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Min Sun

Min Sun, Christopher A. Candelaria, David Knight, Zachary LeClair, Sarah E. Kabourek, Katherine Chang.

Knowing how policy-induced salary schedule changes affect teacher recruitment and retention will significantly advance our understanding of how resources matter for K-12 student learning. This study sheds light on this issue by estimating how legislative funding changes in Washington state in 2018-19—induced by the McCleary court-ordered reform—affected teacher salaries and labor market outcomes. By embedding a simulated instrumental variables approach in a mixed methods design, we observed that local collective bargaining negotiations directed new state-level funding allocations toward certificated base salaries, particularly among more senior teachers. Variability in political power, priorities, and interests of both districts and unions led to greater heterogeneity in teacher salary schedules. Teacher mobility rate was reduced in the first year of the reform, and subsequently new hiring rate was reduced in the second year. Suggestive evidence indicates that a $1,000 salary increase would have larger effects on junior teachers’ hiring and their transfers between districts to a greater extent than late-career teachers.

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Biraj Bisht, Zachary LeClair, Susanna Loeb, Min Sun.

Paraeducators perform multiple roles in U.S. classrooms, including among others preparing classroom activities, working with students individually and in small groups, supporting individualized programming for students with disabilities, managing classroom behavior, and engaging with parents and communities. Yet, little research provides insights into this key group of educators. This study combines an analysis of national administrative data to describe the paraeducator labor market with a systematic review of collective bargaining agreements and other job-defining documents in ten case-study districts. We find a large and expanding labor market of paraeducators, far more diverse along ethnic and racial lines than certified teachers but with far lower wages, fewer performance incentives, less professional development, and fewer opportunities for advancement within the profession.

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Min Sun, Alec Kennedy, Susanna Loeb.

School Improvement Grants (SIG) represent one type of governments’ capacity-building investment to spur sustainable changes in America’s persistently under-performing public schools. This study examines both short- and long-run effects of the first two cohorts of SIG schools from two states and two urban districts across the country. Using dynamic event analyses, we observe that SIG showed larger effects in the second and third years of the intervention than the first year on 3-8th grade student test scores—a pattern of gradually increase over the course the intervention. These positive effects are largely sustained three or four years after the funding ended. In high schools, the SIG effects on 4-year graduation rates were steadily increasing throughout the period of six or seven years after the initial start of the intervention. These patterns of SIG effects mostly apply to each of the four locations, but the magnitude of effects varies across locations, suggesting differential implementations. Moreover, SIG effects on students of color or low-socioeconomic students are similar to, and sometimes a bit larger than, the overall SIG effects. We also conduct a variety of sensitivity and robustness checks.  Lastly, we discuss the policy implications of our findings on states’ continuing efforts of transforming public organizations and building their long-term capacity for better performance.

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Min Sun, Jing Liu, Junmeng Zhu, Zachary LeClair.

Although program evaluations using rigorous quasi-experimental or experimental designs can inform decisions about whether to continue or terminate a given program, they often have limited ability to reveal the mechanisms by which complex interventions achieve their effects. To illuminate these mechanisms, this paper analyzes novel text data from thousands of school improvement planning and implementation reports from Washington State, deploying computer-assisted techniques to extract measures of school improvement processes. Our analysis identified 15 coherent reform strategies that varied greatly across schools and over time. The prevalence of identified reform strategies was largely consistent with school leaders’ own perceptions of reform priorities via interviews. Several reform strategies measures were significantly associated with reductions in student chronic absenteeism and improvements in student achievement. We lastly discuss the opportunities and pitfalls of using novel text data to study reform processes.

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