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Program and policy effects
A fundamental question for education policy is whether outcomes-based accountability including comprehensive educator evaluations and a closer relationship between effectiveness and compensation improves the quality of instruction and raises achievement. We use synthetic control methods to study the comprehensive teacher and principal evaluation and compensation systems introduced in the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD) in 2013 for principals and 2015 for teachers. Under this far-reaching reform, educator evaluations that are used to support teacher growth and determine salary depend on a combination of supervisor evaluations, student achievement, and student or family survey responses. The reform replaced salary scales based on experience and educational attainment with those based on evaluation scores, a radical departure from decades of rigid salary schedules. The synthetic control estimates reveal positive and significant effects of the reforms on math and reading achievement that increase over time. From 2015 through 2019, the average achievement for the synthetic control district fluctuates narrowly between -0.27 s.d. and -0.3 s.d., while the Dallas ISD average increases steadily from -0.28 s.d. in 2015 to -0.08 s.d. in 2019, the final year of the sample. Though the increase for reading is roughly half as large, it is also highly significant.
We estimate the societal costs associated with corequisite and traditional pre-requisite English developmental education and compare them to societal benefits. Our context is the randomized controlled trial conducted by Miller et al. (2022) that estimated the effects of three different approaches to English corequisites implemented in 5 Texas community colleges. The main drivers of differential costs across pathways and colleges are the number of credit and contact hours in each pathway, class sizes, and the type of faculty used to teach courses (adjunct or full-time). Corequisites are less expensive than pre-requisite pathways in two colleges, they are more expensive yet roughly similar in two other colleges, and they are much more expensive in one college. Miller et al. (2022) find that corequisites induced more students to pass the required college-level English course in all colleges, but do not find that they impacted persistence in college. Considering the enormous societal benefit of a college education, corequisites are most likely the preferred policy from a societal point of view even when they are more expensive to implement and given that they only have a small impact on the likelihood of completing college. From students’ point of view, corequisites are always preferred because they require less tuition and have a higher likelihood of success.
U.S. public school students increasingly attend schools with sworn law enforcement officers present. Yet, little is known about how these school resource officers (SROs) affect school environments or student outcomes. Our study uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) design with national school-level data from 2014 to 2018 to estimate the impacts of SRO placement. We construct this discontinuity based on the application scores for federal school based policing grants of linked police agencies. We find that SROs effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools, but do not prevent gun-related incidents. We also find that SROs intensify the use of suspension, expulsion, police referral, and arrest of students. These increases in disciplinary and police actions are consistently largest for Black students, male students, and students with disabilities.
In the U.S., state politicians directly influence legislation and budget decisions that can substantially affect public education spending and students. Does the political party of elected officials matter for these outcomes? We use a regression discontinuity design to analyze close house and gubernatorial elections from 1982 to 2016 and find that the impact of Democratic control of state government depends on whether elections occur during a presidential election year. On average, Democratic states spend less per capita on K-12 education. This trend, however, reverses when Democrats secure marginal control during off-cycle elections. Outside of presidential election years, we find increased state expenditures on both K-12 education and higher education. These increases coincided with smaller K-12 class sizes, relatively higher high school diploma rates, and expanded college enrollment. Our results highlight the importance of considering how federal political contexts influence the effects of state-level politics on education finance and outcomes.
Teachers are the most important school-specific factor in student learning. Yet, little evidence exists linking teacher professional development programs and the strategies or activities that comprise them to student achievement. In this paper, we examine a fellowship model for professional development designed and implemented by Leading Educators, a national nonprofit organization that aims to bridge research and practice to improve instructional quality and accelerate learning across school systems. During the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years, Leading Educators conducted its fellowship program for two cohorts of teachers and school leaders to provide these educators ongoing, collaborative, job-embedded professional development and to improve student achievement. Relying on quasi-experimental methods, we find that a school’s participation in the fellowship program significantly increased student proficiency rates in English language arts and math on state achievement exams. Student achievement benefitted from a more sustained duration of participation in the fellowship program, varied depending on the share of a school’s educators who participated in the fellowship, and differed based on whether fellows independently selected into the program or were appointed to participate by their school leaders. Taken together, findings from this paper should inform professional learning organizations, schools, and policymakers on the design, implementation, and impact of educator professional development.
Broadband is not equally accessible among students despite its increasing importance to education. We investigate the relationship between broadband and housing policy by joining two measures of broadband access with Depression-era redlining maps that classified neighborhoods based in part on racist and classist beliefs. We find that despite internet service provider selfreports of similar technological availability, broadband access generally decreases in tandem with historic neighborhood classification, with further heterogeneity by race/ethnicity and income. Our findings demonstrate how past federally-developed housing policies connect to the digital divide and should be considered in educational policies that require broadband for success.
Anecdotal evidence points to the importance of school principals, but the limited existing research has neither provided consistent results nor indicated any set of essential characteristics of effective principals. This paper exploits extensive student-level panel data across six states to investigate both variations in principal performance and the relationship between effectiveness and key certification factors. While principal effectiveness varies widely across states, there is little indication that regulation of the background and training of principals yields consistently effective performance. Having prior teaching or management experience is not related to our estimates of principal value-added.
Discussion of the rising price of higher education and associated student debt in America has been a key feature of political discourse in recent memory, with renewed interest sparked by the announcement of the student loan forgiveness plan. Federal student debt has increased by 756% since 1995, and total student debt tripled from 2007 to 2022. Concurrently, state support for public universities fell by 18% from 2000 to 2015. This phenomenon has drawn interest in the literature, with works by Jaquette and Curs (2015), Bound et al. (2016), Deming and Walters (2017), Webber (2017), and Mathias (2022) examining the effect of state disinvestment on higher education pricing and enrollment. This paper uses data from IPEDS to examine Colorado's College Opportunity Fund, which eliminated state appropriations to Colorado universities in 2006. I advance the literature by being the first to employ quasi-experimental methods, using a synthetic control identification strategy to measure the impact of this funding shock on enrollment and tuition revenue recuperation by Colorado universities. I find that Hispanic enrollment increased by 3 percentage points relative to the synthetic counterfactual, and that tuition revenue increased by 42% as a result of the policy. These results are robust to threats to identification, and placebo tests conrm the validity of the design. These findings provide robust evidence of the pitfalls of state disinvestment in higher education, and the consequences for students who are left to foot the bill.
A controversial, equity-focused mathematics reform in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) featured delaying Algebra I until ninth grade for all students. This descriptive study examines student-level longitudinal data on mathematics course-taking across successive cohorts of SFUSD students who spanned the reform’s implementation. We observe large changes in ninth and tenth grades (e.g., delaying Algebra I and Geometry). Participation in Advanced Placement (AP) math initially fell 15% (6 pp.) driven by declines in AP Calculus and among Asian/Pacific-Islander students. However, growing participation in acceleration options attenuated these reductions. Large ethnoracial gaps in advanced math course-taking remained.
College attendance has increased significantly over the last few decades, but dropout rates remain high, with fewer than half of all adults ultimately obtaining a postsecondary credential. This project investigates whether one-on-one college coaching improves college attendance and completion outcomes for former low- and middle-income income state aid recipients who attended college but left prior to earning a degree. We conducted a randomized control trial with approximately 8,000 former students in their early- to mid-20s. Half of participants assigned to the treatment group were offered the opportunity to receive coaching services from InsideTrack, with all communication done remotely via phone or video. Intent-to-treat analyses based on assignment to coaching shows no impacts on college enrollment and we can rule out effects larger than a two-percentage point (5%) increase in subsequent Fall enrollment.