Rethinking Schools and Teachers
The (Perceived) Returns to Education and the Demand for Schooling
Robert Jensen
Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2010, Pages 515-548
Abstract:
Economists emphasize the link between market returns to education and investments in schooling. Though many studies estimate these returns with earnings data, it is the perceived returns that affect schooling decisions, and these perceptions may be inaccurate. Using survey data for eighth-grade boys in the Dominican Republic, we find that the perceived returns to secondary school are extremely low, despite high measured returns. Students at randomly selected schools given information on the higher measured returns completed on average 0.20-0.35 more years of school over the next four years than those who were not.
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The Price of Admission: Who gets into private school, and how much do they pay?
Nina Walton
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
I analyze how elementary and secondary private schools decide which students to admit from their applicant pool using mechanism design theory. The problem for an individual private school of who to admit and how much to charge in tuition is complicated by the existence of peer-effects: the value students place on attending school is increasing with the average ability of the entire class at that school. This feature, coupled with the fact that students can always attend public school for free, places constraints on the types of classes the private school can admit. In my model, students have an ability type that is known to the school through testing, as well as a wealth type that is private information. Students report their wealth to the school and, on the basis of the results from the ability test and wealth reports, the school institutes an allocation rule and a payment rule. Allocation rules which only admit all high ability students and no others, or all high wealth students and no others, are not feasible. I utilize a simple example to show how, in a revenue-maximizing allocation, the private school always under-admits the highest ability students relative to the allocation rule that maximizes social welfare.
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Incentivizing education: Seeing schoolwork as an investment, not a chore
Mesmin Destin & Daphna Oyserman
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most American children expect to attend college but because they do not necessarily spend much time on schoolwork, they may fail to reach their imagined "college-bound" future self. The proposed identity-based motivation model helps explain why this gap occurs: Imagined "college-bound" identities cue school-focused behavior if they are salient and feel relevant to current choice options, not otherwise. Two studies with predominantly low-income and African American middle school students support this prediction. Almost all of the students expect to attend college, but only half describe education-dependent (e.g., law, medicine) adult identities. Having education-dependent rather than education-independent adult identities (e.g., sports, entertainment) predicts better grades over time, controlling for prior grade point average (Study 1). To demonstrate causality, salience of education-dependent versus education-independent adult identities was experimentally manipulated. Children who considered education-dependent adult identities (vs. education-independent ones) were eight times more likely to complete a take-home extra credit assignment (Study 2).
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Facebook(R) and academic performance
Paul Kirschner & Aryn Karpinski
Computers in Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is much talk of a change in modern youth - often referred to as digital natives or Homo Zappiens - with respect to their ability to simultaneously process multiple channels of information. In other words, kids today can multitask. Unfortunately for proponents of this position, there is much empirical documentation concerning the negative effects of attempting to simultaneously process different streams of information showing that such behavior leads to both increased study time to achieve learning parity and an increase in mistakes while processing information than those who are sequentially or serially processing that same information. This article presents the preliminary results of a descriptive and exploratory survey study involving Facebook use, often carried out simultaneously with other study activities, and its relation to academic performance as measured by self-reported Grade Point Average (GPA) and hours spent studying per week. Results show that FacebookR users reported having lower GPAs and spend fewer hours per week studying than nonusers.
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Teacher Quality Moderates the Genetic Effects on Early Reading
J. Taylor, A.D. Roehrig, B. Soden Hensler, C.M. Connor & C. Schatschneider
Science, 23 April 2010, Pages 512-514
Abstract:
Children's reading achievement is influenced by genetics as well as by family and school environments. The importance of teacher quality as a specific school environmental influence on reading achievement is unknown. We studied first- and second-grade students in Florida from schools representing diverse environments. Comparison of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, differentiating genetic similarities of 100% and 50%, provided an estimate of genetic variance in reading achievement. Teacher quality was measured by how much reading gain the non-twin classmates achieved. The magnitude of genetic variance associated with twins' oral reading fluency increased as the quality of their teacher increased. In circumstances where the teachers are all excellent, the variability in student reading achievement may appear to be largely due to genetics. However, poor teaching impedes the ability of children to reach their potential.
