Browsing by Subject "Education policy"

The issue that this paper addresses is how the college coach has abandoned the roles of educator and liaison between athletics and academics. The current era of college was examined using academic analysis, interviews with college administrators and academics connected to college athletics, and literature regarding the topic. The conclusion reached is that the college coach is in dire need of reform both professionally and pedagogically and that for the college coach to justify an existence in academics that is not solely for entertainment, college coach must reform their profession with academics values.

Empirical studies of education programs and systems, by nature, rely upon use of student outcomes that are measurable. Often, these come in the form of test scores. However, in light of growing evidence about the long-run importance of other student skills and behaviors, the time has come for a broader approach to evaluating education. This dissertation undertakes experimental, quasi-experimental, and descriptive analyses to examine social, behavioral, and health-related mechanisms of the educational process. My overarching research question is simply, which inside- and outside-the-classroom features of schools and educational interventions are most beneficial to students in the long term? Furthermore, how can we apply this evidence toward informing policy that could effectively reduce stark social, educational, and economic inequalities?

The first study of three assesses mechanisms by which the Fast Track project, a randomized intervention in the early 1990s for high-risk children in four communities (Durham, NC; Nashville, TN; rural PA; and Seattle, WA), reduced delinquency, arrests, and health and mental health service utilization in adolescence through young adulthood (ages 12-20). A decomposition of treatment effects indicates that about a third of Fast Track’s impact on later crime outcomes can be accounted for by improvements in social and self-regulation skills during childhood (ages 6-11), such as prosocial behavior, emotion regulation and problem solving. These skills proved less valuable for the prevention of mental and physical health problems.

The second study contributes new evidence on how non-instructional investments – such as increased spending on school social workers, guidance counselors, and health services – affect multiple aspects of student performance and well-being. Merging several administrative data sources spanning the 1996-2013 school years in North Carolina, I use an instrumental variables approach to estimate the extent to which local expenditure shifts affect students’ academic and behavioral outcomes. My findings indicate that exogenous increases in spending on non-instructional services not only reduce student absenteeism and disciplinary problems (important predictors of long-term outcomes) but also significantly raise student achievement, in similar magnitude to corresponding increases in instructional spending. Furthermore, subgroup analyses suggest that investments in student support personnel such as social workers, health services, and guidance counselors, in schools with concentrated low-income student populations could go a long way toward closing socioeconomic achievement gaps.

The third study examines individual pathways that lead to high school graduation or dropout. It employs a variety of machine learning techniques, including decision trees, random forests with bagging and boosting, and support vector machines, to predict student dropout using longitudinal administrative data from North Carolina. I consider a large set of predictor measures from grades three through eight including academic achievement, behavioral indicators, and background characteristics. My findings indicate that the most important predictors include eighth grade absences, math scores, and age-for-grade as well as early reading scores. Support vector classification (with a high cost parameter and low gamma parameter) predicts high school dropout with the highest overall validity in the testing dataset at 90.1 percent followed by decision trees with boosting and interaction terms at 89.5 percent.

This dissertation shows how an array of policymakers, invested in uprooting an unequal political economy descended from the plantation system and Jim Crow, gravitated to education as a centerpiece of development strategy, and why so many are still disappointed in its outcomes. By looking at state-wide policymaking in North Carolina and policy effects in the state’s black belt counties, this study shows why the civil rights movement was vital for shifting state policy in former Jim Crow states towards greater investment in human resources. By breaking down employment barriers to African Americans and opening up the South to new people and ideas, the civil rights movement fostered a new climate for economic policymaking, and a new ecosystem of organizations flourished to promote equitable growth. At first, they sought to create a high-wage economy based on the industrial North. But as branch-plant recruitment faltered as a development strategy, these policy advocates turned to worker co-operatives, entrepreneurial incubators, and improved education as an alternative. Kids were the new cash crop in part because policymakers came to believe that economic growth—for the locality, for the state, for the nation, for all countries at all times—depended on innovators and entrepreneurs. American workers, too expensive to perform physically grueling industrial chores in an unevenly governed global economy, had to be ready and willing to toss away old skills and acquire new ones to fit whatever tasks the innovators found humans still useful to perform. By stressing the economic value of education, these policy advocates succeeded—for a time—in boosting state and local spending. But this came at the cost of democratic rationales for public schools. Moreover, this approach failed to stabilize rural communities hurt by manufacturing job losses.

This dissertation comprises three essays in the economics of education. I begin with a paper that evaluates the effectiveness of selective secondary schools. An unique admissions context permits identifying the causal benefits of such institutions for a more heterogeneous sample of students than previous US-based studies. The second essay examines the causes of female under-representation in STEM fields, with a focus on engineering. I decompose the gender gap into explanatory accounts such as academic preparation, ability beliefs, and preferences for prosocial values and professional goals. The final essay investigates the roles of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in explaining high school graduation gaps at the three-way intersection of race, gender, and income. A finding of particular interest is the lagging performance of disadvantaged white students relative to African American peers, even after accounting for skill disparities using a sequential model of educational attainment.

