Problems of degree
School Finance Reforms, Teachers' Unions, and the Allocation of School Resources
Eric Brunner, Joshua Hyman & Andrew Ju
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
School finance reforms caused some of the most dramatic increases in intergovernmental aid from states to local governments in U.S. history. We examine whether teachers' unions affected the fraction of reform-induced state aid that passed through to local spending and the allocation of these funds. Districts with strong teachers' unions increased spending nearly dollar-for-dollar with state aid, and spent the funds primarily on teacher compensation. Districts with weak unions used aid primarily for property tax relief, and spent remaining funds on hiring new teachers. The greater expenditure increases in strong union districts led to larger increases in student achievement.
Union Reform, Performance Pay, and New Teacher Supply: Evidence from Wisconsin's Act 10
Jason Baron
Florida State University Working Paper, January 2019
Abstract:
Despite the pervasive debate surrounding teachers' unions and their impacts on teacher recruitment, the causal effect of unions on new teacher supply has not been rigorously examined due to a lack of variation in public sector unionism. To fill this gap in the literature, this study exploits recent variation in union strength induced by the enactment of Wisconsin's Act 10, a landmark law that severely reduced the influence of teachers' unions in the state and gave school districts the freedom to redesign their compensation schemes. Immediately following the law, the majority of school districts in Wisconsin eliminated rigid unionized compensation schemes and moved to negotiate salaries with individual teachers based on performance. As a result, the compensation of teachers with high-value-added prior to Act 10 rose more than that of teachers with low-value-added in school districts that switched to flexible compensation. To test whether these changes in compensation impacted the quantity and the quality of new teacher supply, I compare the quantity of individuals completing a teaching degree in Wisconsin institutions before and after Act 10 and relative to those in similar states in a difference-in-differences framework. I find that Act 10 led to a 20% increase in the number of awarded teaching degrees. This effect was entirely driven by the most selective universities, which suggests that the quality of the prospective teacher pool in Wisconsin increased as a result of the union reform.
Competitive Impacts of Means-Tested Vouchers on Public School Performance: Evidence from Louisiana
Anna Egalite & Jonathan Mills
Education Finance and Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Given the significant growth rate and geographic expansion of private school choice programs over the past two decades, it is important to examine how traditional public schools respond to the sudden injection of competition for students and resources. Although prior studies of this nature have been limited to Florida and Milwaukee, this article examines the competitive impacts of the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP), using multiple analytic strategies to determine its achievement impacts on students in affected public schools. Serving 4,954 students in its first year of statewide expansion, this targeted school voucher program provides public funds for low-income students in low-performing public schools to enroll in participating private schools across the state of Louisiana. Using 1) a school fixed effects approach, and 2) a regression discontinuity framework to examine the achievement impacts of the LSP on students in affected public schools, this competitive effects analysis reveals neutral to positive impacts that are small in magnitude. Policy implications are discussed.
Who Values Access to College?
Kartik Athreya et al.
Federal Reserve Working Paper, February 2019
Abstract:
At first glance, college appears to be of great value to most, given its mean returns and sharply subsidized tuition. An empirically-disciplined human capital model that allows for variation in college readiness suggests otherwise: Nearly half of high school completers place zero value on access to college. This renders blanket subsidies potentially inefficient. As proof of principle, we show that redirecting subsidies away from those who would nonetheless enroll -- towards a stock index retirement fund for those who do not even when college is subsidized -- increases ex-ante welfare by 1 percent of mean consumption, while preserving enrollment and budget neutrality.
Improving Educational Pathways to Social Mobility: Evidence from Norway's "Reform 94"
Marianne Bertrand, Magne Mogstad & Jack Mountjoy
NBER Working Paper, March 2019
Abstract:
High school vocational education has a controversial history in the United States, largely due to a perceived tradeoff between teaching readily deployable occupational skills versus shunting mostly disadvantaged students away from the educational and career flexibility afforded by general academic courses. We study the effects of a nationwide high school reform in Norway that aimed to move beyond this tradeoff. Reform 94, implemented in one step in the fall of 1994, integrated more general education into the vocational track, offered vocational students a pathway to college through a supplementary semester of academic courses, and sought to improve the quality of the vocational track through greater access to apprenticeships. We identify the impacts of the reform through a difference-in-discontinuity research design, comparing students born just before and after the reform’s birthdate eligibility cutoff to students born around the same cutoff in placebo years. Linking multiple administrative registries covering the entire Norwegian population, we find that the reform substantially increased initial enrollment in the vocational track, but with different subsequent outcomes for different groups. More men complete the vocational track at the expense of academic diplomas, but this has no detectable impact on college-going and leads to reduced criminal activity and higher earnings in adulthood, especially among disadvantaged men. For disadvantaged women, the initial surge in vocational enrollment leads to fewer high school dropouts and more vocational degrees with the college-prep supplement, and hence an increase in the share of college-eligible women; however, this translates into only small and insignificant increases in college completion and adult earnings. We show that men overwhelmingly pursue vocational education in higher-paying skilled trade fields, while women almost exclusively pursue vocational education in lower-paying service-based fields, which helps in interpreting some of these results. Overall, the reform succeeded at improving social mobility, particularly among men, but it somewhat exacerbated the gender gap in adult earnings.
