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High schools
Ready for What? School and District Responses to State College and Career Readiness Accountability in Tennessee
Tags: College readiness, High schoolsTennessee’s K-12 accountability system incorporates three distinct measures of college and career readiness (CCR) for state and federal accountability. Each of these indicators applies its own set of metrics and performance benchmarks, but they all consistently draw upon similar components… more →
Removing Barriers to College Credits: Where and for Whom AP Exam Fee Waivers Work
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceDo policies that broaden educational access also foster success? We study this question in the context of North Carolina’s universal Advanced Placement (AP) exam fee waiver policy. Using student-course level administrative data, we exploit within-student variation on a sample of students who… more →
Influence of Within-Class Age Differences on Adolescents’ Eating Behaviors
Topics: Student Well-BeingThis study examines within-class age differences as a novel determinant of adolescents’ dietary behaviors, isolating it from confounders such as absolute age, season of birth, and country-specific school entry rules. Using a multi-country dataset of over 600,000 European students, we find that… more →
School Bathrooms: Perspectives on Safety, Surveillance, and Privacy in the Restroom
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceSchools are increasing surveillance in bathrooms in response to concerns about student behaviors in the restroom such as vaping, drug use, and vandalism. This study investigates how schools secure and surveil bathrooms and how stakeholders perceive these interventions. We situate school… more →
The Labor Market Impact of K-11 vs. K-12
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceIn 1945, Louisiana extended secondary education from 11 years to 12. Since many students followed diploma-based stopping rules, consecutive birth cohorts exogenously received different amounts of schooling. We use this natural experiment to evaluate the long-run labor market impact of having an… more →
The Effects of K-12 Computer Science Education Policies on Postsecondary CS Participation
Paul Bruno, Tuan D. Nguyen, Haeryun Kim, Chanh B. Lam, Mariam Saffar Pérez, Jinyoung Hur, Colleen M. Lewis.Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: High schools, Science educationStates have increasingly adopted policies to promote computer science education at the elementary and secondary levels. These policies are intended, in part, to promote the pursuit of computer science at the postsecondary level. We collect novel longitudinal data on adoption and implementation… more →
Increasing Applied STEM Curricular Opportunities in High School and Impacts on Early Post-Secondary Outcomes: The Effect of Project Lead the Way
Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is an applied STEM Career Technical Education program that has been adopted widely across the country. Using data from Missouri, we investigate the impact of PLTW course expansion on program participation and early post-secondary outcomes. Our identification… more →
The impact of increasing school resources on peer victimization: Evidence from targeted funding on low-income families in Chile
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWhile a large body of literature has examined the impact of school spending on academic outcomes, far less is known about its effect on students’ socioemotional development and school experiences. This study contributes to narrowing this gap by evaluating the impact of a nationwide school… more →
High School Effects on Civic Engagement
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernancePreparing young people for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship is cited as a fundamental purpose of public education, yet little is known about whether or how K-12 schools impact civic engagement. Using education records, birth records, and national voting records for nine cohorts of… more →
Exploring Claims of Critical Race Theory, Divisive Topics, and Indoctrination in the Classroom
Gary W. Ritter, Brian Kisida, J. Cameron Anglum, Heidi H. Erickson, Jennifer S. Gontram, Matthew H. Lee.Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceCritical race theory (CRT) and claims of political indoctrination in K-12 classrooms are at the forefront of the ongoing culture wars surrounding public education. Despite a wave of legislative action targeting CRT-related instruction, little systematic evidence documents the extent to which… more →
Identifying Indicators to Support Educational Attainment for Different Groups of English Learners in High School
This study examines a broad array of potential indicators for early warning and college readiness indicator systems for different subgroups of English Learners in high school. Using data from 2008 through 2021 from the Chicago Public Schools, the study follows cohorts of students from eighth… more →
The Effects of High School Remediation on Long-Run Educational Attainment
Tags: Ability grouping, Career and technical education, College readiness, Curriculum, High schools, Human capitalThis study examines the effects of remedial courses in high school on postsecondary outcomes using a regression discontinuity design and explores the mechanisms behind these effects. I find that being placed in the remedial schedule and taking an additional remedial course in high school reduces… more →
Are School Discipline Practices Pushing Students Out…to Another School? A Longitudinal Analysis of School Transfers in Five Midwest Counties
Topics: Student LearningSociology of education scholars have positioned punitive discipline practices as factors that work to “push” unwanted students to drop out of school before graduating. However, limited research examines how punitive discipline practices may push students to transfer to another schools—… more →
Peer Income Exposure Across the Income Distribution
Michelle Spiegel, Leah Clark, Thurston Domina, Emily Penner, Paul Hanselman, Paul Yoo, Andrew M. Penner.Topics: Families and CommunitiesChildren from families across the income distribution attend public schools, making schools and classrooms potential sites for interaction between more- and less-affluent children. However, limited information exists regarding the extent of economic integration in these contexts. We merge… more →
The Costs and Benefits of North Carolina’s Early College High School Model
Early colleges are high schools that blend the high school and college experiences. They have been shown to increase college enrollment and completion; however less is known about the costs of the early college model relative to traditional high schools. We leverage randomized assignment of… more →
Making the Grade: Accounting for Course Selection in High School Transcripts with Item Response Theory
Topics: MethodsWe apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to high-school transcript data, treating courses as items and grades as ordered responses, to estimate student transcript strength (θ̂) and course difficulty on a common scale. IRT estimation orders courses plausibly by difficulty, differentiates… more →
How and Why Racial Isolation Affects Education Costs & the Provision of Equal Educational Opportunity
This article provides a review of prior empirical work exploring whether and to what extent school district racial composition affects the costs associated with providing equal educational opportunity to achieve a common set of outcomes. This prior work mainly involves education cost function… more →
Using Gaussian Process Regression in Two-Dimensional Regression Discontinuity Designs
Topics: MethodsTags: High schools, Instructional designSometimes a treatment, such as receiving a high school diploma, is assigned to students if their scores on two inputs (e.g., math and English test scores) are above established cutoffs. This forms a multidimensional regression discontinuity design (RDD) to analyze the effect of the educational… more →
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 →
Less is More: The Causal Effect of Four-Day School Weeks on Employee Turnover
The use of four-day school weeks (4dsw) in the United States has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. Previous work examines the impact of 4dsw on student outcomes, but little research to date examines the effect on school employees even though schools in some locales have adopted 4dsw to… more →