Michah W. Rothbart, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Emily Gutierrez
{"title":"Paying for Free Lunch: The Impact of CEP Universal Free Meals on Revenues, Spending, and Student Health","authors":"Michah W. Rothbart, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Emily Gutierrez","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00380","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 allows school districts to provide free meals to all students if over 40 percent of them are directly certified as free-meal eligible. While emerging evidence documents positive effects on student behavior and academics, critics worry that CEP has unintended consequences for student weight, district finances, and instructional spending. We investigate these using school and district data from New York State and a difference-in-differences design. We exploit staggered CEP adoption, and explore differences between metro, town, and rural districts. We investigate potential mechanisms, including lunch and breakfast participation, and use event studies to assess pre-adoption trends and effects over time. We find that CEP increases total food expenditures, but spending per meal declines. Local food service revenues decline, but increased federal reimbursements more than compensate for local food revenues and expenditures changes. Indeed, while some worry that CEP crowds out education spending, we find no effect on instructional expenditures. Furthermore, CEP increases participation in school lunch and breakfast, but has no deleterious effect on weight outcomes and, instead, is associated with obesity declines in secondary grades. Rural districts experience larger impacts than metro and town districts, alongside some negative fiscal effects.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135181150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introducing the New Editorial Team","authors":"","doi":"10.1162/edfp_e_00406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_e_00406","url":null,"abstract":"Li Feng and Cassandra Hart, EditorsTolani Britton, Sean Corcoran, Oded Gurantz, Joshua Hyman, Tammy Kolbe, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, and Roddy Theobald, Associate EditorsEditorsLi Feng is a professor of economics at Texas State University. She has served as a Visiting Scholar in the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research focuses on the economics of education, labor economics, and health economics, exploring topics such as teacher labor markets, school accountability, and collective bargaining agreements. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the American Educational Research Association. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for Education and Finance Policy. She received her PhD in Economics and Education Specialist in Education (EdS) from Florida State University.Cassandra Hart is a professor of education policy in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis. She evaluates the effects of school, state, and national education programs, policies, and practices on overall student achievement, and on the equity of student outcomes. Her recent work has focused on online education in both K–12 schools and community colleges, school choice programs, school accountability policies, and effects on students of exposure to demographically similar teachers. She holds her PhD in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University.Associate EditorsTolani Britton is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She uses quasi-experimental methods to explore the impact of policies on students’ transition from secondary school to higher education, as well as access and retention in higher education. Her research focuses on three primary areas: the relationship between state criminal laws and college enrollment and persistence, the impact of state and city college preparedness policies on college access and success, and the role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in college access and success. She received her doctorate from the Quantitative Policy Analysis program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and previously worked as a high school math teacher and college counselor in New York City public schools.Sean Corcoran is an associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University. He conducts research in applied microeconomics, specifically, the economics of education and state and local public finance. His published papers have examined long-run trends in teacher quality, the impact of income inequality and school finance reform on education funding in the United States, the properties of “value-added” measures of teacher effectiveness, and the high school choices of middle school students in New York City. He received a PhD in economics from the University of M","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135844366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dan Goldhaber, J. Krieg, Stephanie Liddle, Roddy Theobald
{"title":"Out of the Gate, But Not Necessarily Teaching: A Descriptive Portrait of Early-Career Earnings for Those Who Are Credentialed to Teach","authors":"Dan Goldhaber, J. Krieg, Stephanie Liddle, Roddy Theobald","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00395","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Prior work on teacher candidates in Washington State has shown that about two thirds of individuals who trained to become teachers between 2005 and 2015 and received a teaching credential did not enter the state's public teaching workforce immediately after graduation, while about one third never entered a public teaching job in the state at all. In this analysis, we link data on these teacher candidates to unemployment insurance data in the state to provide a descriptive portrait of the future earnings and wages of these individuals inside and outside of public schools. Candidates who initially became public school teachers earned considerably more, on average, than candidates who were initially employed either in other education positions or in other sectors of the state's workforce. These differences persisted 10 years into the average career and across transitions into and out of teaching. There is therefore little evidence that teacher candidates who did not become teachers were lured into other professions by higher compensation. Instead, the patterns are consistent with demand-side constraints on teacher hiring during this time period that resulted in individuals who wanted to become teachers taking positions that offered lower wages but could lead to future teaching positions.