Highly Trained
Gadi Barlevy & Derek Neal
NBER Working Paper, July 2011
Abstract:
We analyze an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets, and we show that under certain conditions this scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort to all students. Moreover, because this scheme employs only ordinal information, it allows education authorities to employ completely new assessments at each testing date without ever having to equate various assessment forms. This approach removes incentives for teachers to teach to a particular assessment form and eliminates opportunities to influence reward pay by corrupting the equating process or the scales used to report assessment results. Education authorities can use the incentive scheme we describe while employing a separate no-stakes assessment system to track secular trends in scaled measures of student achievement.
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Trust and Schooling in the United States
Oguzhan Dincer
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
I investigate the effects of trust on human capital measured as average years of schooling in U.S. states using data from the 1980s and the 1990s. I find robust evidence that an increase in trust increases schooling across U.S. states. According to the results of the seemingly unrelated regression estimation, a 25 percentage point increase in Trust increases the average years of schooling by approximately 1.5 months. This is not insignificant since more than a $5000 increase in per capita income (in 2000 prices) is needed to have the same effect on schooling.
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Michael Hartney & Patrick Flavin
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Elementary and secondary education policy making in the U.S. states is heavily influenced by the political bargaining of various actors, with teacher unions one of the most important actors.Yet previous studies that assess the impact of teacher unions on education reform use problematic measures of their direct political influence, instead opting for broader measures of membership or collective bargaining power. By contrast, the authors measure teacher union political activity by calculating the percentage of campaign contributions to candidates for state office that come from teacher unions. Using this measure, the authors find that increased teacher union political activity greatly reduces the chances that states enact reform-oriented education policies such as school choice and performance pay for teachers, while previous measures of teacher union strength bear little relationship to a state's adoption of these reform policies. These findings highlight the importance of paying careful attention to how political influence is operationalized in studies that assess the role organized interests play in shaping U.S. state policies.
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Estimating the Return to College Selectivity over the Career Using Administrative Earnings Data
Stacy Dale & Alan Krueger
NBER Working Paper, June 2011
Abstract:
We estimate the monetary return to attending a highly selective college using the College and Beyond (C&B) Survey linked to Detailed Earnings Records from the Social Security Administration (SSA). This paper extends earlier work by Dale and Krueger (2002) that examined the relationship between the college that students attended in 1976 and the earnings they self-reported reported in 1995 on the C&B follow-up survey. In this analysis, we use administrative earnings data to estimate the return to various measures of college selectivity for a more recent cohort of students: those who entered college in 1989. We also estimate the return to college selectivity for the 1976 cohort of students, but over a longer time horizon (from 1983 through 2007) using administrative data. We find that the return to college selectivity is sizeable for both cohorts in regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers, such as student high school GPA and SAT scores. However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. There were notable exceptions for certain subgroups. For black and Hispanic students and for students who come from less-educated families (in terms of their parents' education), the estimates of the return to college selectivity remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics.
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New Evidence on Class Size Effects: A Pupil Fixed Effects Approach
Nadir Altinok & Geeta Kingdon
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The impact of class size on student achievement remains a thorny question for educational decision makers. Meta-analyses of empirical studies emphasize the absence of class-size effects but detractors have argued against such pessimistic conclusions because many of the underlying studies have not paid attention to the endogeneity of class size. This article uses a stringent method to address the endogeneity problem using Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study data on 47 countries. We measure the class size effect by relating the difference in a student's achievement across subjects to the difference in his/her class size across subjects. This (subject-differenced) within-pupil achievement production function avoids the problem of the non-random matching of children to specific schools, and to classes within schools. The results show a statistically significant negative effect of class size in 14 countries, but the effect size is small in most cases. Several robustness tests are carried out, including control for students' subject-specific ability and subject-specific teacher characteristics, and correction for possible measurement error. Thus, our approach to addressing the endogeneity problem confirms the findings of meta-analyses that find little support for class size effects. Additionally, we find that class size effects are smaller in countries with higher teacher quality.
