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Race, ethnicity and culture
Although Black and Latinx students disproportionately face exclusionary school discipline, prior research finds that the likelihood of suspension for Black students decreases when they are taught by greater proportions of Black teachers. Little prior work, however, has examined whether these effects generalize to large, diverse, urban school districts or to Asian American or Latinx students and teachers. Using student fixed effects models and 10 years of data from New York City, we find that assignment to greater proportions of ethnoracially matched teachers decreases the likelihood of suspension for Black, Latinx, and Asian American students. The magnitudes of these effects are small but suggest that diversifying the teacher workforce could lead to significant decreases in exclusionary discipline in urban districts.
We documented (1) the use of strategies, beyond suspensions and expulsions, that exclude young students from learning opportunities and (2) how teacher-reported use of these strategies varied according to student racial/ethnic composition. In a sample of 2,053 teachers and 40,771 kindergarten students, teachers reported on their use of five exclusionary strategies including isolated seating, removal from an activity, and loss of recess. Teachers reported substantive use of all exclusionary strategies and use varied depending on strategy. Teachers reported using certain exclusionary practices (break outside of classroom, loss of recess or free time, and limit talking) more frequently when they rated more Black versus White students to be lowest on self-regulation and social skills. Findings illustrate the value of looking beyond suspensions and expulsions in the early years to advance equity in young children’s opportunities to engage with teachers, peers, and learning tasks at school.
State and local education agencies across the country are prioritizing the goal of diversifying the teacher workforce. To further understand the challenges of diversifying the teacher pipeline, I investigate race and gender dynamics between teachers and school-based administrators, who are key decision-makers in hiring, evaluating, and retaining teachers. I use longitudinal data from a large school district in the southeastern United States to examine the effects of race-congruence and gender-congruence between teachers and observers/administrators on teachers’ observation scores. Using models with two-way fixed effects, I find that teachers, on average, experience small positive increases in their scores from sharing race or gender with their observers, raising fairness concerns for teachers whose race or gender identities are not reflected by any of their raters.
Cognition, a component of human capital, is fundamental for decision-making, and understanding the causes of human capital depreciation in old age is especially important in aging societies. Using various proxy measures of cognitive performance from a longitudinal survey in South Africa, we study how education affects cognition in late adulthood. We show that an extra year of schooling improves memory performance and general cognition. We find evidence of heterogeneous effects by gender: the effects are stronger among women. We explore potential mechanisms, and we show that a more supportive social environment, improved health habits, and reduced stress levels likely play a critical role in mediating the beneficial effects of educational attainment on cognition among the elderly.
In this paper I study the impact of court-mandated school desegregation by race on student suspensions and special education classification. Simple descriptive statistics using student enrollment and outcome data collected from the largest school districts across the country in the 1970s and 1980s show that Black-White school integration was increasing for districts under court order, but not for a set of comparison districts. Similarly, Black student suspension rates were increasing at faster rates in integrating districts relative to comparison districts, and their classification rates as having an intellectual disability were decreasing at slower rates. Differences-in-differences and event study models confirm these patterns I observe in the raw data: after integration, school districts experienced statistically and practically significant reductions in racial isolation across schools and growth in racial disparities in discipline and special education classification. The impacts of integration are immediate, sustained, and robust for student suspensions in particular. My results thus provide causal evidence confirming prior descriptive and theoretical work suggesting that the racial composition of schools may influence measures of categorical inequality by race.
Using detailed classroom-level data for North Carolina, we build on previous research to examine racial gaps in access to high-quality teachers. We calculate the exposure of White, Black and Hispanic students to teachers with various characteristics in 4th grade, 7th grade math and English, and 10th grade math and English. We find that across the state White students enjoy sizable advantages over both Black and Hispanic students in the form of higher exposure to teachers with strong credentials and lower exposure to teachers with weak credentials. Remarkably, we also find this pattern of White advantage in most individual counties, with the largest White advantage occurring in the largest counties by enrollment. A decomposition of the White advantages shows that the bulk of them can be attributed to differences across counties and differences between schools within counties. Only in 10th grade are differences across classrooms within schools important in explaining the White advantage.
Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the decision to reopen schools for in-person instruction has become a highly salient policy issue. This study examines what overall factors drive public support for schools re-opening in person, and whether members of the public are any more or less willing to comply with school re-opening decisions based on their own preferences and the level of government from which the order comes. Through two rounds of national surveys with an embedded experiment, I find consistent evidence that 1) trust in information from elites - not contact with COVID - best explain preferences for reopening, 2) political ideology and racial and class identification help explain preferences as well, and 3) the President of the United States is best positioned to generate compliance with a school reopening mandate. However, low public trust in the president makes the public significantly less likely to comply. This study suggests that politics - not public health - drives public support for schools reopening and compliance with government orders to reopen.
Despite interest in the role of school discipline in the creation of racial inequality, previous research has been unable to identify how students who receive suspensions in school differ from unsuspended classmates on key young adult outcomes. We utilize novel data to document the links between high school discipline and important young adult outcomes related to criminal justice contact, social safety net program participation, post-secondary education, and the labor market. We show that the link between school discipline and young adult outcomes tends to be stronger for Black students than for White students, and that inequality in exposure to school discipline accounts for approximately 30 percent of the Black-White disparities in young adult criminal justice outcomes and SNAP receipt.
Over the last decade, more and more schools have adopted Universal Free Meals (UFM), a program that provides meals free of charge to all students, regardless of household income. Recent research finds UFM increases participation in school meals, improves test scores, and reduces incidences of bad behavior. Additionally, advocates cite stigma reduction as one of UFM’s many benefits, but to date, scholars have yet to provide empirical evidence of this claim. This paper fills the gap in the literature by being the first to examine whether UFM influences student perceptions of school climate. I use individual, student survey responses and school meal participation data from New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) to investigate whether and to what extent UFM changes participation behavior and student perceptions of their school climate. Using a difference-in-differences design, I exploit students’ staggered exposure to UFM, among those that are ever exposed, to investigate if UFM influences participation and improves student perceptions of bullying, fighting, respect, and safety. I find UFM increases school lunch participation among students that were previously eligible for free meals but rarely participated, suggesting that UFM affects participation patterns beyond simply reducing the price of food. All students, regardless of socioeconomic status, report reductions in perceptions of bullying and fighting within school, as well as improvements in perceptions of safety outside of school. Notably, students ever designated as eligible for free/reduced price meals and those that ate school lunches last year report feeling safer inside the school cafeteria. Thus, not only does UFM improve perceptions associated with stigma for students who directly interact with UFM, but the program also has positive effects for all students regardless of their socioeconomic status.
Federal law defines eligibility for English learner (EL) classification differently for Indigenous students compared to non-Indigenous students. Indigenous students, unlike non-Indigenous students, are not required to have a non-English home or primary language. A critical question, therefore, is how EL classification impacts Indigenous students’ educational outcomes. This study explores this question for Alaska Native students, drawing on data from five Alaska school districts. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find evidence that among students who score near the EL classification threshold in kindergarten, EL classification has a large negative impact on Alaska Native students’ academic outcomes, especially in the 3rd and 4th grades. Negative impacts are not found for non-Alaska Native students in the same districts.