Does Art Make You Smart? A Longitudinal Experiment of the Effects of Multiple Arts-Focused Field Trips
Heidi Holmes Erickson et al.
University of Arkansas Working Paper, February 2019
Abstract:
This paper presents second year results from the first ever multi-visit, longitudinal experiment on the benefits from arts-focused field trips. Students in fourth and fifth grades in ten elementary schools in a large urban school district were randomly assigned to receive three arts-related field trips throughout the school year, including an art museum, a live theater production, and a symphony performance or to serve as a control. We find that treatment students exhibit higher levels of school engagement as measured by students’ behavioral infractions and self-reported engagement. We also find that treatment students perform significantly better on their end of year standardized tests, up to 16% of a standard deviation increase. These effects are persistent even one year following treatment. However, the effects appear to be stronger for the first cohort of students in our sample.
The GRE over the entire range of scores lacks predictive ability for PhD outcomes in the biomedical sciences
Linda Sealy et al.
PLoS ONE, March 2019
Abstract:
The association between GRE scores and academic success in graduate programs is currently of national interest. GRE scores are often assumed to be predictive of student success in graduate school. However, we found no such association in admission data from Vanderbilt’s Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity (IMSD), which recruited historically underrepresented students for graduate study in the biomedical sciences at Vanderbilt University spanning a wide range of GRE scores. This study avoids the typical biases of most GRE investigations of performance where primarily high-achievers on the GRE were admitted. GRE scores, while collected at admission, were not used or consulted for admission decisions and comprise the full range of percentiles, from 1% to 91%. We report on the 32 students recruited to the Vanderbilt IMSD from 2007-2011, of which 28 completed the PhD to date. While the data set is not large, the predictive trends between GRE and long-term graduate outcomes (publications, first author publications, time to degree, predoctoral fellowship awards, and faculty evaluations) are remarkably null and there is sufficient precision to rule out even mild relationships between GRE and these outcomes. Career outcomes are encouraging; many students are in postdocs, and the rest are in regular stage-appropriate career environments for such a cohort, including tenure track faculty, biotech and entrepreneurship careers.
Evaluating Charter School Achievement Growth in North Carolina: Differentiated Effects among Disadvantaged Students, Stayers, and Switchers
Lisa Spees & Douglas Lee Lauen
American Journal of Education, forthcoming
Abstract:
Charter school effects remain uncertain. Small lottery studies on high-performing charters produce impressive results, but large observational studies on the full range of charter schools are less encouraging. To make matters worse, these observational studies that aim for representativeness are based on only switchers, a small and unrepresentative population, arguably defeating the purpose of this design. In the first study of charter school effects on the full range of charter school students in North Carolina, we find that, in general, charter school performance has improved over time, although often it continues to remain lower than traditional public school achievement. However, we find some evidence suggesting that black and economically disadvantaged students experience slightly more achievement growth in charter schools, particularly in reading, than do students who are white and not economically disadvantaged.
The Financial Benefits and Burdens of Performance Funding in Higher Education
Lori Prince Hagood
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Performance funding in higher education is intended to incentivize increased degree production at American colleges and universities by linking state funds directly to institutional outcomes. However, many critics suggest that such funding arrangements create systems of “winners and losers” by rewarding some institutions over others. Using a difference-in-difference methodology, this article explores the impact of performance funding on state appropriations and investigates the heterogeneous treatment effects across institution types. I find that performance funding consistently benefits high-resource institutions and imposes financial burdens on low-resource institutions. The theory of social construction and policy design illuminates the findings.
