Search EdWorkingPapers
Search for EdWorkingPapers here by author, title, or keywords.
Search
EdWorkingPapers
We use close tax elections to estimate the impact of school district funding increases on operational spending and education outcomes across seven states. The analysis indicates that districts where tax levies passed spent $400-$500 more annually per pupil through 5-7 years after the election. They directed most of these funds toward increasing instructor salaries. These spending increases correspond to student test score gains of approximately 0.1 of a standard deviation and gains in graduation rates of approximately 3-4 percentage points. There is some evidence of diminishing returns, as these effects are driven by districts below the median in spending per pupil.
Public support for school improvement policies can increase the success and durability of those reforms. However, little is known about public views on turnaround. We deployed questions and embedded experiments in a nationally representative 2017 survey (n=4,214) to uncover opinions regarding (a) which level of government should lead on turnaround and (b) state takeover of troubled districts. We find a large plurality prefers states play the greatest role in identifying and fixing failing schools. However, a substantial share prefers local governments increase their role. We find high levels of support for state takeover, yet support is greater in cases of financial mismanagement than academic underperformance. Those most likely to be directly affected express the least support for state takeover.
Indiana, Oklahoma, and Washington have programs designed to address college enrollment and completion gaps by offering a promise of state-based college financial aid to low-income middle school students in exchange for making a pledge to do well in high school, be a good citizen, not be convicted of a felony, and apply for financial aid to college. Using a triple-difference specification, we find that Washington’s College Bound Scholarship shifted enrollment from out-of-state to in-state colleges at which the scholarship could be used. While we find suggestive evidence that the program increased the likelihood of attending a postsecondary institution and attaining a bachelor’s degree within five years of high school, we discuss why the program might be more successful if it did not require students to sign a pledge.
Recent attempts to measure schools’ influence on students' SEL show differences across schools, but whether these differences measure the true effect of schools is unclear. We examine the stability of school-by-grade effects on students' SEL across two years using a large-scale survey. Correlations among effects in the same grades across different years are positive but lower than those for math and English. Schools in the top or bottom of the effect distribution have more persistent impacts across years than those in the middle. Overall, the results suggest that these school effects measure real contributions to students' SEL. However, their low stability draws into question whether including school value-added measures of self-reported SEL in school performance systems would be beneficial.
We provide novel evidence on the causal impact of student absences in middle and high school on state test scores, course grades, and educational attainment using a rich administrative dataset that includes the date and class period of each absence. Our identification strategy addresses potential endogeneity due to time-varying student-level shocks by exploiting the fact that in a given year, there exists within-student, between-class variation in absences. We also leverage information on the timing of absences to show that absences that occur after the annual window for state standardized testing do not appear to affect test scores, which provides a further check of our identification strategy. We find that absences in middle and high school harm contemporaneous student achievement and longer-term educational attainment: On average, missing 10 math classes reduces math test scores by 7% of a standard deviation, math course grades by 19% of a standard deviation, the probability of on-time graduation by 8%, and the probability of immediate college enrollment by 7%. Similar results hold for absences in English Language Arts classes. These results suggest that absences in middle school and high school are just as harmful, if not more so, than absences in elementary school. Moreover, the timing of absences during the school year matters, as both the occurrence and the impact of absences are dynamic phenomena.
We examine whether virtual advising – college counseling using technology to communicate remotely – increases postsecondary enrollment in selective colleges. We test this approach using a sample of approximately 16,000 high-achieving, low- and middle-income students identified by the College Board and randomly assigned to receive virtual advising from the College Advising Corps. The offer of virtual advising had no impact on overall college enrollment, but increased enrollment in high graduation rate colleges by 2.7 percentage points (5%), with instrumental variable impacts on treated students of 6.1 percentage points. We also find that non-white students who were randomly assigned to a nonwhite adviser exhibited stronger treatment effects.
In recognition of the complexity of the college and financial aid application process, and in response to insufficient access to family or school-based counseling among economically-disadvantaged populations, investments at the local, state, and federal level have expanded students’ access to college and financial aid advising. Experimental and quasi-experimental studies of these programs demonstrate that they can generate substantial improvements in the rate at which low-income students enroll and persist in college. While these programs are successful at the level of individual communities, the individualized, in-person college advising model faces numerous barriers to scale. In this paper, we report early results from an RCT of CollegePoint, an innovative, national college advising initiative that pursues a technology-enabled approach to provide students with sustained, intensive advising. Students assigned to CollegePoint are modestly more likely (1.5 percentage points, or 7.5 percent relative to the control) to enroll at the most selective colleges and universities (Barron’s 1 institutions), though we find no difference in enrollment patterns on other measures of college quality. We find suggestive evidence of variation in the impact of CollegePoint based on when students enrolled in the program. Students who enrolled in the spring of their junior year were 5.6 percentage points (22 percent relative to the control) more likely to enroll at one of the most selective colleges and universities in the country than students in the control group who also signed up in the spring of junior year but who were not assigned to the program.
Use of education finance data is ubiquitous. Yet, because the academic calendar circumscribes two calendar years, researchers have linked the Consumer Price Index to three different dates: the Fall, Spring and academic fiscal years. We demonstrate that linking the CPI to these different academic year results in identifying different trends in U.S. educational spending during the Great Recession. Descriptive inferences should not be sensitive to researcher discretion about merge years. We provide an easy-to-use software package to facilitate implementation of NCES guidelines in the hope that future analyses of education finance data will explicitly and consistently apply inflation adjustments.
Holzer and Baum’s recent book, ‘Making College Work: Pathways to Success for Disadvantaged Students,’ provides an excellent up-to-date review of higher education. My review first summarizes its key themes: 1) who gains from college and why? 2) mismatch and the need for more structure; 3) problems with remediation; 4) financial barriers and 5) the promise of comprehensive support. I then critique the book’s proposed solutions using some of my own qualitative and quantitative data. Some recommendations are worth considering, while others are too expensive or unlikely to make a meaningful difference without addressing the underlying lack of preparedness and motivation of college students. I argue that making mandatory some existing services, such as application assistance and advice, proactive tutoring and advising, and greater career transition support, has the most immediate potential.
Child care subsidies play an important role in stabilizing parental employment and helping low- income families access care. With limited federal requirements under CCDBG, states developed divergent subsidy program policies. Our study examines how variations in six state policy levers that capture CCDF administrative burdens and generosity relate to stability in children’s care in the CCDF program, known as subsidy “spells.”: (1) length of eligibility redetermination; (2) reporting requirements for income changes; (3) grace period for care before termination; (4) provider reimbursement rates; (5) parent copay amounts; and (6) difference between initial and continuing eligibility income thresholds. We exploit states’ changes in these policies during a 10- year period (2004-2013) using state fixed effects analyses to identify their impact on spell length. We find that administrative burdens robustly affect child care spell length; increasing states’ redetermination period length by one month increased state median subsidy spell length by 1.4 weeks, but requiring all changes in family income to be reported while enrolled in CCDF decreased spell length by 2.3 weeks. Switching to a 12-month redetermination period increased median spell length by 30%. CCDF policy generosity was not related to spell length. Results are discussed in the context of the 2014 CCDBG reauthorization.