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Markets (vouchers, choice, for-profits, vendors)

Paul Yoo, Thurston Domina, Andrew McEachin, Leah Clark, Hannah Hertenstein, Andrew M. Penner.

Virtual charter schools are increasingly popular, yet there is no research on the long-term outcomes of virtual charter students. We link statewide education records from Oregon with earnings information from IRS records housed at the US Census Bureau to provide evidence on how virtual charter students fare as young adults. Virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor's degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than students in traditional public schools. Although there is growing demand for virtual charter schools, our results suggest that students who enroll in virtual charters may face negative long-term consequences.

This paper is available exclusively at REACH until June 30, 2023.

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Edward J. Kim, Luke W. Miratrix.

Greater school choice leads to lower demand for private tutoring according to various international studies, but this has not been explicitly tested for the U.S. context. To estimate the causal effect of charter school appearances on neighboring private tutoring prevalence, we employ a comparative event study model combined with a longitudinal matching strategy to accommodate differing treatment years. In contrast to findings from other countries, we estimate that charter schools increase, rather than decrease, tutoring prevalence in the United States. We further find that the effect varies considerably based on the characteristics of the treated neighborhood: areas with the highest income, educational attainment, and proportion Asian show the greatest treatment impacts, while the areas with the least show null effects. Moreover, methodologically this investigation offers a pipeline for flexibly estimating causal effects with observational, longitudinal, geographically located data.

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Juan Esteban Carranza, Maria Marta Ferreyra, Ana Maria Gazmuri.

Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs) form skilled human capital in two or three years and could be key to upskilling and reskilling the workforce, provided their supply responds fast and nimbly to local labor market needs. We study determinants of SCP entry and exit in Colombia for markets defined by geographic location and field of study. We show greater dynamism in the market for SCPs than bachelor’s program, with greater turnover or “churn” of programs. Exploiting data on local economic activity and employment by field of study, we find that higher education institutions open new SCPs in response to local labor market demand as well as competition and costs. SCPs are more responsive to local labor market demand than bachelor’s programs; among SCP providers, private and non-university institutions are the most responsive. While private SCP entry is deterred by the presence of competitors and responds to cost considerations, these responses are weaker among public SCPs. Further, institutions often open and close programs simultaneously within a field, perhaps reflecting capacity constraints. These findings have implications for the regulation and funding of SCP providers.

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Matthew A. Kraft, Megan Conklin, Grace Falken.

We examine the labor supply decisions of substitute teachers – a large, on-demand market with broad shortages and inequitable supply. In 2018, Chicago Public Schools implemented a targeted bonus program designed to reduce unfilled teacher absences in largely segregated Black schools with historically low substitute coverage rates. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that incentive pay substantially improved coverage equity and raised student achievement. Changes in labor supply were concentrated among Black and Hispanic substitutes from nearby neighborhoods with experience in incentive schools. Wage elasticity estimates suggest incentives would need to be 50% of daily wages to close fill-rate gaps.

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Alex Eble, Feng Hu.

Colleges can send signals about their quality by adopting new, more alluring names. We study how this affects college choice and labor market performance of college graduates. Administrative data show name-changing colleges enroll higher-aptitude students, with larger effects for alluring-but-misleading name changes and among students with less information. A large resume audit study suggests a small premium for new college names in most jobs, and a significant penalty in lower-status jobs. We characterize student and employer beliefs using web-scraped text, surveys, and other data. Our study shows signals designed to change beliefs can have real, lasting impacts on market outcomes.

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Joseph Waddington, Ron Zimmer, Mark Berends.

A pervasive issue in the school choice literature is whether schools of choice cream-skim students by enrolling high-achieving, less challenging, or less costly students. Similarly, schools of choice may “pushout” low-achieving, more challenging, or more costly students. Using longitudinal student-level data from Indiana, we created multiple measures to examine whether there is evidence consistent with the claims of voucher-participating private schools cream skimming the best students from public schools or pushing out voucher-receiving students. We do not find evidence consistent the claim of cream skimming. However, we find evidence consistent with the claim of private schools pushing out the lowest achieving voucher students.