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Jennifer Graves
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using detailed longitudinal data for the state of California, this paper estimates the effect of yearround school calendars on nationally standardized test performance of traditionally disadvantaged students. The student subgroups studied in this paper are: low socioeconomic status, limited English proficiency, Hispanic and Latino, and African American students. I find significant negative effects of multi-track year-round calendars on academic achievement for all subgroups examined, with only the limited English proficiency student subgroup producing unreliable estimates. Negative and significant results for another type of year-round calendar, single-track, are also found for the full sample of students and low socioeconomic status students.
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Improving College Performance and Retention the Easy Way: Unpacking the ACT Exam
Eric Bettinger, Brent Evans & Devin Pope
NBER Working Paper, June 2011
Abstract:
Colleges rely on the ACT exam in their admission decisions to increase their ability to differentiate between students likely to succeed and those that have a high risk of under-performing and dropping out. We show that two of the four sub tests of the ACT, English and Mathematics, are highly predictive of positive college outcomes while the other two subtests, Science and Reading, provide little or no additional predictive power. This result is robust across various samples, specifications, and outcome measures. We demonstrate that focusing solely on the English and Mathematics test scores greatly enhances the predictive validity of the ACT exam.
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Rules and reality: Quantifying the practice of apprenticeship in early modern England
Chris Minns & Patrick Wallis
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article uses recently digitized samples of apprentices and masters in London and Bristol to quantify the practice of apprenticeship in the late seventeenth century. Apprenticeship appears much more fluid than is traditionally understood. Many apprentices did not complete their terms of indenture; late arrival and early departure from the master's household were widespread. Other apprentices appear to have been absent temporarily, returning to the master shortly before the end of their indenture. Regression analysis indicates that the patterns of presence and absence broadly reflect the resources and external opportunities available to apprentices.
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New Schools, New Students, New Teachers: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Charter Schools
Celeste Carruthers
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is widely acknowledged that charter schools tend to have less experienced teachers and higher teacher turnover, but to date, little effort has been made to identify the contribution of faculty experience and retention to overall charter effectiveness. I do so using a twelve-year panel of charter and mainstream student achievement in North Carolina, focusing on the state's middle schools. Indeed, new charter schools had twice the rate of new teachers as new mainstream schools, as well as lower rates of faculty retention. Consistent with past research, I find significant returns to charter school age in terms of math and reading achievement, and I rule out the possibility that charter maturation was driven by higher-achieving students selecting into older schools. Faculty development explains, at best, a small share of the observed maturation over the initial years of charter schools' operation. Charters of all ages were relatively ineffective at improving math achievement, but were on par with mainstream schools at improving reading achievement by their sixth year of operation.
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Human Capital Spillovers in Families: Do Parents Learn from or Lean on their Children?
Ilyana Kuziemko
Princeton Working Paper, March 2011
Abstract:
I develop a model in which a child's acquisition of a given form of human capital incentivizes adults in his household to either learn from him (if children act as teachers then adults' cost of learning the skill falls) or lean on him (if children's human capital substitutes for that of adults in household production then adults' benefit of learning the skill falls). I exploit regional variation in two shocks to children's human capital and examine the effect on adults. The rapid introduction of primary education for black children in the South during Reconstruction not only increased literacy of children but also of adults living in the same household ("learning" outweighs "leaning"). Conversely, the 1998 introduction of English immersion in California public schools appears to have increased the English skills of children but discouraged adults living with them from acquiring the language ("leaning" outweighs "learning"). In both examples, the results are driven by households with children of school-going age, suggesting that children's human capital acquisition, and not some omitted variable, is driving the effect on adults.
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The Consumption Value of Postsecondary Education
Brian Jacob, Brian McCall & Kevin Stange
University of Michigan Working Paper, April 2011
Abstract:
Education provides both investment and consumption benefits; the former being realized after schooling is completed but the latter being realized only while schooling is actually taking place. In this paper, we quantify the importance of consumption value considerations to schooling decisions in the context of higher education. We estimate a discrete choice model of college choice using micro data from the high school classes of 1992 and 2004, matched to extensive information on all four-year colleges in the U.S. We find that students do appear to value college attributes which we categorize as "consumption," including college spending on student activities, sports, and dormitories. In fact, students appear to be more willing to pay for these non-academic aspects of colleges than typical academic aspects, such as spending on instruction. Consequently, policies that reallocate financial resources away from these non-academic aspects to instruction would not enable schools to attract more or better students, as some policy-makers suggest. Our empirical approach makes a number of improvements on existing literature, including accounting for unobserved choice set variability created by selective admissions, controlling for fixed unobserved differences between schools, and permitting greater preference heterogeneity and realistic substitution patterns between colleges.
