Estimating teacher effectiveness from two-year changes in students’ test scores

Using a dataset covering over 10,000 Australian school teachers and over 90,000 pupils, I estimate how effective teachers are in raising students’ test scores. Since the exams are biennial, it is necessary to take account of the teacher's work in the intervening year. Even adjusting for measurement error, the teacher fixed effects are widely dispersed, and there is a strong positive correlation between a teacher's gains in literacy and numeracy. Teacher fixed effects show a significant association with some, though not all, observable teacher characteristics. Experience has the strongest impact, particularly in the early years of a teacher's career. Female teachers do better at teaching literacy. Teachers with a master's degree or some other form of further qualification do not appear to achieve significantly larger test score gains. Overall, teacher characteristics found in the departmental payroll database explain only a small fraction of the variance in teacher performance.     

The redistributive equity of affirmative action: Exploring the role of race,socioeconomic status,and gender in college admissions

This paper contributes to research on affirmative action by examining issues of equity in the context of racial quotas in Brazil. We study the experience of the University of Brasilia, which established racial quotas in 2004 reserving 20% of available admissions slots for students who self-identified as black. Based on university admissions data and a student survey conducted by the authors, we find evidence that race, socioeconomic status, and gender were considerable barriers to college attendance and achievement. For example, first-difference regressions involving pairs of siblings indicate that black identity and gender had a negative effect on entrance exam scores. Moreover, we compare displaced and displacing applicants and find that racial quotas helped promote equity to some extent. Nevertheless, the scale and scope of redistribution were highly limited, and the vast majority of Brazilians had little chance of attending college, suggesting that more still needs to be done.     

Field of study choice by community college students in Canada

Community college education is a key component of Canadian postsecondary education, with 21% of the population aged 25–64 having college credentials. In order to understand educational decisions at this level, we estimate a model of choice of field of study and analyze, among other things, the effect of earnings on this choice. In this way, we exploit two cross-sections (and cohorts) of young workers who completed community college (Cegeps in Quebec) in 1990 and 1995 from the Canadian National Graduate Survey. Structural estimates indicate that the probability of selecting a specific community college field of study depends significantly upon anticipated earnings in this field relative to other fields. Our results also show that women put less weight on earnings compared to men when choosing a field of study, and that students who were employed prior to starting community college are more sensitive to earnings variations across fields of study than students with no prior work experience.     

Am I missing something? The effects of absence from class on student performance

We analyse a rich dataset of Economics students at a UK university to identify causal effects of class absence on student performance, exploiting the random assignment of students and information on students’ class timetables to avoid selection problems. We use panel properties of the data to control for unobserved student factors such as ability and effort. Quantile regression results suggest that absence has adverse effects on performance – but these effects are causal only for the upper part of the conditional performance distribution.     

The effects of high school math curriculum on college attendance: Evidence from the NLSY97

Using a sample of youth who graduated from high school in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this paper examines the impact of high school math curriculum on the decision to go to college. Results that control for unobserved differences between students and their families suggest that a more rigorous high school math curriculum is associated with a higher probability of attending college and of attending a 4-year college. The household fixed effect results imply that students who take an advanced academic math curriculum in high school (algebra II or precalculus, trigonometry, or calculus) are about 17 percentage points more likely to go to college and 20 percentage points more likely to start college at a 4-year school by age 21 compared to those students whose highest math class was algebra I or geometry.     

Changes in the returns to education and college quality

This paper estimates changes in the effects of educational attainment and college quality on three cohorts of students observed during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Consistent with most of the prior literature, I find that educational attainment and college quality raise earnings, and the magnitudes of these effects have increased over time. The new contributions of this paper are the following: (1) changes in these effects are disaggregated by sex, race, and parent's SES, and include estimates of effects on earnings, labor force participation, family formation, and civic participation; (2) evidence of larger increases in the effects of education on earnings and labor force participation for men, Blacks, and Hispanics; (3) declining effects of educational attainment on voter registration; and (4) increasing effects of college quality on delaying marriage and childbearing, particularly for males.     

