Applying Research-Based Strategies to Strategic Staffing Initiatives
Category: Teacher and Leader Development
This paper studies the New York City Department of Education's Discovery Program, an affirmative action policy implemented to increase access to some of New York City’s most elite public high schools. The Discovery Program allocates reserve seats at New York City’s exam schools to disadvantaged students who successfully complete the course requirements of a summer program. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) and student-level administrative data I estimate the causal impact of exam school admission through the Discovery Program on educational outcomes. I find that while students experience an initial reduction in high school GPA, this negative effect does not persist into later years. Conversely, reserve seat offers increase performance on standardized math test scores. Test score gains are larger for female students, while the initial drop in high school GPA is strongest for male students. Under a counterfactual school assignment match with no reserve seats, I show that exam school displacement as a result of the Discovery Program has no effect on math scores, but boosts high school GPA. Taken together, these results suggest that the Discovery Program improves outcomes for disadvantaged students, with little to no achievement cost for those displaced by reserve seats.
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/91qk-ka33
