Taking attendance
Trading Off Democracy? School Choice, Voter Turnout, and School Bond Election Outcomes
David Casalaspi
American Journal of Education, November 2019, Pages 139-181
Abstract:
Education researchers and political scientists have long raised theoretical objections to market-based reforms like school choice on the grounds that these policies may undermine public participation in democratic politics and erode public support for public institutions like schools. Little work, however, has empirically tested this claim. Drawing on a unique dataset of 191 off-cycle school bond elections in Michigan school districts between 2005 and 2017, this paper employs regression modeling to test whether voter turnout and school bond passage rates are lower in districts where school choice exit participation is high. Results show that a 1 percentage point increase in a district’s school choice participation rate is associated with a 1% decline in voter turnout in that district’s school bond elections. This result is statistically significant even when controlling for other community and election characteristics associated with voter turnout. However, differential relationships are revealed for exit via charter schools and exit via interdistrict public school choice. The data do not reveal a significant relationship between school choice and the odds of bond passage on election day.
Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale
Marianne Bitler et al.
NBER Working Paper, November 2019
Abstract:
Estimates of teacher “value-added” suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using administrative student data from New York City, we apply commonly estimated value-added models to an outcome teachers cannot plausibly affect: student height. We find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading achievement, raising obvious questions about validity. Subsequent analysis finds these “effects” are largely spurious variation (noise), rather than bias resulting from sorting on unobserved factors related to achievement. Given the difficulty of differentiating signal from noise in real-world teacher effect estimates, this paper serves as a cautionary tale for their use in practice.
Which grades are better, A’s and C’s, or all B’s? Effects of variability in grades on mock college admissions decisions
Woo-kyoung Ahn et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, November 2019, Pages 696–710
Abstract:
Students may need to decide whether to invest limited resources evenly across all courses and thus end with moderate grades in all, or focus on some of the courses and thus end with variable grades. This study examined which pattern of grades is perceived more favorably. When judging competency, people give more weight to positive than negative information, in which case heterogeneous grades would be perceived more favorably as they have more positive grades than homogeneous moderate grades. Furthermore, high school students are told to demonstrate their passion in college applications. Nonetheless, people generally overweigh negative information, which can result in a preference for a student with homogeneous grades lacking extremely negative grades. The college admissions decisions in particular may also involve emphasis on long-term stable, consistent, and responsible character, which the homogeneous grades may imply. Study 1 found that laypeople, undergraduate students, and admissions officers preferred to admit a student with homogeneous grades to a college than a student with heterogeneous grades even when their GPAs were the same. Study 2 used a heterogeneous transcript signaling a stereotypic STEM or humanities student, and found that while undergraduate students were more split in their choices, laypeople and admissions officers still preferred a student with homogeneous grades. Study 3 further replicated the preference for a student with homogeneous grades by using higher or lower average GPAs and wider or narrower range of grades for the heterogeneous grades. Possible reasons and limitations of the studies are discussed.
College major, college coursework, and post-college wages
Audrey Light & Sydney Schreiner
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We ask whether estimated wage payoffs to college majors change when we account for skills acquired in college by including college major dummies and detailed coursework measures in log-wage models. Using data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find that students in all majors differ considerably in the percentage of credits taken within-major, as well as in their overall credit distributions. When credit distributions are taken into account in modeling log-wages, estimated coefficients for college majors often fall by 50% or more. Moreover, estimated log-wage gaps between select pairs of majors often change by orders of magnitude depending on whether we compare individuals whose overall credit distributions correspond to obtaining a low, medium, or high level of credit concentration within the major.
Student Loans and Homeownership
Alvaro Mezza et al.
Journal of Labor Economics, January 2020, Pages 215-260
Abstract:
We estimate the effect of student loan debt on subsequent homeownership in a uniquely constructed administrative data set for a nationally representative cohort. We instrument for the amount of individual student debt using changes to the in-state tuition rate at public 4-year colleges in the student’s home state. A $1,000 increase in student loan debt lowers the homeownership rate by about 1.8 percentage points for public 4-year college-goers during their mid-20s, equivalent to an average delay of about 4 months in attaining homeownership. Validity tests suggest the results are not confounded by local economic conditions or changes in educational outcomes.
Financial Incentives in Vertical Diffusion: The Variable Effects of Obama’s Race to the Top Initiative on State Policy Making
William Howell & Asya Magazinnik
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
A substantial body of empirical work documents the influence of federal monies on state policy making. Less attention, however, has been paid to the conditioning effects of states’ prior financial health. Nearly always, apportioned monies cover only a fraction of the costs of federal policy reforms. The capacity of states to deploy supplementary resources, therefore, may inform the willingness of states to comply with the federal government’s policy objectives. Focusing on Barack Obama’s Race to the Top (RttT) initiative, we present new evidence that state responses to federal initiatives that carry financial rewards systematically vary with the amount of resources already on hand. States that survived the Great Recession with their education budgets largely intact, we find, tended to implement more RttT reforms overall, and especially more reforms that required substantial up-front financial commitments. These patterns of policy adoptions can be meaningfully attributed to RttT, are not the result of either prior or ancillary policy trends, and speak to the general importance of accounting for what states already have, above and beyond what the federal government is willing to offer, when studying the financial incentives of vertical diffusion.