This dissertation consists of three essays on the topic of education policy. In the first essay, I evaluate the impacts of a teacher quality equity law that was enacted in California in the fall of 2006 prohibiting superintendents from transferring a teacher into a school in the bottom three performance deciles of the state's academic performance index if the principal refuses the transfer. The primary mechanism through which the policy should affect student outcomes is through the mix of the quality of teachers in the school. Using publicly available statewide administrative education data, and two quasi-experimental methodologies, I assess whether the policy had an effect on the district-wide distribution of teachers with varying levels of experience, education and licensure and on student academic performance. I extend the analysis by examining whether the policy has differential effects on subgroups of schools classified as having high-poverty or high-minority student populations. I find that, as a result of the teacher quality equity law, low-performing schools experienced a relative increase in fully-credentialed teachers and more highly educated teachers, but that did not necessarily translate to an increase in academic performance. I also find evidence that the dimension along which the policy was most effective was in improving teacher pre-service qualifications in schools with high minority student populations.

In the second essay, I estimate racial, ethnic, gender and socioeconomic differences in teacher reports of student absenteeism and tardiness while controlling for administrative records of actual absences. Subjective perceptions that teachers form about students' classroom behaviors matter for student academic outcomes. Given this potential impact, it is important to identify any biases in these perceptions that would disadvantage subgroups of students. I use longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 in conjunction with longitudinal, student-level data from the North Carolina Education Data Research Center to employ a variation of a two sample instrumental variables approach in which I instrument for actual eighth grade absences with simulated measures of eight grade absences. I find consistent evidence that teacher reports of the attendance of poor students are negatively biased and that math teacher reports of male attendance are positively biased. There is mixed evidence with regard to student race and ethnicity.

The third essay is a co-authored work in which we employ a quasi-experimental estimation strategy to examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1 percent of a state's working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state's eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2 percent of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16 percent increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind.

Over my Ph.D. study, I work on various projects about the school choice reform in New York City, with a special focus on understanding how students or parents choose high schools and evaluating education policies. Specifically, my dissertation consists of two essays: the first one aims to detect whether small schools are effective in improving students' academic performance; the second one measures how one's own school choice is affected by his or her neighbors.

In the first chapter, which is coauthored with Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak, We use assignment lotteries embedded in New York City's high school match to estimate the effects of attendance at a new small high school on student achievement. More than 150 unselective small high schools created between 2002 and 2008 have enhanced autonomy, but operate within-district with traditional public school teachers, principals, and collectively-bargained work rules. Lottery estimates show positive score gains in Mathematics, English, Science, and History, more

credit accumulation, and higher graduation rates. Small school attendance causes a substantial increase in college enrollment, with a marked shift to CUNY institutions. Students are also less likely to require remediation in reading and writing when at college. Detailed school surveys indicate that students at small schools are more engaged and closely monitored, despite fewer

course offerings and activities. Teachers report greater feedback, increased safety, and improved collaboration. The results show that school size is an important factor in education production

and highlight the potential for within-district reform strategies to substantially improve

student achievement.

In the second chapter, I use the exact home addresses and the complete high school application records to estimate neighborhood impact on the choice of high schools in the New York city. This paper converts home addresses to location coordinates and exploit that metric to rank students' neighbors by distance and estimate the marginal influence of the school choice of the immediate (ten nearest) neighbors relative to that of more distant neighbors. With the assumption that one's immediate neighbors are formed roughly randomly within the reference group, I find that students are 20\% more likely to rank the identical schools as their immediate neighbors than their more distant neighbors. The estimated effects are stronger among students with homogeneous ethnic and academic backgrounds. For a robustness check, I match the home addresses with the 2010 census data to group students into different census blocks and block groups. This alternative definition of neighborhood peers by census geographic boundaries further confirms the existence of social interactions on school choice. Further, I study if elder neighbors' experience of school choice benefits younger neighborhood peers. On one hand, information sharing can be beneficial: experience from older students improves their nearest neighbors' probability of being matched with their top choice. On the other hand, inefficient herding for students living in the less informed areas can be a disadvantage of neighborhood interactions.

This dissertation examines the political determinants of government spending across different levels of education. What are the political motivations that drive budgetary decisions on primary, secondary, and tertiary education? Who are the beneficiaries of these appropriations? Why are they capable of influencing the decisions over appropriations?

