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Inequality
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This paper reports findings from a nationally representative survey of K-12 teachers in May 2023 that examines the potential long-term impacts of COVID-19 on public schooling. The findings suggest fundamental ways in which school operations, instructional practice and parent-teacher interaction have changed since the pandemic. Some changes seem promising; others suggest caution. While policymakers may not be able to directly influence some of the reported changes in the short run, monitoring the evolution of school practices (and their consequences for children) will position educational leaders to help teachers and students address the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic going forward.
Targeted school funding is a potentially valuable policy lever to increase educational equality by race, ethnicity, and income, but it remains unclear how to target funds most effectively. We use a regression discontinuity approach to compare districts that narrowly passed or failed a school funding election. We use close tax elections in 9 states to identify effects of operating funds and close bond elections in 8 states to identify effects of capital funds. Results indicate positive achievement returns to spending, especially for math achievement and for operating funds. We find similar returns to spending by race, ethnicity, and income (not statistically different), but we find significantly larger returns for students in low-resource districts than in high-resource districts, including larger returns for Black, Latinx, and low-income students. Mediation analyses suggest spending on teacher salaries and counselors may be particularly effective mechanisms to increase achievement among Black and low-income students.
A 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, direct links between one theoretically important form of digital information– school quality data– and neighborhood and school segregation are rarely drawn. To clarify these dynamics, we leverage an exogenous digital information shock, in which the Los Angeles Times’ website revealed measures of a particularly important school quality proxy– schools’ value-added effectiveness– for nearly all elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Results suggest that although the information shock had no detectable effects on residential sorting or neighborhood racial segregation, it did exert modest effects on school sorting—particularly for Latino and Asian students— albeit not in ways that materially diminished school racial segregation because the racial compositions of high- and low value-added schools were broadly similar both before and after the information shock. We conclude that the urban stratification implications of digital information may be more nuanced than often appreciated, with effects shaped by racial heterogeneity in both constraints and preferences vis-à-vis specific types of information and operating through mechanisms beyond residential segregation.
Limited scholarship examines districtwide turnaround reforms beyond the first few years of implementation or efforts to replicate successes in new contexts. We study Massachusetts, home to a state takeover of the Lawrence school district that led to academic gains in early reform years, and where state leaders attempted to replicate this success in three additional communities. We use statewide student-level administrative data (2006-07 to 2018- 19) and event study methods to estimate medium-term impacts on student outcomes across four districts. We find the initial improvements were largely sustained in Lawrence. We observe evidence of successful replication in Springfield but not Holyoke or Southbridge. The two turnarounds with positive outcomes both struck a unique balance between state and local input into decision-making.
The academic and economic benefits of school spending are well-established, but focusing on these outcomes may underestimate the full social benefits of school spending. Recent increases in U.S. child mortality are driven by injuries and raise questions about what types of social investments could reduce child deaths. We use close school district tax elections and negative binomial regression models to estimate effects of a quasi-random increase in school spending on county child mortality. We find consistent evidence that increased school spending from passing a tax election reduces child mortality. Districts that narrowly passed a proposed tax increase spent an additional $243 per pupil, mostly on instruction and salaries, and had 4% lower child mortality after spending increased (6-10 years after the election). This increased spending also reduced child deaths of despair (due to drugs, alcohol, or suicide) by 5% and child deaths due to accidents or motor vehicle accidents by 7%. Estimates predicting potential mechanisms suggest that lower child mortality could partly reflect increases in the number of teachers and counselors, higher teacher salaries, and improved student engagement.
College attendance has increased significantly over the last few decades, but dropout rates remain high, with fewer than half of all adults ultimately obtaining a postsecondary credential. This project investigates whether one-on-one college coaching improves college attendance and completion outcomes for former low- and middle-income income state aid recipients who attended college but left prior to earning a degree. We conducted a randomized control trial with approximately 8,000 former students in their early- to mid-20s. Half of participants assigned to the treatment group were offered the opportunity to receive coaching services from InsideTrack, with all communication done remotely via phone or video. Intent-to-treat analyses based on assignment to coaching shows no impacts on college enrollment and we can rule out effects larger than a two-percentage point (5%) increase in subsequent Fall enrollment.