High Schools That Work and college preparedness: Measuring the model's impact on mathematics and science pipeline progression

The High Schools That Work school improvement initiative is the nation's largest comprehensive school reform model with over a thousand schools adopting its framework. The initiative's premise is that all students can meet the demands of a college preparatory curriculum if provided the right supports. Analyzing over a decade of data on student course taking and performance, we employ a rigorous comparative interrupted time series strategy to assess the extent to which HSTW meets its goal by increasing students’ successful progression through the mathematics and science pipelines. Each pipeline consists of three college preparatory courses: algebra 1, geometry, and algebra 2 in mathematics and biology plus two physical science courses in science. The results show no effect on pipeline progression for the average student and some evidence of increased gaps in course taking between more advantaged and disadvantaged students.     

The effects of attending a diverse college

The question of whether there are benefits to be obtained from having a diverse student body is a key issue in the debate over affirmative action. This paper estimates the effects of college racial diversity on post-college earnings, civic behavior, and satisfaction with the college attended. I use the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey, which allows me to control for exposure to racial diversity prior to college. Moreover, I use two techniques from Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) to address the issue of selection on unobservables. The first is a sensitivity analysis showing how the coefficient on diversity changes when different values of the correlation are imposed in a system of equations that consists of a selection equation and an outcome equation. The second is estimation based upon an assumption that selection on unobservables equals selection on observables, which, along with the OLS results, gives estimates of bounds on the effect. Single-equation estimates suggest a possible positive effect of diversity on satisfaction with the racial climate at the college attended and a negative effect on community service, but I do not find an effect on other outcomes. Moreover, the estimates are very sensitive to the assumptions made about selection on unobservables.     

Student incentives and preferential treatment in college admissions

We consider a framework in which the optimal admissions policy of a purely academic-quality oriented college implements preferential treatment in favor of the student from the deprived socioeconomic background which maximizes the competition between candidates. We find that the exact form of the preferential treatment admissions policy matters for student incentives and hence for student-body diversity in equilibrium. Preferential treatment policy in college admissions often takes, or is perceived to take, an additive form where the score of the applicant from the deprived background is augmented by a fixed number of points. Such a preferential treatment policy fails to incentivize students from the deprived background. Despite the affirmative action, the level of preferential treatment that achieves academic excellence leaves student-body diversity unchanged compared with a background-blind admissions policy and leads to a higher intergroup score gap.     

Earnings benefits of Tulsa's pre-K program for different income groups

This paper estimates future adult earnings effects associated with a universal pre-K program in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These projections help to compensate for the lack of long-term data on universal pre-K programs, while using metrics that relate test scores to social benefits. Combining test-score data from the fall of 2006 and recent findings by Chetty et al. (2011) on the relationship between kindergarten test scores and adult earnings, we generate projections of adult earnings effects and a partial cost–benefit analysis of the Tulsa pre-K program. For both half-day and full-day programs, benefits are similar across program participants of different income, with benefit-to-cost ratios of 3- or 4-to-1. Because we only consider adult earnings benefits, actual benefit–cost ratios are likely higher, especially for disadvantaged children.     

Why preferences in college admissions may yield a more-able student body

Critics of affirmative action policies contend that the elimination of racial preferences in college admissions would lead to a “more-able” student body. We develop a simple model comprised of three classes of college admissions—merit, race and legacy—to show that it is possible that a change in admissions policy that reduces racial preferences leads to a “less-able” student body. The change in admissions policy may serve only to ensure that more admissions are available for “sale” to wealthy alumni through legacy preferences. In other words, when there are multi-dimensional preferences, reducing or eliminating one dimension of preferences may lead to the unforeseen consequence of producing a “less able” student body.     

The role of peers and grades in determining major persistence in the sciences

Using longitudinal administrative data from a large elite research university, this paper analyzes the role of peers and grades in determining major persistence in the life and physical sciences. In the physical sciences, analyses using within-course, across-time variation show that ex-ante measures of peer quality in a student's introductory courses has a lasting impact on the probability of persisting in the major. This peer effect exhibits important non-linearities such that weak students benefit from exposure to stronger peers while strong students are not dragged down by weaker peers. In both the physical and the life sciences, I find evidence that students are “pulled away” by their high grades in non-science courses and “pushed out” by their low grades in their major field. In the physical sciences, females are found to be more responsive to grades than males, consistent with psychological theories of stereotype vulnerability.     