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John Papay, Richard Murnane & John Willett
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, March 2010, Pages 5-23
Abstract:
In specifying a minimum passing score on examinations that students must pass to obtain a high school diploma, states divide a continuous performance measure into dichotomous categories. Thus, students with scores near the cutoff either pass or fail despite having essentially equal skills. The authors evaluate the causal effects of barely passing or failing a high school exit examination on the probability of graduation using a regression discontinuity design. For most Massachusetts students, barely failing their first 10th grade mathematics or English language arts (ELA) examination does not affect their probability of graduating. However, low-income urban students who just fail the mathematics examination have an 8 percentage point lower graduation rate than observationally similar students who just pass. There is no analogous impact from just passing or failing the ELA exit examination. For these urban, low-income students, barely failing the mathematics test does not affect the likelihood of on-time grade promotion, but it does cause students to be 4 percentage points more likely to drop out of school in the year following the test. Low-income urban students are just as likely to retake the test as equally skilled suburban students, but they have less success on retest.
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The Effect of Employment Protection on Worker Effort: Evidence from Public Schooling
Brian Jacob
NBER Working Paper, January 2010
Abstract:
This paper studies the effect of employment protection on worker productivity and firm output in the context of a public school system. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers (defined as those with less than five years of experience) for any reason, and without the elaborate documentation and hearing process typical in many large, urban school districts. Results suggest that the policy reduced annual teacher absences by roughly 10 percent and reduced the prevalence of teachers with 15 or more annual absences by 20 percent. The effects were strongest among teachers in elementary schools and in low-achieving, predominantly African-American high schools, and among teachers with highpredicted absences. There is also evidence that the impact of the policy increased substantially after its first year.
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Race, Gender, and Teacher Testing: How Informative a Tool Is Teacher Licensure Testing?
Dan Goldhaber & Michael Hansen
American Educational Research Journal, March 2010, Pages 218-251
Abstract:
Virtually all states require teachers to undergo licensure testing before participation in the public school labor market. This article analyzes the information these tests provide about teacher effectiveness. The authors find that licensure tests have different predicative validity for student achievement by teacher race. They also find that student achievement is impacted by the race/ethnicity match between teachers and their students, with Black students significantly benefitting from being matched with a Black teacher. As a consequence of these matching effects, the uniform application of licensure standards is likely to have differential impacts on the achievement of White and minority students.
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Sunny Niu & Marta Tienda
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, March 2010, Pages 44-69
Abstract:
The University of Texas at Austin administrative data between 1990 and 2003 are used to evaluate claims that students granted automatic admission based on top 10% class rank underperform academically relative to lower ranked students who graduate from highly competitive high schools. Compared with White students ranked at or below the third decile, top 10% Black and Hispanic enrollees arrive with lower average standardized test scores yet consistently perform as well or better in grades, 1st-year persistence, and 4-year graduation likelihood. A similar story obtains for top 10% graduates from Longhorn high schools versus lower ranked students who graduate from highly competitive feeder high schools. Multivariate results reveal that high school attended rather than test scores is largely responsible for racial differences in college performance.
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The Effect of Village-Based Schools: Evidence from a RCT in Afghanistan
Dana Burde & Leigh Linden
NYU Working Paper, March 2010
Abstract:
We conduct a randomized evaluation of community-based schools on children's academic performance using a sample of 31 villages and over 1,500 children in rural northwestern Afghanistan. The program significantly increases enrollment and test scores amongst all children and dramatically improves the existing gender disparities. The intervention increases formal school enrollment by 42 percentage points among all children and increases test scores by 0.5 standard deviations (1.2 standard deviations for children that enroll in school). Despite few resources and poorer quality teachers, evidence suggests that the schools provide a comparable education to traditional schools. Overall, children prove very sensitive to changes in the distance to the nearest school. Enrollment and test scores fall by 16 percentage points and 0.19 standard deviations per mile. Girls prove much more sensitive to distance. So much so that providing a community based school eliminates the gender gap in enrollment (from 21 percentage points in control villages) and reduces the test score disparity by a third after a single year.
