{"title":"A Classroom Observer Like Me: The Effects of Race-Congruence and Gender-Congruence between Teachers and Raters on Observation Scores","authors":"Olivia L. Chi","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00367","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract State and local education agencies across the country are prioritizing the goal of diversifying the teacher workforce. To further understand the challenges of diversifying the teacher pipeline, I investigate race and gender dynamics between teachers and school-based administrators, who are key decision makers in hiring, evaluating, and retaining teachers. I use longitudinal data from a large school district in the southeastern United States to examine the effects of race-congruence and gender-congruence between teachers and observers/administrators on teachers’ observation scores. Using models with two-way fixed effects, I find that teachers, on average, experience small positive increases in their scores from sharing race or gender with their observers, raising fairness concerns for teachers whose race or gender identities are not reflected by any of their raters.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"442-466"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44335369","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":"Comprehensive Support and Student Success: Can Out of School Time Make a Difference?","authors":"Sarah Komisarow","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00366","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract StudentU is a comprehensive program that provides education, nutrition, and social support services to disadvantaged middle and high school students outside of the regular school day. In this paper I investigate the effects of this multiyear program on the early high school outcomes of participating students by exploiting data from oversubscribed admissions lotteries. I find that the subgroup of lottery winners who entered the comprehensive program with low baseline achievement earned more course credits (0.82 credits), achieved higher grade point averages (0.37 grade points), and were less likely to be suspended (17.1 percentage points) during ninth grade than their lottery loser counterparts. Investigation of intervening variables indicates that on-time grade progress and decreases in course failure and disciplinary infractions are potential mediating channels. Using an index of early high school outcomes, I predict that lottery winners are around 4 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than lottery losers (5 percent effect). These results suggest that comprehensive services delivered outside of the regular school day have the potential to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"17 1","pages":"579-607"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47074803","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":"The Impact of Corequisite Math on Community College Student Outcomes: Evidence from Texas","authors":"Akiva Yonah Meiselman, Lauren Schudde","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00365","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Developmental education (dev-ed) aims to help students acquire knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college-level coursework. The traditional prerequisite approach to postsecondary dev-ed—where students take remedial courses that do not count toward a credential—appears to stymie progress toward a degree. At community colleges across the country, most students require remediation in math, creating a barrier to college-level credits under the traditional approach. Corequisite coursework is a structural reform that places students directly into a college-level course in the same term they receive dev-ed support. Using administrative data from Texas community colleges and a regression discontinuity design, we examine whether corequisite math improves student success compared with traditional prerequisite dev-ed. We find that corequisite math quickly improves student completion of math requirements without any obvious drawbacks, but students in corequisite math were not substantially closer to degree completion than their peers in traditional dev-ed after three years.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"17 1","pages":"719-744"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42483899","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}
Christine G. Mokher, Toby J. Park-Gaghan, Shouping Hu
{"title":"Does Developmental Education Reform Help or Hinder the Success of Language Minority Students? An Exploration by Language Minority, ESOL, and Foreign-Born Status","authors":"Christine G. Mokher, Toby J. Park-Gaghan, Shouping Hu","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00364","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Community colleges may face challenges supporting the unique needs of language minority (LM) students whose primary language is not English. Florida provides a unique context for examining whether LM students who are considered underprepared for college-level coursework benefit more from traditional developmental education programs in reading and writing, or reformed programs that allow most students to accelerate or even bypass developmental requirements while providing additional support services. Utilizing statewide data from first-time-in-college students at all twenty-eight Florida College System institutions, we use an interrupted time-series design with an analysis of heterogenous effects to compare first year course-taking outcomes in English before and after Florida's developmental education reform for LM versus non-LM students. We also consider the intersecting identities of LM students by further disaggregating results based on whether students took high school courses in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), and for native-born versus foreign-born students. The findings suggest that while the reform's benefits are similar for LM and non-LM students overall, there are important differences among LM subgroups indicating that ESOL and foreign-born students may benefit most.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"467-497"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49362224","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":"Let's Tweet Again? Social Networks and Literature Achievement in High School Students","authors":"Gianpaolo Barbetta, Paolo Canino, Stefano Cima","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00363","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The availability of cheap Wi-Fi Internet connections has encouraged schools to adopt Web 2.0 platforms for teaching, with the intention of stimulating students’ academic achievement and participation in school. Moreover, during the recent explosion of the COVID-19 crisis that forced many countries to close schools (as well as offices and factories), the widespread diffusion of these applications kept school systems going. Despite their widespread use as teaching tools, the effect of adopting Web 2.0 platforms on student performance has never been rigorously tested. We fill this gap in the literature by analyzing the impact of using Twitter as a teaching tool on high school students’ literature skills. Based on a large-scale, randomized controlled trial that involved seventy schools and about 1,500 students, we find that using Twitter to teach literature has an overall negative effect on students’ average achievement, reducing standardized test scores by about 25 percent of a standard deviation. The negative effect is stronger on students who usually perform better.