Restricting seniority as a factor in public school district layoffs: Analyzing the impact of state legislation on graduation rates
Christine Dabbs
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Following the Great Recession, employment in the U.S. local education sector fell by about 364,000. I analyze whether state legislation that prohibits or limits the use of seniority in layoff decisions has an impact on public high school graduation rates. I find that over a ten-year time span, all else held constant, such legislation on average increases the yearly growth of district graduation rates by about 0.3 percentage points. This is economically significant, as the average yearly increase in the national graduation rate from 2010–11 to 2015–16 was 1 percentage point. When states prohibit or limit using seniority to determine a layoff order, districts must utilize other considerations such as teacher quality. In states with this legislation, teachers remaining following layoffs may be more effective than when states use seniority to determine the layoff order.
The Unexpected Effects of No Pass, No Drive Policies on High School Education
Kendall Kennedy
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
Since 1988, 27 states have introduced No Pass, No Drive laws, which tie a teenager's ability to receive and maintain a driver's license to various school‐related outcomes — most commonly, enrollment and attendance. Enrollment‐Based No Pass, No Drive policies, in 21 states, target both enrollment and attendance, and have negligible effects on dropout rates. However, these policies decrease the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR) by between 1 and 1.7 percentage points. This lower graduation rate stems from students delaying their dropout decision by up to two years. As a result, these students are retained in the ninth and tenth grades, increasing 9th‐grade enrollment by 3.6 percent relative to 8th‐grade enrollment the year prior; this causes an artificial reduction in the graduation rate, rather than a reduction in the true likelihood that a student will graduate. Truancy‐Based No Pass, No Drive policies, in five states, target only attendance — teens that fail to meet a minimum attendance requirement lose their driver's license. However, these policies allow students to drop out of school without facing this penalty. These policies increase the annual dropout rate by between 23 and 34 percent (1 to 1.6 percentage points).
Tenure-Track Appointment for Teaching-Oriented Faculty? The Impact of Teaching and Research Faculty on Student Outcomes
Di Xu & Sabrina Solanki
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article presents new quasi-experimental evidence regarding the effectiveness of teaching-oriented faculty with tenure-track appointment, a model pioneered at the University of California (UC) system. Using data from six cohorts of students at a UC campus, we examine the impact of initial course-taking with three distinct types of instructors — tenure-track research faculty, tenure-track teaching faculty, and contingent lecturers — on students’ current and subsequent academic outcomes. Descriptive analyses indicate that tenure-track teaching faculty assume a substantially larger teaching load than either research faculty or lecturers. Using a three-way fixed effects model, we find limited evidence supporting differences by faculty type on either current or downstream student outcomes.
Away from home, better at school. The case of a British boarding school
Francesca Foliano, Francis Green & Marcello Sartarelli
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper we study whether substituting family inputs with school resources in an academically oriented environment has an impact on achievement in high-stakes national examinations. We use administrative data for England to estimate the effect of attending a selective boarding school that admits an unusually high share of pupils with low socio-economic status on attainment at the end of compulsory education. By using propensity score matching we obtain comparable control groups in selective non-boarding schools. Our main finding is that the probability of being in the top decile of achievement in the exams increases by about 18 percentage points compared to 59% for controls.
The effect of post-baccalaureate business certificates on job search: Results from a correspondence study
Amanda Gaulke, Hugh Cassidy & Sheryll Namingit
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper tests whether post-baccalaureate business certificates improve the job callback rates of applicants using a correspondence study. We randomly assign a post-baccalaureate certificate to fictitious résumés and apply to real vacancy postings for managerial, administrative and accounting assistant positions in several large cities on multiple large online job boards. We find no statistical relationship between having a certificate and the probability of receiving a callback, with the 95 % confidence interval being (−1.44, 0.50) percentage points with a baseline callback rate of 11.6%. Our results suggest that post-baccalaureate certificates may provide little value to job seekers, though it remains an unexplored question as to whether such certificates improve wage growth or promotions on the job.
High school value-added and college outcomes
Evan Totty
Education Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the relationship between high school value-added and college performance, which contributes to the literature on (1) the relationship between value-added and adult outcomes and (2) the importance of high schools. One standard deviation increase in high school value-added is associated with an increase in the probability of graduating from college by 4–6 percentage points and final GPA by 0.04–0.08 points on a 4.0 scale, depending on controls for student, high school, geographic, university, and major selection effects. The associations are largest for male students and Black students. Most of the association with GPA occurs in early semesters.