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We examine through a field experiment whether outreach and support provided through an AI-enabled chatbot can reduce summer melt and improve first-year college enrollment at a four-year university and at a community college. At the four-year college, the chatbot increased overall success with navigating financial aid processes, such that student take up of educational loans increased by four percentage points. This financial aid effect was concentrated among would-be first-generation college goers, for whom loan acceptances increased by eight percentage points. In addition, the outreach increased first-generation students’ success with course registration and fall semester enrollment each by three percentage points. For the community college, where the randomized experiment could not be robustly implemented due to limited cell phone number information, we present a qualitative analysis of organizational readiness for chatbot implementation. Together, our findings suggest that proactive outreach to students is likely to be most successful when targeted to those who may be struggling (for example, in keeping up with required administrative tasks). Yet, such targeting requires university systems to have ready access to and ability to make use of their administrative data.
Rising inequality in the United States has raised concerns about potentially widening gaps in educational achievement by socio-economic status (SES). Using assessments from LTT-NAEP, Main-NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA that are psychometrically linked over time, we trace trends in achievement for U.S. student cohorts born between 1954 and 2001. Achievement gaps between the top and bottom quartiles of the SES distribution have been large and remarkably constant for a near half century. These unwavering gaps have not been offset by improved achievement levels, which have risen at age 14 but have remained unchanged at age 17 for the past quarter century.
Public charter schools could theoretically experience fewer school climate problems than district-run public schools because of additional competitive pressures, autonomy, and improved matches between schools and students. Using publicly available data from the New York State Education Department, I analyze differences in 13 school climate problems between public charter school and district-run public school sectors. After controlling for observable differences in students and schools between sectors, I find that public charter schools tend to report fewer school climate problems than district-run public schools in New York state in the 2017-18 school year. Specifically, public charter schools report fewer assaults with physical injuries, assaults with serious physical injuries, forcible sex offenses, other sex offenses, weapons possessions resulting from routine security checks, other weapons possessions, and false alarms than district-run public schools; however, public charter schools tend to report more cyberbullying than district-run public schools. The charter school climate advantages tend to be more pronounced in New York City than the rest of the state.
Theory suggests that teachers’ implicit racial attitudes affect their students, but we lack large-scale evidence on US teachers’ implicit biases and their correlates. Using nationwide data from Project Implicit, we find that teachers’ implicit White/Black biases (as measured by the implicit association test) vary by teacher gender and race. Teachers’ adjusted bias levels are lower in counties with larger shares of Black students. In the aggregate, counties in which teachers hold higher levels of implicit and explicit racial bias have larger adjusted White/Black test score inequalities and White/Black suspension disparities.
Recent increases in high school graduation rates have been linked anecdotally to online course-taking for credit recovery. Online course-taking that supports high school completion could open opportunities for postsecondary education pursuits. Alternatively, poorer quality online instruction could diminish student learning and discourage persistence toward graduation and further education. Using quasi-experimental methods in an eight-year longitudinal study of high school online course-taking, we find positive associations between online course-taking, credits earned and high school graduation, and for those with limited online course-taking, small increases in college enrollment. However, we find significantly lower four-year college enrollments and lower-quality college enrollments for all online course-takers, leaving open the question of whether online course-taking will lead to longer-term postsecondary education and labor market success.
The belief that additional time allows children to become more ready for school has affected public policy and individual practices. Prior studies estimated either associations between school entry age and academic growth or causal effects on achievement measured at one or two points. This paper contributes novel causal evidence for the impacts of kindergarten entry age on academic growth in the first three years of school. We embed regression discontinuity into a piecewise multilevel growth model and apply it to rich assessment data from three states. Being a year older leads to higher initial achievement and higher kindergarten growth rates but lower growth rates during 1st and 2nd grades. Effects do not differ by gender or race.
Teacher turnover has adverse consequences for student achievement and imposes large financial costs for schools. Some have argued that high-stakes testing may lower teachers’ satisfaction with their jobs and could be a major contributor to teacher attrition. In this paper, we exploit changes in the tested grades and subjects in Georgia to study the effects of eliminating high-stakes testing on teacher turnover and the distribution of teachers across grades and schools. To measure the effect of testing pressures on teacher mobility choices we use a "difference-in-differences" approach, comparing changes in mobility over time in grades/subjects that discontinue testing vis-à-vis grades/subjects that are always tested. Our results show that eliminating testing did not have an impact on the likelihood of leaving teaching, changing schools within a district, or moving between districts. We only uncover small negative effects on the likelihood of grade switching. However, we do find relevant positive effects on retention of beginning teachers in the profession. In particular, the average probability of exit for teachers with 0-4 years of experience fell from 14 to 13 percentage points for teachers in grades 1 and 2 and from 14 to 11 percentage points in grades 6 and 7.
This paper uses meta-analytic techniques to estimate the separate effects of the starting age, program duration, and persistence of impacts of early childhood education programs on children’s cognitive and achievement outcomes. It concentrates on studies published before the wide scale penetration of state-pre-K programs. Specifically, data are drawn from 67 high-quality evaluation studies conducted between 1960 and 2007, which provide 993 effect sizes for analyses. When weighted for differential precision, effect sizes averaged .26 sd at the end of these programs. We find larger effect sizes for programs starting in infancy/toddlerhood than in the preschool years and, surprisingly, smaller average effect sizes at the end of longer as opposed to shorter programs. Our findings suggest that, on average, impacts decline geometrically following program completion, losing nearly half of their size within one year after the end of treatment. Taken together, these findings reflect a moderate level of effectiveness across a wide range of center-based programs and underscore the need for innovative intervention strategies to produce larger and more persistent impacts.
The effects of competition from public charter schools on district school budget decisions are theoretically ambiguous. Competitive pressures could increase desired budget autonomy since they give district school leaders more flexibility; however, competition could decrease desired budget autonomy if district school leaders are generally risk-averse or if they believe that central office staff are in better positions to make school-level budget decisions. Competitive pressures could also increase or decrease changes in school-level spending depending on school leaders’ beliefs about how to efficiently allocate resources.
We randomly assign surveys to district school leaders in Texas in the 2019-20 school year to determine the effects of anticipated competition from public charter schools on reported desire for budget autonomy and expectations about future school-level spending decisions. We find the first experimental evidence to suggest that anticipated charter school competition has large negative effects on school leaders’ reported spending on certain categories of support staff, and reduces, or has no effect on, the reported desire for more school-level budget autonomy. The negative effects on spending for support staff tend to be larger for school leaders with more experience.
States and localities cannot avoid dealing with issues of teacher compensation. Not only is it the largest budget item for most local governments, but it is the place of largest leverage for improving the quality of schools. Fortunately, consistent research evidence directly informs ways to optimize teacher compensation.
This research provides strong motivation for improving teacher compensation. First, it shows that teachers are paid significantly less than they could earn outside of teaching. Second, teacher salaries have been stagnant, largely because personnel budgets have been more directed toward increasing the number of educators and administrators than toward supporting teachers. But simply increasing pay without consideration of teacher effectiveness will not lead to improved student outcomes.
The economic status of both students and the nation as a whole could be dramatically improved with increases in school quality. But with pressures on public budgets—due importantly to the growing costs of public pensions and health benefits—personnel dollars will have to be used more strategically if our students are to compete internationally. Moreover, the nation has a substantial equity problem: achievement gaps have been constant for a half century despite a wide variety of federal, state, and local policies designed to address them.