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"676-707"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46381224","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":"The Impact of Principal Attrition and Replacement on Indicators of School Quality","authors":"Marcus A. Winters, Brian Kisida, Ik-Joon Cho","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00362","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Transitions to a new principal are common, especially within urban public schools, and potentially highly disruptive to a school's culture and operations. We use longitudinal data from New York City to investigate if the effect of principal transitions differs by whether the incoming principal was hired externally or promoted from within the school. We take advantage of variation in the timing of principal transitions within an event-study approach to estimate the causal effect of principal changes. Changing principals has an immediate negative effect on student test scores that is sustained over several years regardless of whether hired internally or externally. However, externally hired principals lead to an increase in teacher turnover and a decline in perceptions of the school's learning environment, whereas transitions to an internally promoted principal have no such effects. This pattern of results raises important questions about leadership transitions and the nature of principal effects on school quality.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"302-318"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43967493","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":"Can Community Crime Monitoring Reduce Student Absenteeism?","authors":"Sarah Komisarow, R. Gonzalez","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00361","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper we study the impact on student absenteeism of a large, school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during times when students traveled to and from school. We find that the program resulted in a 0.58 percentage point (8.5 percent) reduction in the elementary school-level absence rate in the years following initial implementation. We discuss and explore potential channels to explain this and believe our results are most consistent with improved neighborhood conditions in the form of reduced crime as an underlying mechanism.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"319-350"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49636807","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":"Race to the Tablet? The Impact of a Personalized Tablet Educational Program","authors":"Elizabeth Setren","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00359","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The presence of tablets and laptops in schools has burgeoned in recent years, with $4.9 billion spent on over 10.8 million devices in 2015. Despite the large and increasingly prevalent monetary and time investments in education technology, little causal evidence of its effectiveness exists. I estimate the effect of a Math and English Language Arts tablet educational program that supplements core instruction using a randomized controlled trial in a Boston charter middle school. I find that the personalized learning technology can substantially increase end-of-year test scores by 0.202 standard deviation in Math, but find no effects for the summative English exam. For the quarterly formative exams, I find positive, but insignificant effects for Math and marginally significant effects for English. This paper demonstrates the potential of technology to enhance student learning in Math and could serve as a cheaper alternative to high-intensity tutoring for school districts without funding or labor supply for extensive tutoring programs.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"213-231"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48476014","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":"Advanced Placement and Initial College Enrollment: Evidence from an Experiment","authors":"D. Conger, M. Long, Raymond McGhee, Jr.","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00358","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract To evaluate how Advanced Placement (AP) courses affect college-going, we randomly assigned the offer of enrollment into an AP science course to over 1,800 students in twenty-three schools that had not previously offered the course. We find no AP course effects on students’ college entrance exam scores (SAT/ACT). As expected, AP course-takers are substantially more likely to take the AP exam than their control group counterparts. At the same time, treatment group students opt out of the exam at very high rates and most do not earn a passing score on the AP exam. Though less precisely estimated, the results also suggest that taking the AP course increases students’ aspirations to attend higher-quality colleges but does not lead to enrollment in such institutions.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"52-73"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47606276","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}
Bingjie Chen, Shaun Dougherty, Dan Goldhaber, Kristian L. Holden, Roddy Theobald
{"title":"CTE Teacher Licensure and Long-Term Student Outcomes","authors":"Bingjie Chen, Shaun Dougherty, Dan Goldhaber, Kristian L. Holden, Roddy Theobald","doi":"10.1162/edfp_a_00357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00357","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We use longitudinal data from Massachusetts that link high school course-taking records in career and technical education (CTE) to postsecondary student outcomes to provide the first empirical evidence linking characteristics of CTE teachers to later student outcomes. We find that CTE teachers who received better scores on subject performance tests required for licensure tend to have students with higher longer-term earnings than CTE teachers who received lower scores on these tests, controlling for other factors. Specifically, we estimate that a 1 standard deviation increase in teacher performance on these tests is associated with about a $1,000 increase in average expected earnings for the teacher's students five years after their expected graduation date, controlling for licensure test area and observable differences between students.","PeriodicalId":46870,"journal":{"name":"Education Finance and Policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"253-276"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43161438","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}