“Free college” programs are widespread in American higher education. They are discussed as addressing college access, affordability, inequality, and skills shortages. Many are last-dollar tuition guarantees restricted to use at single community colleges. Using student-level data spanning the transition to college, we investigate how two similar local community college tuition guarantees in Pennsylvania affected college-going outcomes. The Morgan Success Scholarship has large impacts on community college attendance and associate degree attainment. The program diverts students away from four-year colleges, though much of this effect is temporary. Meanwhile, we find little evidence that the Community College of Philadelphia’s 50th Anniversary Scholars program has any impact on college-going behavior. We suggest reasons for divergent findings and offer suggestions for practice.
The increasing prevalence of private tutoring has received minimal scholarly attention in the United States. We use over 25 years of geocoded data on the universe of U.S. private tutoring centers to estimate the size and growth of this industry and to identify predictors of tutoring center locations. We document four important facts. First, from 1997 to 2022, the number of private tutoring centers more than tripled, from about 3,000 to 10,000, with steady growth through 2015 before a more recent plateau. Second, the number and growth of private tutoring centers is heavily concentrated in geographic areas with high income and parental education. More than half of tutoring centers are in areas in the top quintile of income. Third, even conditional on income and parental education, private tutoring centers tend to locate in areas with many Asian American families, suggesting important differences by ethnic or cultural identity in demand for such services. Fourth, we see only marginal evidence that prevalence of private tutoring centers is related to the structure of K-12 school markets, including the prevalence of private schools and charter or magnet school options. The rapid rise in high-income families’ demand for this form of private educational investment mimics phenomena observed in other spheres of education and family life, with potentially important implications for inequality in student outcomes.
“Free college” (sometimes called Promise) programs are common in U.S. higher education. Reviewing 88 studies of 25 state and local programs, I provide a nuanced picture of the mechanisms through which these programs may work and their likely effects on students, communities, and colleges. Some commonly-claimed mechanisms for these effects—e.g., improving secondary school environments or impacting residential decisions—lack empirical support or are implausible for most existing programs. Programs are consistently found to shift college-bound students to colleges where they can use more scholarship dollars, increase enrollment at eligible colleges, and (for generous local programs only) increase community school district enrollment. Less consistently, programs boost college participation and thereby degree attainment, but evidence for direct effects on college performance, persistence or completion net of enrollment is weak. There is insufficient or inconsistent evidence for program effects on secondary school performance and graduation, post-college income and debt, community population or property values, and inequality reduction according to gender, race, or socioeconomic status.
Demand for child care in the United States outpaces supply. Understanding access issues is critical for addressing them and supporting children, families, and the economy. However, the most widely available proxy for child care supply—authorized capacity—likely overestimates care availability. Authorized capacity represents the maximum children a provider can legally serve based on safety regulations and physical characteristics of the site. However, the slots available across sites can be constrained by factors not captured by authorized capacity, including the combination of ages currently enrolled and staffing at a site. If the gap between authorized capacity and “current capacity” is large, we stand to underestimate needed investments to improve access. This study quantifies the gap between providers’ “current capacity” as reported in a fall 2022 survey and authorized capacity per administrative records. Using data from 1,968 home- and center-based providers in Virginia, we find three key limitations of authorized capacity as a proxy of supply. First, providers’ current capacity was 74% of their authorized capacity on average. Authorized capacity would overestimate child care availability by more than 30,000 slots across the providers in our sample. Second, center-based providers that accepted child care subsidies and those in neighborhoods with a greater concentration of poverty or people of color had significantly larger discrepancies between their current and authorized capacity. Finally, we find centers that reported challenges hiring and retaining staff had larger gaps between their current and authorized capacity compared to providers that did not report staffing challenges. These findings suggest the need for measures that more accurately and dynamically capture the number of children a provider can serve to better describe and address access inequities.