation in which schools that become coeducational face losing donations from existing alumni but, because they raise the quality of new students, increase other future revenues. We find that older and private single-sex institutions were slower to become coeducational and that institutions persisting as single sex into the 1970s had lower enrollment growth in the late 1960s and early 1970s than those that switched earlier. We also find that access to coeducational institutions in the first half of the twentieth century was associated with increased women's educational attainment. Coeducation mattered to women's education throughout U.S. history and it mattered to a greater extent in the more distant past than in the more recent and celebrated period of change.
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Access to handouts of presentation slides during lecture: Consequences for learning
Elizabeth Marsh & Holli Sink
Applied Cognitive Psychology, July 2010, Pages 691-706
Abstract:
Teachers often lecture with presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint; however, little research has examined the effects of this new technology on learning. One issue that arises is whether or not to give students copies of the lecture slides, and if so when. A survey documented that students prefer to receive lecture slides before class, whereas instructors were less pronounced in their preferences. Two experiments examined whether having handouts of the slides facilitated encoding of science lectures. Having access to handouts of the slides during lecture was associated with a number of benefits: less note-taking (studies 1 and 2), less time needed to prepare for a final test (study 1), and better performance on the final test (study 2). Overall, receiving handouts before lecture helped efficient encoding of the lecture.
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Effects of Inequality, Family and School on Mathematics Achievement: Country and Student Differences
Ming Ming Chiu
Social Forces, June 2010, Pages 1645-1676
Abstract:
Inequality, family and school characteristics were linked to student achievement as shown by multi-level analyses of 107,975 15 year olds' mathematics tests and questionnaires in 41 countries. Equal distribution of country and school resources were linked to higher mathematics scores. Students scored higher in families or schools with more resources (SES, native born, two parents, more educational materials, higher SES schoolmates, female schoolmates, class time, educated teachers) or beneficial intangible processes (communication, discipline, teacher-student relationships). Students living with grandparents or siblings (especially older ones) scored lower. Physical family resource variables showed similar results across countries, supporting the social reproduction hypothesis for physical resources. In richer countries, intangible processes had stronger links with mathematics achievement, suggesting that greater availability of public physical resources raises the value of complementary intangible processes, which can help explain the Heyneman-Loxley effect of stronger family effects in richer countries.