I argue that the distribution of education spending across education levels depends on the capacity of organized groups active in this sector to make their demands heard and served by governments. Better organized groups have stronger capacity to take advantage of the electoral concerns of politicians and influence their decisions on educational budgets. I provide evidence to show that, with some exceptions, the teachers' unions in the primary and secondary schools are the most influential organized group in the education sector. By taking their demands out to the streets, by capturing key positions in the education ministries, and by using their mobilization capacity in the electoral arena, teachers have made governments cater to their economic interests, rather than direct resources in ways that would enhance access to and the quality of education.

I test the theoretical arguments using an original dataset incorporating a comprehensive account of all protests, strikes, and other disruptive actions by teachers, university workers, students, and parents in Mexico between 1992 and 2008. The statistical analysis reveals that 1) states with higher levels of teachers' protests receive larger federal education grants, and that 2) subnational authorities spend more on primary and lower secondary as a consequence of the larger disruptive behavior observed in these education levels. Complementary qualitative evidence shows how the teachers' union has captured the education ministries at the federal and the subnational levels, consolidating its influence over education policy. Finally, this study reveals the teachers' union capacity to leverage their participation in electoral politics in order to defend its economic interests.

During the past 20 years, immigration enforcement increased dramatically in the U.S. interior. There is a growing recognition that immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior has spillover effects onto U.S. citizens, particularly the family of unauthorized immigrants. U.S. citizen children in mixed status families are particularly likely to be affected. Over 5 million children are estimated to have at least one unauthorized parent, and 80 percent of these children are U.S. citizens. These chapters contribute to a full accounting of the costs of immigration enforcement by investigating its impacts on educational outcomes, which have long-term ramifications for the United States.

I focus on the effects of partnerships between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local law enforcement. Although raids by ICE agents, whether at worksites or in the community, are particularly salient, the majority of arrests by ICE result not from direct arrests by ICE agents but from transfers to ICE from federal, state, or local custody. In my first chapter, I use the staggered rollout of Secure Communities, a biometric sharing program activated in every U.S. county between 2008 and 2013. I examine this program's effects on county-level academic achievement and school enrollment. In my second and third chapters, I examine the impacts of another type of partnership between ICE and local law enforcement, 287(g) programs, on achievement, attendance, out-of-school suspensions, and school mobility within North Carolina. In North Carolina, nine counties were approved to establish 287(g) programs, and another fifteen applied but were not approved to participate. I use a triple difference strategy in which I compare educational outcomes for different groups of students in these two sets of counties before and after activation of 287(g) programs.Together, these studies provide evidence on how partnerships between local law enforcement and ICE affect educational outcomes for students, as well as which students are likely to experience impacts.

I find that the activation of 287(g) programs decreases school engagement by decreasing attendance. This effect is concentrated at the top of the distribution, increasing chronic absenteeism (missing 15 or more days per year), and is driven by high school students. In contrast, I find more mixed results for the effects of both types of partnerships on math and English Language Arts (ELA) achievement in grades 3-8. Although I observe a small decline in ELA achievement for Hispanic students following the activation of Secure Communities, this decline may result from other factors correlated with activation. I observe no effect of 287(g) programs on achievement.

In this dissertation, I explore the impact of several public policies on civic participation. Using a unique combination of school administrative and public–use voter files and methods for causal inference, I evaluate the impact of three new, as of yet unexplored, policies: one informational, one institutional, and one skill–based. Chapter 2 examines the causal effect of No Child Left Behind’s performance-based accountability school failure signals on turnout in school board elections and on individuals’ use of exit. I find that failure signals mobilize citizens both at the ballot box and by encouraging them to vote with their feet. However, these increases in voice and exit come primarily from citizens who already active—thus exacerbating inequalities in both forms of participation. Chapter 3 examines the causal effect of preregistration—an electoral reform that allows young citizens to enroll in the electoral system before turning 18, while also providing them with various in-school supports. Using data from the Current Population Survey and Florida Voter Files and multiple methods for causal inference, I (with my coauthor listed below) show that preregistration mobilizes and does so for a diverse set of citizens. Finally, Chapter 4 examines the impact of psychosocial or so called non-cognitive skills on voter turnout. Using information from the Fast Track intervention, I show that early– childhood investments in psychosocial skills have large, long-run spillovers on civic participation. These gains are widely distributed, being especially large for those least likely to participate. These chapters provide clear insights that reach across disciplinary boundaries and speak to current policy debates. In placing specific attention not only on whether these programs mobilize, but also on who they mobilize, I provide scholars and practitioners with new ways of thinking about how to address stubbornly low and unequal rates of citizen engagement.

