Sean P. Corcoran
Do the Effects Persist? An Examination of Long-term Effects After Students Leave Turnaround Schools
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWhole-school reforms have received widespread attention, but a critical limitation of the current literature is the lack of evidence around whether these extensive and costly interventions improve students’ long-term outcomes after they leave reform schools. Leveraging Tennessee’s statewide… more →
Choosing Alone? Peer Similarity in High School Choices
Topics: School ChoiceWe provide a descriptive analysis of within-school and neighborhood similarity in high school applications in New York City. We depart from prior work by examining similarity in applications to specific schools rather than preferences for school characteristics. We find surprisingly low… more →
When Do Informational Interventions Work? Experimental Evidence from New York City High School Choice
Topics: School ChoiceTags: High schoolsThis paper reports the results of a large, school-level randomized controlled trial evaluating a set of three informational interventions for young people choosing high schools in 473 middle schools, serving over 115,000 8th graders. The interventions differed in their level of customization to… more →
Racial Disparities in Pre-K Quality: Evidence from New York City’s Universal Pre-K Program
Topics: Student LearningNew York City’s universal pre-kindergarten program, which increased full-day enrollment from 19,000 to almost 70,000 children, is ambitious in both scale and implementation speed. We provide new evidence on the distribution of pre-K quality in NYC by student race/ethnicity, and investigate the… more →
Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale
Topics: MethodsTags: AssessmentEstimates of teacher “value-added” suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the… more →