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Kathleen Lynch, Lily An, Zid Mancenido.
We present results from a meta-analysis of 37 contemporary experimental and quasi-experimental studies of summer programs in mathematics for children in Grades pre-K-12, examining what resources and characteristics predict stronger student achievement. Children who participated in summer programs that included mathematics activities experienced significantly better mathematics achievement outcomes, compared to their control group counterparts. We find an average weighted impact estimate of +0.10 standard deviations on mathematics achievement outcomes. We find similar effects for programs conducted in higher- and lower-poverty settings. We undertook a secondary analysis exploring the effect of summer programs on non-cognitive outcomes and found positive mean impacts. The results indicate that summer programs are a promising tool to strengthen children’s mathematical proficiency outside of school time.

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David Blazar, Beth Schueler.

What guidance does research provide school districts about how to improve system performance and increase equity? Despite over 30 years of inquiry on the topic of effective districts, existing frameworks are relatively narrow in terms of disciplinary focus (primarily educational leadership perspectives) and research design (primarily qualitative case studies). To bridge this gap, we first review the theoretical literatures on how districts are thought to affect student outcomes, arguing that an expanded set of disciplinary perspectives—organizational behavior, political science, and economics—have distinct theories about why districts matter. Next, we conduct a systematic review of quantitative studies that estimate the relationship between district-level inputs and performance outcomes. This review reveals benefits of district-level policies that cross disciplinary perspectives, including higher teacher salaries and strategic hiring, lower student-teacher ratios, and data use. One implication is that future research on district-level policymaking needs to consider multiple disciplinary perspectives. Our review also reveals the need for significant additional causal evidence and provides a multidisciplinary map of theorized pathways through which districts could influence student outcomes that are ripe for rigorous testing.

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Johnathan G. Conzelmann, Steven W. Hemelt, Brad J. Hershbein, Shawn Martin, Andrew Simon, Kevin Stange.

This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4-year institutions as for 2-year institutions. However, more than one-quarter of 2-year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4-year institution. In one application of these data, we find that the average strength of the labor market to which a college sends its graduates predicts college-specific intergenerational economic mobility. In a second application, we quantify the extent of “brain drain” across areas and illustrate the importance of considering migration patterns of college graduates when estimating the social return on public investment in higher education.

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Umair Ali.

Over the past few decades, the U.S. has received a consistent and increasing influx of immigrants into the nation. Immigration poses challenges relating to diversity, inclusion and cohesion in education systems, including K-12 education. In the context of immigration, the theory of native flight argues that U.S. born populations move away from neighborhoods when an increasing number of immigrants move in. I test the theory of native flight in the context of K-12 school enrollments, by examining the impact of immigrant influx on public, private and public charter school enrollments, differentiating across U.S. born races and ethnicities. To do so, I merge yearly school enrollment measures from the common core of data (CCD) with immigration data from the American Community Survey (ACS) over the years 2005-2019. Using an instrumental variables approach (2SLS) to address potentially endogenous settlement patterns of immigrants into Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), I find that students of U.S. born race/ethnicities display heterogeneous enrollment responses to immigrant influx. Shares of White students and Black students in public non-charter schools decrease significantly in response to an increase in immigration. At the same time, the shares of Hispanic students and Asian students increase significantly in public non-charter schools. Analogous estimates for native flight into private schools lend further credence to public school estimates. Across private schools, the share of White students increases significantly in response to immigration. The share of Black students decreases across private schools as well, signaling a crowding-out effect. There are two key implications. First, significant White flight from the public-school system still exists over the past decade and a half. Second, while the increasing shares of White students in private schools might compensate for White students leaving the public school system, the shares of Black students are dropping across private and public schools.

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