This dissertation examines the interplay between school district assignment and reassignment policies and the elementary public school parents select for their children. The sample in all chapters includes the third and fourth grade students in a subset of growing North Carolina school districts from 2003/04 to 2010/11. The data are derived from historical, longitudinal secondary data sources containing student, school, and district records. All chapters employ quantitative longitudinal data analysis methods. Chapter 1 identifies the groups of students who do not comply with their school assignments. Chapter 2 identifies the groups of students who are reassigned to different schools, and to schools of varying quality, when school districts enact reassignment plans. Chapter 3 identifies the groups of students who do not comply with school reassignments. Together, the chapters demonstrate the interplay between residential decisions, school choices, and the resulting educational opportunities of observably different students. Consistent with existing bodies of literature, the findings demonstrate unexplored processes through which advantaged families maintain the most desirable educational opportunities for their children. Policy implications of these findings are also discussed.

This mixed-method cross-sectional study evaluated the effect of commercial sanitary pads on school attendance and symptoms of vaginal infections in rural Kenyan adolescents aged 11-18. It also provides contextual information that situates the data gathered on school attendance and vaginal infections in the broader experience of girls managing their menstruation. A sequential design was used for this study with a total of 8 qualitative focus groups and a quantitative survey. A total of 482 girls were surveyed, with 321 who were currently attending school and 151 who had dropped out of school. Qualitative data from focus groups was analyzed using applied thematic analysis, while the effect of commercial sanitary pads as well as the effect of using other items on school attendance and symptoms of vaginal infections was estimated using logistic regression analysis. Overall, girls reported that menstruation negatively affects their experience at school and in the classroom and causes an array of negative emotions. Girls also conveyed having to often leave school to change or bathe due to menstrual leaks and missing class lessons as a result. Poor concentration in class attributed to menstrual pain and worry over potential leaks was also mentioned. Lastly, the practice of transactional sex to obtain money to purchase pads was a theme within the data. It was found through the quantitative data that the prevalence odds of missing one or more days of school over a two-month period when using commercial sanitary pads is 1.6 times as high as the odds of missing one or more days of school over a two-month period when using other items (p = 0.02, 95% C.I. = 1.03-2.07). There was no statistically significant difference found in the number of school days missed when comparing those who used reusable pads, many underwear, homemade items, and nothing each to those using commercial sanitary pads. The overall prevalence of symptoms of vaginal infections among all girls in this study was found to be 9.4%. There is no statistically significant difference between the odds of having symptoms of a vaginal infection when using commercial sanitary pads as compared to using any other item to control menstruation.

In October of 2019, a social crisis exploded in Chile; over one million Chileans marched on the streets, followed by riots and extensive destruction of public and private property. The economic and social inequality was unequivocally the cause of this conflict. Simultaneously, similar crisis crises occurred in many parts of the world, from Sudan to Indonesia and even in the US. The three chapters of this dissertation address the causes of the social crisis within the population and why it has been hard for the State to fund more social services. The first chapter measures and analyzes intergenerational income mobility in Chile. By creating a new administrative panel dataset, I look at the different educational and labor market roadblocks that individuals face while climbing the social mobility ladder. The year-to-year data allows this chapter to analyze in detail the possible roadblocks and co-funding factors that affect mobility. These challenges include low returns in higher education for low-income students, socioeconomic class, role models in schools, drop-out, and irregular labor markets.

The second chapter questions whether public policies can promote intergenerational income mobility. Using a subway expansion as a quasi-experiment, this chapter shows how a reduction in transport cost increased educational opportunities of students' and their intergenerational income mobility by 2 percentage points, an increase equivalent to a 5$\%$ increase in wages. Allowing students to attend school beyond their neighborhood could be an effective policy to promote intergenerational mobility and should be considered before moving the whole family to a different neighborhood.

The last chapter explores how members of the economic elite in Congress can reduce taxes, one of the most effective methods to reduce inequality. By creating a new biographical dataset of over 2500 members of Congress, I am able to analyze the educational history and wealth of Congressmen. I use the detailed biographical characteristics such as being a landowner or firm owner and find that a 10% reduction of elite members in Congress is associated with a 0.45 GDP points increment of taxes in the country. Overall, my findings suggest that it's possible to achieve a highly detailed analysis of the roadblocks of intergenerational mobility, that public policies can affect social mobility, and that the influence of elite members in Congress has historically reduced the State's capacity.

For students of color, how do school experiences early in life affect adult political participation later on? Political scientists have long understood that race plays a critical role in political behavior; however, scholars rarely investigate the features of American society that drive racial inequalities in outcomes like voting, volunteering for campaigns, and other forms of political participation. This study explores an important and underexamined source of long-term differences in political behavior: childhood experiences in schools. Using observational analysis of longitudinal datasets, I examine the relationship between public schools and political participation among students of color. My research highlights the important fact that public schools can influence both the resources students of color have later in life and the feelings they have toward government and politics—sometimes in opposing ways that ultimately leave students of color better-resourced but less confident in government and less likely to participate.