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Program and policy effects
The segregation of students by socioeconomic status has been on the rise in American public education between schools during the past several decades. Recent work has demonstrated that segregation is also increasing within schools at the classroom level. In this paper, we contribute to our understanding of the determinants of this increase in socioeconomic segregation within schools. We assess whether growth in the presence and number of nearby charter schools have affected the segregation of socioeconomically disadvantaged students by classroom in traditional public schools (TPS). Using data from North Carolina, we estimate a series of models exploit variation in the number and location of charter schools over time between 2007 and 2014 to estimate the impact of charter school penetration and proximity on levels of within school segregation in TPS classrooms serving grades 3-8. We find that socioeconomic segregation in math and English language arts increase in grades 3-6 when additional charter schools open within large urban districts. We find the largest impacts on schools that are closest to the new charter schools. We estimate that the impact of charter schools can account for almost half of the overall growth in socioeconomic segregation we see over the course of the panel within grades 3-6 in large urban districts.
Employers may favor applicants who played college sports if athletics participation contributes to leadership, conscientiousness, discipline, and other traits that are desirable for labor-market productivity. We conduct a resume audit to estimate the causal effect of listing collegiate athletics on employer callbacks and test for subgroup effects by ethnicity, gender, and sport type. We applied to more than 450 jobs on a large, well-known job board. For each job listing we submitted two fictitious resumes, one of which was randomly assigned to include collegiate varsity athletics. Overall, listing a college sport does not produce a statistically significant change in the likelihood of receiving a callback or interview request. However, among non-white applicants, athletes are 3.2 percentage points less likely to receive an interview request (p = .04) relative to non-athletes. We find no statistically significant differences among males or females.
COVID-19 has created acute challenges for the child care sector, potentially leading to a shortage of supply and a shrinking sector as the economy recovers. This study provides the first comprehensive, census-level evaluation of the medium-term impacts of COVID-19 on the county child care market in a large and diverse state, North Carolina. We also document the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on different types of providers and disadvantaged communities. We use data from two time points (February and December) from 2018 to 2020 and a difference-in-differences design to isolate the effects of COVID-19. We find that COVID- 19 reduced county-level child care enrollment by 40%, and reduced the number of providers by 2%. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that family child care providers experienced not only less severe reductions in enrollment and closures than center providers, but a small growth in the number of family providers. Declines in enrollment were most substantial for preschool-aged children. COVID-19 did not appear to further exacerbate inequities in terms of enrollment amongst low-income communities, communities with a larger share of Black residents, or rural communities, although communities with a larger share of Hispanic residents had more provider closures. Our findings underscore the importance of family child care providers in the child care sector and providing continuing and targeted support to help the sector through this crisis. Implications for future policies are discussed.
Developmental education, in which college students deemed unprepared for college-level coursework enroll in non-credit bearing courses, is widespread in American higher education. The current study evaluates the effect of mobile app courseware on the college outcomes of developmental education students, using a research design which randomly assigned course sections to receive access to the apps or not. The results show that access to the apps significantly improved student performance in developmental education outcomes, marginally improved medium-term college persistence and performance, but did not effect credential attainment in the study timeframe. Despite a number of barriers to implementation, the results suggest the intervention has the potential to improve the short-term outcomes of developmental education students in addition to being low-cost and scalable.
Valid and reliable measurements of teaching quality facilitate school-level decision-making and policies pertaining to teachers. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of 4th- and 5th-grade English language arts classes, we apply novel text-as-data methods to develop automated measures of teaching to complement classroom observations traditionally done by human raters. This approach is free of rater bias and enables the detection of three instructional factors that are well aligned with commonly used observation protocols: classroom management, interactive instruction, and teacher-centered instruction. The teacher-centered instruction factor is a consistent negative predictor of value-added scores, even after controlling for teachers’ average classroom observation scores. The interactive instruction factor predicts positive value-added scores. Our results suggest that the text-as-data approach has the potential to enhance existing classroom observation systems through collecting far more data on teaching with a lower cost, higher speed, and the detection of multifaceted classroom practices.
In this paper we study the effects of three large, nearly-simultaneous coal-fired power plant closures on school absences in Chicago. We find that the closures resulted in a 7 percent reduction in absenteeism in nearby schools relative to those farther away following the closures. For the typical elementary school in our sample, this translates into around 372 fewer absence-days per year in the aggregate, or around 0.71 fewer annual absences per student. We find that reductions in absences were larger in schools where pre-closure exposure to coal-fired power plants was more intense: namely, schools with low levels of air conditioning, schools more frequently in the wind path of the plants, and non-magnet (i.e., neighborhood) schools where students were more likely to live nearby. To explore potential mechanisms responsible for these absence reductions we investigate the effects of the closures on housing values and children’s respiratory health. We do not find statistical evidence of endogenous migration into neighborhoods near the coal-fired power plants following the closures but do find declines in emergency department visits for asthma-related conditions among school-age children.
Despite calls for more evidence regarding the effectiveness of teacher education practices, causal research in the field remains rare. One reason is that we lack designs and measurement approaches that appropriately meet the challenges of causal inference in the context of teacher education programs. This article provides a framework for how to fill this gap. We first outline the difficulties of doing causal research in teacher education. We then describe a set of replicable practices for developing measures of key teaching outcomes, and propose causal research designs suited to the needs of the field. Finally, we identify community-wide initiatives that are necessary to advance effectiveness research in teacher education at scale.
During the past fifteen years, immigration enforcement increased dramatically in the U.S. interior. There is a growing recognition that immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior has spillover effects onto U.S. citizens. I examine the impacts of a type of partnership between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local law enforcement, 287(g) programs, on school engagement within North Carolina. In North Carolina, nine counties were approved to establish 287(g) programs, and another fifteen applied but were not approved to participate. I use a triple difference strategy in which I compare educational outcomes for different groups of students in these two sets of counties before and after activation of 287(g) programs. I find that 287(g) programs decrease school engagement by decreasing attendance. This effect appears to be driven by increases in chronic absenteeism (missing 15 or more days per year). In contrast, I observe no effect of 287(g) programs on achievement.
Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong (2020a, JWX) provide evidence that education spending reductions following the Great Recession had widespread negative impacts on student achievement and attainment. This paper describes our process of duplicating JWX and highlights a variety of tests we employ to investigate the nature and robustness of the relationship between school spending reductions and student outcomes. Though per-pupil expenditures undoubtedly shifted downward due to the Great Recession, contrary to JWX, our findings indicate there is not a clear and compelling story about the impact of those reductions on student achievement. Moreover, we find that the relationship between K-12 spending and college-going rates is likely confounded with contemporaneous higher education funding trends. While we believe that K-12 spending reductions may have negative impacts on student outcomes, our results suggest that estimating generalizable causal effects remains a significant challenge.
There is no national consensus on how school districts calculate high school achievement disparities between students who experience homelessness and those who do not. Using administrative student-level data from a mid-sized public school district in the Southern United States, we show that commonly used ways of defining which students are considered homeless can yield markedly different estimates of the homelessness-housed student high school graduation gap. The key distinctions among homelessness definitions relate to how to classify homeless students who become housed and how to consider students who transfer out of the district or drop out of school. Eliminating housing insecurity-related achievement disparities necessitates understanding the link between homelessness and educational achievement; how districts quantify homelessness affects measured gaps.