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The Implications of Digital School Quality Information for Neighborhood and School Segregation: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Los Angeles
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceA digital information explosion has transformed cities’ residential and educational markets in ways that are still being uncovered. Although urban stratification scholars have increasingly scrutinized whether emerging digital platforms disrupt or reproduce longstanding segregation patterns,… more →
Local Licensure and Teacher Shortage: Policy Analysis and Implications
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWe use frame analysis to analyze the first iteration of the Texas District of Innovation policy, which allows districts to take exemption from state education requirements mandating the hiring of a state certified teacher. We analyzed 451 district policies and find the plans use very similar,… more →
Neighbors' Spillovers on High School Choice
Topics: School ChoiceDo residential neighbors affect each others' schooling choices? We exploit oversubscription lotteries in Chile's centralized school admission system to identify the effect of close neighbors on application and enrollment decisions. A student is 5-7% more likely to rank a high school as their… more →
How Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Influence School Board Elections?
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Covid-19 recovery, NeighborhoodsMedia reports suggest that parent frustration with COVID school policies and the growing politicization of education have increased community engagement with local public schools. However, there is no evidence to date on whether these factors have translated into greater engagement at the ballot… more →
The Politics of Teachers' Union Endorsements
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Neighborhoods, School districtsSchool board candidates supported by local teachers' unions overwhelmingly win and we examine the causes and consequences of the "teachers' union premium" in these elections. First, we show that union endorsement information increases voter support. Although the magnitude of this effect varies… more →
Dual Language Program Expansion and Dispersion in the Context of Neighborhood Change, School Choice, and Enrollment Decline
Topics: Families and CommunitiesTags: NeighborhoodsPurpose. Bilingual programs in the United States, particularly two-way dual language immersion (TWDL) programs, have been implemented since the 1960s to support the education of English Learner-classified (EL-classified) and language minoritized students. Over the past decade, TWDL programs have… more →
An Improved Method for Estimating School-Level Characteristics from Census Data
Topics: MethodsTags: School districts, NeighborhoodsWe propose a new method for estimating school-level characteristics from publicly available census data. We use a school’s location to impute its catchment area by aggregating the nearest n census block groups such that the number of school-aged children in those n block groups is just over the… more →
Are Connections the Way to Get Ahead? Social Capital, Student Achievement, Friendships, and Social Mobility
Topics: Families and CommunitiesTags: Neighborhoods, EquityChetty et al. (2022) say county density of cross-class friendships (referred to here as “adult-bridging capital”) has causal impacts on social mobility within the United States. We instead find that social mobility rates are a function of county density of family capital (higher marriage rates… more →
The Causal Impact of Charter Schools on Private Tutoring Prevalence
Topics: School ChoiceGreater school choice leads to lower demand for private tutoring according to various international studies, but this has not been explicitly tested for the U.S. context. To estimate the causal effect of charter school appearances on neighboring private tutoring prevalence, we employ a… more →
Going the Distance: Exploring Variation in Access to High-Quality PreK by Geographic Proximity, Race/Ethnicity, Family Income, and Home Language
Meghan P. McCormick, Mirjana Pralica, JoAnn Hsueh, Christina Weiland, Amanda Weissman, Samantha Xia, Anna Shapiro, Cullen MacDowell, Samuel Maves, Anne Taylor, Jason Sachs.Topics: Families and CommunitiesThis study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (PreK) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS PreK from 2012–2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups. The largest differences in… more →
Native Flight Responses to Immigration: Evidence from K-12 School Enrollments
Topics: Families and CommunitiesOver the past few decades, the U.S. has received a consistent and increasing influx of immigrants into the nation. Immigration poses challenges relating to diversity, inclusion and cohesion in education systems, including K-12 education. In the context of immigration, the theory of native flight… more →
Choice and Change: The Implications of Charter School Expansion for School and Neighborhood Diversity in NYC
Topics: School ChoiceIn this paper we estimate the effect of charter schools on the diversity of nearby traditional public schools (TPSs) and neighborhoods in New York City. We employ a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the differences in the expansion of the charter sector between grades in the same… more →
Self-Interest in Public Service: Evidence from School Board Elections
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceIn this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This increase is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by non-Democratic members, whose neighborhoods appreciate about 4% on average relative to those of… more →
Do Long Bus Rides Drive Down Academic Outcomes?
Topics: Families and CommunitiesTags: Neighborhoods, TransportationSchool buses may be a critical education policy lever, breaking the link between schools and neighborhoods and facilitating access to school choice. Yet little is known about the commute for bus riders, including the average length of the bus ride or whether long commutes harm academic outcomes… more →
Digital redlining: the relevance of 20th century housing policy to 21st century broadband access and education
Topics: Families and CommunitiesBroadband is not equally accessible among students despite its increasing importance to education. We investigate the relationship between broadband and housing policy by joining two measures of broadband access with Depression-era redlining maps that classified neighborhoods based in part on… more →
Informal social interactions, behavior, and academic achievement
Topics: Student LearningWe study the effects of informal social interactions on academic achievement and behavior using idiosyncratic variation in peer groups stemming from changes in bus routes across elementary, middle, and high school. In early grades, a one standard-deviation change in the value-added of same-grade… more →
Higher Education and Local Educational Attainment: Evidence from the Establishment of U.S. Colleges
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Equity, NeighborhoodsWe investigate how the presence of a college affects local educational attainment using historical natural experiments in which "runner-up" locations were strongly considered to become college sites but ultimately not chosen for as-good-as-random reasons. While runner-up counties have since had… more →
Are public housing projects good for kids after all?
Topics: Families and CommunitiesIs public housing bad for children? Critics charge that public housing projects concentrate poverty and create neighborhoods with limited opportunities, including low-quality schools. However, whether the net effect is positive or negative is theoretically ambiguous and likely to depend on the… 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 →
Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students
Topics: Student LearningWe study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among… more →