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K-12 Education
Tutoring—defined here as one-on-one or small-group instructional programming by teachers, paraprofessionals, volunteers, or parents—is one of the most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools in use today. Within the past decade, dozens of preK-12 tutoring experiments have been conducted, varying widely in their approach, context, and cost. Our study represents the first systematic review and meta-analysis of these and earlier studies. We develop a framework for considering different types of programs to not only examine overall effects, but also explore how these effects vary by program characteristics and intervention context. We find that tutoring programs yield consistent and substantial positive impacts on learning outcomes, with an overall pooled effect size estimate of 0.37 SD. Effects are stronger, on average, for teacher and paraprofessional tutoring programs than for nonprofessional and parent tutoring. Effects also tend to be strongest among the earlier grades. While overall effects for reading and math interventions are similar, reading tutoring tends to yield higher effect sizes in earlier grades, while math tutoring tends to yield higher effect sizes in later grades. Tutoring programs conducted during school tend to have larger impacts than those conducted after school.
Younger siblings take more advanced high school course end of year exams when their older siblings perform better in those same exams. Using a regression discontinuity and data from millions of siblings who take Advanced Placement (AP) exams, we show that younger siblings with older siblings who marginally “pass” an AP exam are more likely to take at least one AP exam, increase the total number of AP exams, and are more likely to take the same exam as their sibling. The largest impacts are found among sisters, but we do not see differential effects in coursework where females are underrepresented.
We study personnel flexibility in charter schools by exploring how teacher retention varies with teacher and school quality in Massachusetts. Charters are more likely to lose their highest and lowest value-added teachers. Low performers tend to exit public education, while high performers tend to switch to traditional public schools. To rationalize these findings, we propose a model in which educators with high fixed-costs use charter schools to explore teaching careers before obtaining licenses required for higher paying public sector jobs. The model suggests charter schools create positive externalities for traditional public schools by increasing the average quality of available teachers.
We use high frequency internet search data to study in real time how US households sought out online learning resources as schools closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. By April 2020, nationwide search intensity for both school- and parent-centered online learning resources had roughly doubled relative to baseline. Areas of the country with higher income, better internet access and fewer rural schools saw substantially larger increases in search intensity. The pandemic will likely widen achievement gaps along these dimensions given schools' and parents' differing engagement with online resources to compensate for lost school-based learning time. Accounting for such differences and promoting more equitable access to online learning could improve the effectiveness of education policy responses to the pandemic. The public availability of internet search data allows our analyses to be updated when schools reopen and to be replicated in other countries.
COVID-19 has forced essentially all schools in the country to close their doors to inperson activities. In this study, we provide new evidence about variation in school responses across school types. We focus on five main constructs of school activity during COVID-19: personalization and engagement in instruction, personalization and engagement in other school communication with students, progress monitoring (especially assignment grading), breadth of services (e.g., counseling and meals), and equitable access (to technology and services for students with special needs). We find that the strongest predictor of the extent of school activities was the education level of parents and other adults in schools’ neighborhoods. Internet access also predicts school responses. Race, parent/adult income, and school spending do not predict school responses. Private schools shifted to remote learning several days faster than traditional public schools, though others eventually caught up. On some measures, charter schools exceeded the responses of other schools; in other cases, traditional public schools had the highest overall measures. States in the Midwest responded more aggressively than those in other regions, especially the South, even after controlling for the full set of additional covariates. Learning management systems were reported by a large majority of schools, followed by video communication tools and tutorial/assessment programs. Several methods are proposed and implemented to address differential website use. We discuss potential implications of these findings for policy and effects on student outcomes.
Since their introduction in the 1990s, charter schools have grown from a small-scale experiment to a ubiquitous feature of the public education landscape. The current study uses the legislative removal of a cap on the maximum number of charters, and the weakening of regulations on these new schools, in North Carolina as a natural experiment to assess the intensive impacts of charter school growth on teacher quality and student composition in traditional public schools (TPS) at different levels of local market penetration. Using an instrumental variable difference-in-differences approach to account for endogenous charter demand, we find that intensive local charter entry reduces the inflow of new teachers at nearby TPS, leading to a more experienced and credentialed teaching workforce on average. However, we find that the entry of charters serving predominantly White students leads to reductions in average teacher experience, effectiveness, and credentials at nearby TPS. Overall these findings suggest that the composition of the teacher workforce in TPS will continue to change as charter schools further expand, and that the spillover effects of future charter expansion will vary by the types of students served by charters.
We investigate the determinants and consequences of increased school choice by analyzing a 22-year school panel matched to county-level demographic, economic, and political data. Using an event-study design exploiting the precise timing of charter school enrollment change, we provide robust evidence that charter enrollment growth increases racial and especially socioeconomic school segregation, a finding that is partially explained by non-poor students’ transition from the private to public sector. Charter growth drives public sector incorporation, while also increasing within-public sector segregation. To assess the effects of disparate choice policies on segregation, we replicate this analysis for magnet schools, which have admissions practices intended to increase diversity, and find no evidence that magnet enrollment growth increases segregation.
Major philanthropic initiatives that incorporate features of venture-capital practices have become increasingly prominent, particularly in K-12 public education. In this study, we provide empirical evidence on the reach, character, and impact of the Broad Superintendents Academy, a prominent and controversial venture-philanthropic initiative designed to transform leadership in the nation’s largest school districts. Using a novel dataset on all Broad trainees and a linked panel data set of all large school districts over 20 years, we find that Broad superintendents have had extensive reach (e.g., serving nearly 3 million students at their peak). We also show that, within districts that hired Broad trainees, Broad superintendents were 40 percent more likely to be Black than their non-Broad peers, but also had tenures that were 18 percent shorter. Panel-based estimates provide evidence that Broad-trained leaders had no clear effects on several district outcomes such as enrollment, school closures, per-pupil instructional and support-service spending, and student completion rates. However, Broad-trained leaders initiate a trend towards an increased number of charter schools and higher charterschool enrollment.
We study the effects of counterfactual teacher-to-classroom assignments on average student achievement in elementary and middle schools in the US. We use the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) experiment to semiparametrically identify the average reallocation effects (AREs) of such assignments. Our findings suggest that changes in within-district teacher assignments could have appreciable effects on student achievement. Unlike policies which require hiring additional teachers (e.g., class-size reduction measures), or those aimed at changing the stock of teachers (e.g., VAM-guided teacher tenure policies), alternative teacher-to-classroom assignments are resource neutral; they raise student achievement through a more efficient deployment of existing teachers.
Patience and risk-taking – two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making – are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds of the cross-country variation in student achievement. In an identification strategy addressing unobserved residence-country features, we find similar results when assigning migrant students their country-of-origin cultural traits in models with residence-country fixed effects. Associations of culture with family and school inputs suggest that both may act as channels.