To examine how the kinds of controversies that paralyzed Coachella Valley and Dover schools affect academic achievement, I combined information from the Cato Institute’s Public Schooling Battle Map with test score data from the Stanford Election Data Archive.
Overall, I find that student achievement declines in the years after a local political controversy, with the effects concentrated in math and in elementary and lower middle school grades. The impacts are not huge, translating to about 10 days of learning in a typical 180-day school year, but they are meaningful (see Figure 1).
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