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42951196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Happened to the K–12 Education Labor Market During COVID? The Acute Need for Better Data Systems","authors":"Joshua Bleiberg, M. Kraft","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00391","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic upended the U.S. education system in ways that dramatically affected the jobs of K–12 employees. However, there remains considerable uncertainty about the nature and degree of staffing challenges during the pandemic. We draw on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and State Education Agencies (SEA) to describe patterns in K–12 education employment and to highlight the limitations of available data. Data from the BLS suggest overall employment in the K–12 labor market declined by 9 percent at the onset of the pandemic and remained well below pre-pandemic levels more than two years later. SEA data suggest that teachers did not leave the profession en masse as many predicted, with turnover decreasing in the summer of 2020 and then increasing modestly in 2021 back to pre-pandemic levels. We explore possible explanations for these patterns including weak hiring through the summer of 2020 and high attrition among K–12 instructional support and noninstructional staff. State vacancy data also suggest that schools faced substantial challenges filling open positions during the 2021–22 academic year. Our analyses illustrate the imperative to build nationally representative, detailed, and timely data systems on the K–12 education labor market to better inform policy.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"156-172"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46429835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stress and cognitive performance: Evidence from a South Korean earthquake","authors":"Hyunkuk Cho, Hwa-Sook Kim","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00393","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Studies have identified negative effects of cortisol, a stress hormone, on academic performance. Because natural disasters induce community wide stress, students who experience natural disasters may subsequently perform worse academically. Our study is the first to examine the immediate effects of close exposure to a natural disaster on academic performance. We examine the impact of the 2017 Pohang earthquake in South Korea on college entrance exam scores. The 5.4 magnitude quake occurred one day before the scheduled nationwide college entrance exam date, necessitating its postponement for one week. Several aftershocks occurred during that postponement period. We find that the earthquake decreased the reading test scores of students in the Pohang area by 0.05 standard deviations but had no effect on math test scores. The reading test was administered earlier in the day than the math test, so these findings suggest that students taking exams in posttraumatic situations might be able to perform better after a warm up testing period. Finally, male students suffered the largest adverse impacts on their reading test scores, with serious implications given the high-stakes nature of the exams.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41791111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Brian Heseung Kim, Kelli A. Bird, Benjamin L. Castleman
{"title":"Crossing the Finish Line but Losing the Race? Socioeconomic Inequalities in the Labor Market Trajectories of Community College Graduates","authors":"Brian Heseung Kim, Kelli A. Bird, Benjamin L. Castleman","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00392","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Despite decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of federal and state investment in policies to promote postsecondary educational attainment as a key lever for increasing the economic mobility of lower-income populations, research continues to show large and meaningful differences in the mid-career earnings of students from families in the bottom and top income quintiles. Prior research has not disentangled whether these disparities are due to differential sorting into colleges and majors, or due to barriers lower-socioeconomic status (SES) graduates encounter during the college-to-career transition. Using linked individual-level higher education and Unemployment Insurance (UI) records for nearly a decade of students from the Virginia Community College System (VCCS), we compare the labor market outcomes of higher- and lower-SES community college graduates within the same college, program, and academic performance level. Our analyses show that, conditional on employment, lower-SES graduates earn nearly $500/quarter less than their higher-SES peers one year after graduation, relative to higher-SES graduate average of $10,846/quarter. The magnitude of this disparity persists through at least three years after graduation. Disparities are concentrated among non-Nursing programs, in which gaps persist seven years from graduation. Our results highlight the importance of greater focus on the college-to-career transition.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46016919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sarah Asson, Erica Frankenberg, A. Maselli, Ian Burfoot-Rochford, Christopher S. Fowler, R. Buck
