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Heightened concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the importance of studying the early teacher pipeline. This exploratory, descriptive paper examines preservice teachers' (PST) expressed motivation for pursuing a teaching career and its relationship with PST characteristics and outcomes. Using data from one of the largest teacher education programs in Texas, we use a natural language processing algorithm to categorize into topical groups roughly 2,800 essay responses to the prompt, "Explain why you decided to become a teacher.'' We identify 11 topics that largely reflect altruistic and intrinsic (though not extrinsic) reasons for teaching. The frequency of motivation topics varied substantially by PST gender, race/ethnicity, and certification area. While topics collectively explained little of the variance in PST outcomes, we found preliminary evidence that intrinsic enjoyment of teaching and prior experiences with adversity predicted higher performance during clinical teaching and lower attrition as a full-time K–12 teacher.
There is growing concern that some nonprofit public service providers may be nonprofit in name but not in fact. We consider this concern in the context of nonprofit charter schools, which sometimes subcontract their daily operations to for-profit management organizations. We use unique data from Ohio to study how nonprofit charter schools’ reliance on for-profit operators affects student achievement and attendance. The results indicate that nonprofit charters that subcontract with for-profit operators tend to be more effective and equitable in promoting student achievement (but not attendance, a less salient outcome) than nearby traditional public schools serving similar students. However, nonprofit charters that subcontract with for-profit operators tend to be less effective (with regard to both achievement and attendance) and less equitable (with regard to attendance) than other nonprofit charters nearby. Further analysis comparing the administration and outcomes of for-profit and nonprofit operators suggests that the profit motive may help explain the inferior performance of nonprofit charters with for-profit operators. Our study offers theoretical insights for literatures on charter schools, contracting, performance monitoring, and sector boundaries, and it has immediate implications for education policy and management.
Fadeout is a pervasive phenomenon: post-test impacts on cognitive skills commonly decrease in the years following an educational intervention. Less is known, although much is theorized, about social-emotional skill persistence. The current meta-analysis investigated whether educational RCT impacts on social-emotional skills demonstrated greater persistence than impacts on cognitive skills among 87 interventions involving 59,237 participants and 443 outcomes measured at post-test and at least one follow-up. For post-test impacts of the same magnitude, persistence rates were similar (43% of post-test magnitude) across skill types for follow-ups occurring 6 to 12 months after post-test. At 1- to 2-year follow-ups, persistence rates were larger for cognitive skills (37%) than for social-emotional skills. Interestingly, smaller posttest impacts persisted at proportionately higher rates than larger impacts, which may benefit interventions measuring social-emotional outcomes given their smaller post-test impacts. Considered in whole, social-emotional and cognitive skills demonstrated similar patterns of fadeout.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in substantial unfinished learning for U.S. students, but to differing degrees for various subgroups. For example, students of color, from low-income families, or who attended high-poverty schools experienced greater unfinished learning. In this study we examined the degree of unfinished learning for students who went into the pandemic scoring in the top or bottom 10% in the math or reading achievement distributions. Our results show that students who scored at or below the 10th percentile grew less during the pandemic than their similarly-scoring, pre-COVID peers and, as of the end of the 2021 – 2021 school year, had yet to rebound toward pre-COVID levels of growth or achievement. Conversely, students who scored at or above the 90th percentile largely grew at rates closer to their pre-COVID peers. These students were harmed less academically and have recovered more quickly than their peers scoring at or below the 10th percentile.
School mobility, compounding socioeconomic inequities, can undermine academic achievement and behavior, particularly during middle school years. This study investigates the effect of a school-based integrated student support intervention – City Connects – on the achievement and behavior of middle school students who experience school mobility. Using administrative data from a large, urban, public school district in the U.S., we apply student fixed effects and event studies methods to analyze the academic and behavioral performance of students changing schools. The results indicate that students who moved to schools implementing the City Connects intervention performed better academically and behaviorally than other students.
Providing consistent, individualized feedback to teachers is essential for improving instruction but can be prohibitively resource-intensive in most educational contexts. We develop M-Powering Teachers, an automated tool based on natural language processing to give teachers feedback on their uptake of student contributions, a high-leverage dialogic teaching practice that makes students feel heard. We conduct a randomized controlled trial in an online computer science course (n=1,136 instructors), to evaluate the effectiveness of our tool. We find that M-Powering Teachers improves instructors’ uptake of student contributions by 13% and present suggestive evidence that it also improves students’ satisfaction with the course and assignment completion. These results demonstrate the promise of M-Powering Teachers to complement existing efforts in teachers’ professional development.
In 2006, the federal government effectively uncapped student borrowing for graduate programs with the introduction of the Graduate PLUS loan program. Access to additional federal loans increased graduate students’ borrowing and shifted the composition of their loans from private to federal debt. However, the increase in borrowing limits did not improve access to existing programs overall or for underrepresented groups. Nor did access to additional loan aid result in significant increase in constrained students’ persistence or degree receipt. We document that among programs in which a larger share of graduate students had exhausted their annual federal loan eligibility before the policy change—and thus were more exposed to the expansion in access to credit—federal borrowing and prices increased.
We provide a descriptive analysis of within-school and neighborhood similarity in high school applications in New York City. We depart from prior work by examining similarity in applications to specific schools rather than preferences for school characteristics. We find surprisingly low similarity within schools and neighborhoods, but substantial variation by race and prior achievement. White and Asian students are more likely to have choices in common relative to Black and Hispanic students, a difference that persists after controlling for achievement and location. Likewise, higher-achieving students are more likely to have choices in common, conditional on other student characteristics and location. An implication is that students’ likelihood of attending high school without any peers from their middle school or neighborhood varies by student background.
School finance court cases have proceeded one or more times in all but two states. Plaintiffs ask the courts to rule that the existing funding formula is unconstitutional under state constitutions, and the defendants call for continuation of the existing finance formula. By compiling and analyzing the universe of such cases, we can accurately describe the nature of the cases, the decisions made, and the long run impact on overall financing of schools. Defendants win a slight majority of decisions with, surprisingly, their victories coming most frequently in low spending states and in low achieving states. And, while plaintiff victories on average yield an immediate increase in funding, they have no influence on long run growth in school spending.
Low-socioeconomic status (SES), minority, and male students perform worse than their high-SES, non-minority, and female peers on standardized tests. This paper investigates how within-school differences in school quality contribute to these educational achievement gaps. Using individual-level data on the universe of public-school students in California, I estimate school quality using a value added methodology that accounts for the fact that students sort to schools on observable characteristics. I allow for within-school heterogeneity by estimating a distinct value added for each school's low-/high-SES, minority/non-minority, and male/female students. Standard value added models suggest that on average schools provide less value added to their low-SES, minority, and male students, particularly on postsecondary enrollment. However, value added models that control for neighborhood, older-sibling, and peer characteristics suggest that schools provide similar value added to low-/high-SES students and minority/non-minority students but more value added to female students. Within-school heterogeneity accounts for 6% of the test-score achievement gap and 22% of the difference in postsecondary enrollment between men and women.