The role of federal and private student loans in homeownership decisions
Cliff Robb, Samantha Schreiber & Stuart Heckman
Journal of Consumer Affairs, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of student loans on the decision to become a homeowner. Analyses use the Baccalaureate and Beyond 2008:2012 (B&B) panel data set collected by the US Department of Education that surveyed a representative sample of four‐year college graduates from institutions across the country. Whereas previous analyses of student loan debt rely on cumulative loan balances, the present research examines both federal and private student loan impacts separately. Private student loan data is often unavailable in major datasets, but the B&B data provide rich information on sources and amounts of debt for recent graduates. We instrument student loans using in‐state tuition rates and find that for four‐year college graduates, a $1,000 increase in a respondent's private student loan balance lowers the likelihood of buying a home by about 5 percentage points whereas a $1,000 increase in federal loans has no significant impact on homeownership during this time.
The Impact of Early Investments in Urban School Systems in the United States
Ethan Schmick & Allison Shertzer
NBER Working Paper, March 2019
Abstract:
Cities in the United States dramatically expanded spending on public education in the years following World War I, with the average urban school district increasing per pupil expenditures by over 70 percent between 1916 and 1924. We provide the first evaluation of these historically unprecedented investments in public education by compiling a new dataset that links individuals to both the quality of the city school district they attended as a child and their adult outcomes. Using plausibly exogenous growth in school spending generated by anti-German sentiment, we find that school resources significantly increased educational attainment and wages later in life, particularly for the children of unskilled workers. Increases in expenditures can explain about 50 percent of the sizable increase in educational attainment of cohorts born between 1895 and 1915. However, increased spending did not close the gap in educational attainment between the children of skilled and unskilled workers, which remained constant over the period.
The Impact of Prior Learning Assessments on College Completion and Financial Outcomes
Angela Boatman et al.
Journal of Human Resources, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper estimates the impact of the College Level Examination Program (CLEP), an exam that offers credit for student competency in a content area in lieu of completing a course. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that passing a CLEP exam leads to a 5.5 percent increase in degree completion and 1.6 percent increase in estimated income. The college completion results are notably strong for students who traditionally struggle to graduate and are often hard to track in education data, including two-year and for-profit enrollees and students in the military, students older than 24, underrepresented minorities, and homeschoolers.
Missing Bus, Missing School: Establishing the Relationship Between Public Transit Use and Student Absenteeism
Marc Stein & Jeffrey Grigg
American Educational Research Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Transportation is one of many potential obstacles that students might face as they attempt to attend school, but there are few opportunities to identify the unique contribution of transportation to school attendance. We apply models of commuting stress developed for adult commuters to students in an open enrollment school district to examine whether commuting difficulty plays a part in school absence. By comparing residentially stable students with themselves as they transition from eighth to ninth grade, we identify how changes in estimated school transportation are related to changes in attendance. We find that all students miss more days in high school than they did in middle school and that changing transit demands are associated with an increase in absences.
School Resources and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Early Twentieth-Century Georgia
Richard Baker
Economics of Education Review, June 2019, Pages 35-47
Abstract:
The relationship between school resources and students’ labor market outcomes has been a topic of debate among economists for the last half-century. The release of the 1940 United States census, the first to ask questions regarding income, allows for a closer examination of this relationship for those born in the early twentieth century. I link children residing in Georgia in 1910 to their responses as adults to the 1940 census and to district-level measures of school revenues. Georgia is attractive as a case study since State School Fund allocation rules provide a plausibly exogenous source of variation in school district revenues. The results suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in school revenues for the first three years of an individual’s schooling increases educational attainment by more than a third of a year and weekly wage earnings in adulthood by 7.14 percent on average for whites.
The Impact of the Michigan Merit Curriculum on High School Math Course-Taking
Soobin Kim et al.
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC) is a statewide college-preparatory policy that applies to the high school graduating class of 2011 and later. Using detailed Michigan high school transcript data, this article examines the effect of the MMC on various students’ course-taking and achievement outcomes. Our analyses suggest that (a) post-MMC cohorts took and passed approximately 0.2 additional years’ of math courses, and students at low socioeconomic status (SES) schools drove nearly all of these effects; (b) post-policy students also completed higher-level courses, with the largest increase among the least prepared students; (c) we did not find strong evidence on students’ ACT math scores; and (d) we found an increase in college enrollment rates for post-MMC cohorts, and the increase is mostly driven by well-prepared students.