{"title":"Data Access and the Study of Educational Equity: Implications from a National School Boundary Data Collection Effort","authors":"Sarah Asson, Erica Frankenberg, A. Maselli, Ian Burfoot-Rochford, Christopher S. Fowler, R. Buck","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00388","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract School attendance zone boundary (AZB) data remain relatively underdocumented and understudied within the field of education, despite their critical implications for educational (in)equity. AZBs shape student outcomes and residential sorting patterns both by determining the public schools a student is assigned to and by signaling neighborhood characteristics to prospective homebuyers. The limited access, regulation, and review of AZB data to date has left a gap in the knowledge base, having the potential to leave intact (and exacerbate) patterns of segregation that maintain inequities in educational opportunity. Lack of data also limits our ability to know whether and when AZBs may mitigate segregation. In this brief, we examine a novel data collection effort of current and historical AZB data—the Longitudinal School Attendance Boundary System—to explore the contextual and political factors associated with data access and data quality. We aim to show how factors that hinder access to quality AZB data affect the study of educational equity, and we advocate for more comprehensive, top–down governmental efforts to create, maintain, and collect these data.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"547-563"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47414922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"College Football Performance, Student Earnings, and the Gender Wage Gap","authors":"M. Carney","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00387","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Fluctuations in U.S. college football team performance have been shown to have impacts on the student experience. This study explores the long-run implications, examining the impact of college football team performance relative to the period of student attendance on future earnings. Better college football team performance during the early years of school attendance increases average wages of males, but does not impact female wages. Supplemental evidence suggests that positive shocks to student social networks may partly explain the positive impact on earnings. Better team performance near the time of graduation increases average wages for both genders.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48181306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Extreme Measures: A National Descriptive Analysis of Closure and Restructuring of Traditional Public, Charter, and Private Schools","authors":"Douglas N. Harris, Valentina Martinez-Pabon","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00386","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We describe the levels, trends, and patterns of school closure and restructuring in the United States from 1991 to 2019 across all sectors using a near census of K-12 schools. Focusing on the years with the best available data, 2014-2018, we find that the annual closure rate of charter, private, and traditional public schools (TPS) were 5.1, 2.9, and 0.9 percent respectively. The annual restructuring rates are 2.0 percent for charter schools and 0.6 percent for TPS. Regression analysis shows that these differences in closure and restructuring rates by sector drop slightly after controlling for student and school characteristics. The strongest predictor of increased closures is low student enrollment, especially in private schools. In charter and traditional public schools, achievement measures predict closure and restructuring nearly as strongly as enrollment. While racial and income composition are weaker predictors of closure/restructuring, that they predict at all, after controlling for many other factors, raises some equity concerns. We also discuss ways in which the forces behind closure/restructuring may be difficult to uncover with this type of quantitative analysis.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45376266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social Information and Educational Investment – Nudging Remedial Math Course Participation","authors":"Raphael Brade","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00390","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Using field experiments, I investigate if provision of (social) information can increase incoming university students' attendance in a voluntary remedial math course. In Intervention 1, treated students receive an invitation letter with or without information about a past sign-up rate for the course. In Intervention 2, among those who signed up for the course, treated students receive reminder letters including or excluding information on how helpful the course had been evaluated by previous students. On average, no treatment increases participation in the course, but further analyses reveal that the effects in Intervention 1 are heterogeneous along two dimensions: First, suggesting salience as a mechanism, both types of information raise attendance among students who enroll late in their study program, which in turn increases their first-year performance and closes the achievement gap to early enrollees. Second, the effect of the letter with information about the past sign-up rate depends on the predicted ex-ante sign-up probability. Students whose probability falls just short of the past sign-up rate increase sign-up and participation, while the opposite is true for students whose sign-up probability exceeds the social information. Along this dimension, however, the changes in attendance do not carry over to academic achievements.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48001723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"教育学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}