Non-formal basic education as a development priority: Evidence from Nicaragua

Almost 900m adolescents and adults are illiterate in the developing world, yet most policy discussions focus on the educational circumstances of primary aged children. As a result non-formal educational programs for adolescents and adults are given very little support, and this group is virtually ignored in international agreements such as the millennium declaration. This article presents the first serious attempt at evaluating the impact of a non-formal education program. Results show significant learning achievement over the academic year, as well as strong development impacts of the program in non-learning dimensions of participants’ lives. These positive impacts, plus the significantly lower unit costs and self-targeted nature of the program provide strong evidence that this type of program can be an important part of the poverty reduction and human capital enhancement strategy of developing countries with large illiterate adult populations.     

Do course evaluations truly reflect student learning? Evidence from an objectively graded post-test

It is difficult to assess the extent to which course evaluations reflect how much students truly learn from a course because valid measures of learning are rarely available. This paper makes use of a unique setting in which students take a common, high-stakes post-test which is centrally graded and serves as the basis for capturing actual student learning. We match these student-specific measures of learning to student-specific course evaluation scores from electronic records and a rich set of student-level covariates, including a pre-test score and other measures of skills prior to entering the course. While small in magnitude, we find a robust positive, and statistically significant, association between our measure of student learning and course evaluations.     

Non-market effects of education on crime: Evidence from Italian regions

This paper studies the non-market effects of education on crime using a panel dataset for the 20 Italian regions over the period 1980–1995. Our empirical results suggest that education reduces crime over and above its effect through labour market opportunities (employment rate and wage rate). Because of the absence of a credible instrumental variable for education for Italy, our empirical strategy is to include in our econometric specification region fixed effect, year fixed effects and region-specific time trends together with an extensive set of socioeconomic and deterrence variables. Our results are robust to model specification, changes in the typology of crimes and finally, to alternative definitions of education.     

Cognitive skills among children in Senegal: Disentangling the roles of schooling and family background

We use unique data to estimate the determinants of cognitive ability among 14–17-year olds in Senegal. Unlike standard school-based samples, tests were administered to current students as well as to children no longer – or never – enrolled. Years of schooling strongly affects cognitive skills, but conditional on years of school, parental education and household wealth, as well as local public school quality, have surprisingly modest effects on test performance. Instead, family background primarily affects skills indirectly through its impacts on years of schooling. Therefore closing the schooling gaps between poor and wealthy children will also close most of the gap in cognitive skills between these groups.     

Benefits of early childhood interventions across the world: (Under) Investing in the very young

This paper reviews the international (non-U.S.) evidence on the benefits of early childhood interventions. A total of 38 contrasts of 30 interventions in 23 countries were analyzed. It focuses on studies applying a quasi-experimental or random assignment. Studies were coded according to: the type of intervention (cash transfer, nutritional, educational or mixed); sample size; study design and duration; country; target group (infants, prekindergarten); subpopulations of interventions; and dosage of intervention. Cohen's D effect sizes were calculated for four outcomes: cognitive gains; behavioral change; health gains; and amount of schooling. We find children from different context and countries receive substantial cognitive, behavioral, health and schooling benefits from early childhood interventions. The benefits are sustained over time. Interventions that have an educational or stimulation component evidenced the largest cognitive effects.     

Applying early decision: Student and college incentives and outcomes

Colleges’ early decision (ED) admission policies require accepted students to commit to attend the school without comparing outside options. With data from two liberal arts schools we find evidence that students with higher willingness and ability to pay and lower measured ability levels are more likely to apply ED. Applying ED raises the probability of acceptance by 40 percentage points. We address the potential selection of students into ED, including estimating an upper bound of 46 percentage points following Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005). One college appears to use the ED process to screen applicants with high SAT scores and female applicants, thereby avoiding the potential adverse selection of applicants in the regular decision process. Finally, even conditional on higher socioeconomic status and other observable characteristics, applying ED is correlated with higher financial aid packages, perhaps because the college's financial aid resources are higher earlier in the admission process.     

Congratulations or condolences? The role of human capital in the cultivation of a university administrator

Administrative skill is essential to organizational effectiveness. Yet, few studies examine how human capital investments over a career affect selection into administration. We use panel data for economists to estimate the probability of choosing administration over a pure academic track. The results show that, while research-specific human capital reduces the probability of becoming an administrator, general human capital increases it. There are also inferior administrative opportunities for women that have not improved over time and variation in the role of human capital according to institutional research mission. Thus, our results suggest academic leaders are not merely born, but cultivated through their human capital investments.