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How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement
Matthew Ronfeldt et al.
NBER Working Paper, June 2011
Abstract:
Researchers and policymakers often assume that teacher turnover harms student achievement, but recent evidence calls into question this assumption. Using a unique identification strategy that employs grade-level turnover and two classes of fixed-effects models, this study estimates the effects of teacher turnover on over 600,000 New York City 4th and 5th grade student observations over 5 years. The results indicate that students in grade-levels with higher turnover score lower in both ELA and math and that this effect is particularly strong in schools with more low-performing and black students. Moreover, the results suggest that there is a disruptive effect of turnover beyond changing the composition in teacher quality.
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The Stratification of Universities: Structural Inequality in Canada and the United States
Scott Davies & David Zarifa
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper conceives national systems of higher education as stratified populations of organizations. This stratification is a structural component of ‘horizontal inequality' in higher education, and may be exacerbated by current pressures for colleges and universities to compete for resources and status. To explore this structural inequality, we compare the level of stratification in financial resources across 4-year institutions in Canada and the United States over a 35-year period (1971 to 2006). Our analyses provide a first-look at this form of stratification, employing Gini coefficients, Lorenz curves, and boxplots. Our results provide new and compelling evidence of increasing structural stratification, even in Canada's predominantly publicly-funded postsecondary system. Findings indicate that the distribution of resources is far more stratified in the American system, and that both systems have become more stratified over time. We conclude by situating structural inequality within more general processes of stratification in education.
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Elizabeth Cascio, Nora Gordon & Sarah Reber
NBER Working Paper, June 2011
Abstract:
Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act substantially increased federal aid for education, with the goal of expanding educational opportunity. Combining the timing of the program's introduction with variation in its intensity, we find that Title I increased school spending by 46 cents on the dollar in the average school district in the South and increased spending nearly dollar-for-dollar in Southern districts with little scope for local offset. Based on this differential fiscal response, we find that increases in school budgets from Title I decreased high school dropout rates for whites, but not blacks.
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School Desegregation, School Choice and Changes in Residential Location Patterns by Race
Nathaniel Baum-Snow & Byron Lutz
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the residential location and school choice responses to the desegregation of large urban public school districts. We decompose the well documented decline in white public enrollment following desegregation into migration to suburban districts and increased private school enrollment, and find that migration was the more prevalent response. Desegregation caused black public enrollment to increase significantly outside of the South, mostly by slowing decentralization of black households to the suburbs, and large black private school enrollment declines in southern districts. Central district school desegregation generated only a small portion of overall urban population decentralization between 1960 and 1990.
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Schooling, Political Participation, and the Economy
Filipe Campante & Davin Chor
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate how the link between individual schooling and political participation is affected by country characteristics. Using individual survey data, we find that political participation is more responsive to schooling in land-abundant countries, and less responsive in human capital-abundant countries, even while controlling for country political institutions and cultural attitudes. We find related evidence that political participation is less responsive to schooling in countries with a higher skill premium, as well as within countries for individuals in skilled occupations. The evidence motivates a theoretical explanation in which patterns of political participation are influenced by the opportunity cost of engaging in political rather than production activities.
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Teacher development and evaluation: A study of policy and practice in Colorado
Al Ramirez et al.
Management in Education, July 2011, Pages 95-99
Abstract:
This study undertook an investigation of policy and practice related to teacher evaluation and development among Colorado school districts. A conceptual analysis was applied to a sample of teacher evaluation policies and process materials from 30 school districts. The study was based on policy objectives stipulated in state statute and best practice as reported in the literature. Results of the study show little relationship to teacher development and an emphasis in the policies and processes toward summative evaluations. Student outcomes received modest attention while the processes of teacher evaluation seemed de-contextualised to other school district systems.
