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Field trips to see theater performances are a long-standing educational practice, however, there is little systematic evidence demonstrating educational benefits. This article describes the results of five random assignment experiments spanning two years where school groups were assigned by lottery to attend a live theater performance, or for some groups, watch a movie-version of the same story. We find significant educational benefits from seeing live theater, including higher levels of tolerance, social perspective taking, and stronger command of the plot and vocabulary of those plays. Students randomly assigned to watch a movie did not experience these benefits. Our findings also suggest that theater field trips may cultivate the desire among students to frequent the theater in the future.
Recruiting and retaining teachers can be challenging for many schools, especially in low-performing urban schools in which teachers turn over at higher rates. In this study, we examine three types of school-level attributes that may influence teachers’ decisions to enter or transfer schools: malleable school processes, structural features of employment, and school characteristics. Using adaptive conjoint analysis survey design with a sample of teachers from low-performing, urban, turnaround schools in Tennessee, we find that five of the seven most highly valued features of schools are malleable processes: consistent administrative support, consistent enforcement of discipline, school safety, small class sizes, and availability of high-quality professional development. In particular, teachers rated as effective are more likely to prefer performance-based pay than teachers rated ineffective. We validate our results using administrative data from Tennessee on teachers’ actual mobility patterns.
Effective teacher hiring is fundamental to improving schools and yet few studies investigate this process. In this exploratory study of six successful, high-poverty schools (three charter, three district) in one Massachusetts city, we analyze the policy contexts that influenced hiring and examine the schools’ hiring practices. Through interviews with 142 teachers and administrators, we learned that, despite significant differences, these schools’ approaches were strikingly similar. Each used a two-way, information-rich hiring process that provided schools and candidates with opportunities to exchange information and assess one another before making an offer or signing a contract. Participants viewed their investment in hiring as an essential part of their school’s success. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers.
A growing body of research evaluates the effects of turnaround on chronically low-performing schools. We extend this research to formally test factors that either mediate or suppress the effects of two turnaround initiatives in Tennessee: the Achievement School District (ASD) and local Innovation Zones (iZones). Using difference-in-differences models within a mediational framework, we find that hiring highly effective teachers and employing effective principals partially explain positive effects of iZone interventions. In the ASD, high levels of teacher turnover suppress potential positive effects after the first year. In iZone schools, several factors suppress even larger positive effects: hiring more novice teachers; hiring more principals with less experience; and high levels of student chronic absenteeism and student in-migration.
Textbooks are a widely used educational intervention that can affect student achievement, and the marginal cost of choosing a more effective textbook is typically small. However, we know little about how textbooks get from the publisher to the classroom. We use a lens of institutional theory and interviews with district leaders in a stratified random sample of 34 California school districts to investigate the ways mathematics textbook adoption practices vary and predict adoption decisions. We find isomorphic, highly formalized adoption processes in most districts. However, we observe some differences along dimensions of district size, technological interest/infrastructure, and English learner concentration. We recommend states produce and update lists of high quality materials early and often, and that they use a highly rigorous evaluation process. We also recommend states experiment with encouraging similar districts to partner on textbook evaluation and adoption to respond to district demands for information and capacity building around curricula.
This phenomenological study draws on semi-structured interviews with 27 Black male teachers across 14 schools in an urban school district—seven schools with three or more Black male teachers and seven schools with one Black male teacher. Consistent with theories about teacher turnover, findings indicate a relationship between organizational characteristics, reasons participants cited for leaving, and participants’ actual decisions to stay or leave.
Social programs and mandates are usually studied in isolation even though they often interact closely with each other. Given the immense recent changes to health insurance systems, there is much potential for spillover effects to other systems in which health plays a large role. In this study, we examine how health insurance interacts with education, specifically the education of students with disabilities. We present the first analysis in the literature of how a mandate for health insurers to cover therapy for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) up to age 18 affects educational services received by, and test scores of, students with ASD. A key aspect of the mandate is that children covered by Medicaid aged out of benefits quickly (by age 6), leaving them with a far weaker benefit than children covered by private insurance. Since we do not observe insurance status directly, we proxy for private insurance coverage using ineligibility for free/reduced-price lunch (FRPL) and estimate impacts on identification with ASD, special education services, and achievement through a series of difference-in-differences and triple difference models. We find little evidence of an overall shift in ASD identification, but we do find substantial crowd-out of special education services for students with ASD from the mandate. The stronger mandate led to increased mainstreaming of students in general education classrooms and a reduction in special education support services like teacher consultants. Girls in particular are more likely to be mainstreamed. There is little evidence of changes in achievement, which supports our interpretation of the service reductions as crowd-out.
Friedman (1955) argued that giving parents freedom to choose schools would improve education. His argument was simple and compelling because it extended results from markets for consumer goods to education. We review the evidence, which yields surprisingly mixed results on Friedman's prediction. A key reason is that households often seem to choose schools based on their absolute achievement rather than their value added. We show this can be rational in a model based on three ingredients economists have highlighted since Friedman worked on the issue. First, education is an investment into human capital (Becker, 1964). Second, labor markets can feature wage premia: individuals of a given skill level may receive higher wages if they match to more productive firms (Card et al., 2018). Third, distance influences school choice and the placements schools produce (Abdulkadiroglu et al., 2017, Weinstein, 2017). These imply that choice alone is too crude a mechanism to ensure the effective provision of schooling.
Governments around the world have privatized public services in the name of efficiency and citizen empowerment, but some argue that privatization could also affect citizen participation in democratic governance. We explore this possibility by estimating the impact of charter schools (which are publicly funded but privately operated) on school district elections. The analysis indicates that the enrollment of district students in charter schools reduced the number of votes cast in district school board contests and, correspondingly, reduced turnout in the odd-year elections in which those contests are held. This impact is concentrated in districts that serve low-achieving, impoverished, and minority students, leading to a modest decline in the share of voters in those districts who are black and who have children. There is little evidence that charter school expansion affected the outcomes of school board elections or turnout in other elections