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Douglas Webber & Ronald Ehrenberg
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
During the last two decades, median instructional spending per full-time equivalent (FTE) student at American 4-year colleges and universities has grown at a slower rate than median spending per FTE student in a number of other expenditure categories, including academic support, student services and research. Our paper uses institutional level panel data and a variety of econometric approaches, including unconditional quantile regression methods, to analyze whether these non-instructional expenditure categories influence graduation and first-year persistence rates of undergraduate students. Our most important finding is that student service expenditures influence graduation and persistence rates, and their marginal effects are higher for students at institutions with lower entrance test scores and higher Pell Grant expenditures per student. Put another way, their effects are largest at institutions that have lower current graduation and first-year persistence rates. Simulations suggest that reallocating some funding from instruction to student services may enhance persistence and graduation rates at those institutions whose rates are currently below the medians in the sample.
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Joseph Gasper, Stefanie DeLuca & Angela Estacion
Social Science Research, May 2010, Pages 459-476
Abstract:
Over the past half century, a large body of theoretical and empirical work in sociology and other social sciences has emphasized the negative consequences of mobility for human development in general, and youth outcomes in particular. In criminology, decades of research have documented a link between residential mobility and crime at both the macro and micro levels. At the micro level, mobility is associated with delinquency, substance use, and other deviant behaviors among adolescents. However, it is possible that the relationship between mobility and delinquency may be due to selection on pre-existing differences between mobile and non-mobile youth in their propensity for delinquency, and prior studies have not adequately addressed this issue. Specifically, the families that are most likely to move are also the most disadvantaged and may be characterized by dynamics and processes that are conducive to the development of delinquency and problem behavior in their children. This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to assess the impact of residential and school mobility between the ages of 12 and 17 on delinquency and substance use. Random effects models control for selection on both observed and unobserved differences. Results show that mobility and delinquency are indeed spuriously related. Implications for future research on mobility and outcomes are discussed.
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Thomas Russell
University of Denver Working Paper, March 2010
Abstract:
The paper's title is a quotation from The University of Texas registrar nine days after the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This paper examines 20th-century techniques of racial domination at The University of Texas by crosscutting two narratives. The first narrative that the paper presents is one of the development of bureaucratic or institutional forms of racial exclusion. The paper describes the university's efforts to limit the application of the Brown v. Board of Education. In the immediate years after the United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, The University of Texas developed and instituted entrance exams that university officials knew would exclude a disproportionate number of African-American applicants. Publicly, the university presented the testing as race-neutral. The university stalled post-Brown integration until the exclusionary admissions testing was in place. An explicit concern of the university in seeking to exclude African-American students during the 1950s was a racialized sexual concern about the university's white women. The second narrative is the story of William Stewart Simkins, a law professor at The University of Texas from 1899 to 1929. Professor Simkins helped to organize the Ku Klux Klan in Florida at the conclusion of the American Civil War, and he advocated his Klan past to Texas students. Like the university registrar during the 1950s, Professor Simkins was explicitly concerned with the sexual defense of white women. Relying upon the analysis of historian Grace Elizabeth Hale, the paper links Professor Simkins's advocacy of the Klan to the early 20th-century history of lynching and white supremacist violence. During the 1950s, the memory and history of Professor Simkins supported the university's resistance to integration. As the university faced pressure to admit African-American students, the university's faculty council voted to name a dormitory after the Klansman and law professor. The dormitory carries his name to the present day. During this time period, alumni also presented the law school with a portrait of Professor Simkins. Portraits and a bust of Professor Simkins occupied prominent positions within the law school through the 1990s. The sources for the paper are drawn largely from primary materials of the university's archives, including the papers of the university's Board of Regents, Chancellor, President, and faculty committees. The author completed this research during the 1990s while a member of The University of Texas School of Law faculty.