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The Relative Efficiency of Charter Schools: A Cost Frontier Approach
Timothy Gronberg, Dennis Jansen & Lori Taylor
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Charters represent an expansion of public school choice, offering free, publicly funded educational alternatives to traditional public schools. One relatively unexplored research question concerning charter schools asks whether charter schools are more efficient suppliers of educational services than are traditional public schools. The potential relative efficiency advantage of charters vis-a-vis traditional publics is one of the mechanisms that supports the hypotheses that charters could improve performance for their students while using the same or fewer resources, and that the systemic effect of charters could lead to improved outcomes for traditional public students without requiring an increase in education sector resources. In this paper, we provide evidence as to the cost efficiency of charter schools relative to traditional public schools, and explore the extent to which those differences are attributable to differences in hiring and compensation practices, or to differences in the length of time a campus has been operating. We generate estimates of efficiency using a stochastic cost frontier approach. We estimate a translog stochastic cost frontier model using panel data for charter campuses and traditional public campuses in Texas over the five-year period 2005-2009. Our main findings suggest that charter schools are able to produce educational outcomes at lower cost than traditional public schools - probably because they face fewer regulations - but are not systematically more efficient relative to their frontier than are traditional public schools.
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Effective Schools: Teacher Hiring, Assignment, Development, and Retention
Susanna Loeb, Demetra Kalogrides & Tara Béteille
NBER Working Paper, June 2011
Abstract:
The literature on effective schools emphasizes the importance of a quality teaching force in improving educational outcomes for students. In this paper, we use value-added methods to examine the relationship between a school's effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development and retention of its teachers. We ask whether effective schools systematically recruit more effective teachers; whether they assign teachers to students more effectively; whether they do a better job of helping their teachers improve; whether they retain more effective teachers; or whether they do a combination of these processes. Our results reveal four key findings. First, we find that more effective schools are able to attract and hire more effective teachers from other schools when vacancies arise. Second, we find that more effective schools assign novice teachers to students in a more equitable fashion. Third, we find that teachers who work in schools that were more effective at raising achievement in a prior period improve more rapidly in a subsequent period than do those in less effective schools. Finally, we find that more effective schools are better able to retain higher-quality teachers, though they are not differentially able to remove ineffective teachers. The results point to the importance of personnel, and perhaps, school personnel practices, for improving student outcomes.
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Public education and redistribution when talents are mismatched
Michele Bernasconi & Paola Profeta
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In democratic countries, elected policymakers determine public spending. The level of public spending depends on taxes that are decided by a voting mechanism. Policymakers also decide how to allocate funds among different policies, such as public education and pure redistributive transfers. How are the levels of funding for public education and redistribution determined in the political process? What impacts do votes on these two policies have on inequality, growth and social mobility? We develop a politico-economic model that highlights a novel mechanism: public education provides opportunities for the children of the poor to be recognized for their talent. This reduces the probability of a mismatch, which takes place when individuals with low talent who come from rich families find jobs that should go to people with high talent (and vice-versa). Hence, the poor may prefer public spending on education to direct redistribution, while the rich prefer redistribution, as education implies more competition for good jobs from the poor.
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Long-Run Effects of Public Sector Sponsored Training in West Germany
Michael Lechner, Ruth Miquel & Conny Wunsch
Journal of the European Economic Association, August 2011, Pages 742-784
Abstract:
We estimate the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of different types of government-sponsored training in West Germany using particularly rich data that allows us to control for selectivity by matching methods and to measure interesting outcome variables over eight years after a program's start. We use distance-weighted radius matching together with a bias removal procedure based on weighted regressions in order to increase the precision and robustness of standard matching estimators. We find negative employment effects in the short term for all program types, effects whose magnitude and persistence is directly related to program duration. In the longer term, training seems to increase employment rates by 10-20 percentage points. For most programs the longer-term positive effects seem to be sustainable over the eight-year observation period.