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Author: Joshua Hollinger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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"This thesis consists of three essays on the economics of education. These essays focus on how educators affect student outcomes in the short run and long run, and they assess the effects of policies aimed at educators' incentives. Chapter 1 considers the effects of test-score-based school accountability on students' test scores and long-run outcomes, as well as the relationship between these two different types of effects. While many education policies target test scores as a contemporaneous measure of student learning, a common concern is that these policies may generate higher test scores in a way that fails to translate to more important student outcomes in the long run. I use administrative data from North Carolina and two regression discontinuity designs to estimate the impact of school accountability pressure under No Child Left Behind on elementary students' test scores and their long-run outcomes at the end of high school. I find modest positive effects on elementary test scores and a significant increase in SAT scores years later. There is some evidence for a small increase in high school GPA, mixed evidence for an increase in students intending to attend a 4-year instead of a 2-year college, and no effect on high school graduation or intention to attend any college. Further evidence suggests the effect on SAT scores may be explained by persistent test-score effects in years after accountability exposure. Altogether, these results lend support to a mixed story for No Child Left Behind: while accountability pressure led to a long-run increase in skill captured by tests, these learning gains were not strong or broad enough to yield meaningful improvements in other long-run outcomes like educational attainment. Chapter 2 evaluates the test score effects of individual teacher performance pay schemes implemented in a number of high-need schools in North Carolina. Since performance bonuses were paid to teachers with value-added above a threshold toward the top of the district-wide distribution, I evaluate whether this policy generates larger incentives for teachers with higher probability of attaining the bonus. I find evidence for the opposite: those expected to be further away from the threshold increased their value-added, though the performance incentives did not have a significant overall effect. I show that the single-year value-added estimates are quite noisy, which likely was a reason for this. I also find that almost all of the teachers in these high-need schools were predicted to have value-added below the performance threshold. Both of these factors could explain the lack of overall incentive effectiveness. One possibility is that lower value-added teachers have more scope to improve effort. Chapter 3 addresses the questions of whether the assignment of less effective teachers contributes to worse short-term and longer-term outcomes for disadvantaged students. We leverage transfers of elementary teachers across schools in North Carolina to measure differences in teachers' effects on contemporaneous and future test scores according to students' socio-economic characteristics. We quantify the importance of these differences to account for the observed test score gaps between disadvantaged and advantaged students. Variation in teacher quality accounts for 3% of the total variation in contemporaneous test scores. We also find that teacher quality accounts for similar proportions when we consider variability in test scores taken two and three years after. Our estimates are robust to bias-correction methods that account for limited mobility bias."--Pages viii-ix.
Author: Joshua Hollinger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"This thesis consists of three essays on the economics of education. These essays focus on how educators affect student outcomes in the short run and long run, and they assess the effects of policies aimed at educators' incentives. Chapter 1 considers the effects of test-score-based school accountability on students' test scores and long-run outcomes, as well as the relationship between these two different types of effects. While many education policies target test scores as a contemporaneous measure of student learning, a common concern is that these policies may generate higher test scores in a way that fails to translate to more important student outcomes in the long run. I use administrative data from North Carolina and two regression discontinuity designs to estimate the impact of school accountability pressure under No Child Left Behind on elementary students' test scores and their long-run outcomes at the end of high school. I find modest positive effects on elementary test scores and a significant increase in SAT scores years later. There is some evidence for a small increase in high school GPA, mixed evidence for an increase in students intending to attend a 4-year instead of a 2-year college, and no effect on high school graduation or intention to attend any college. Further evidence suggests the effect on SAT scores may be explained by persistent test-score effects in years after accountability exposure. Altogether, these results lend support to a mixed story for No Child Left Behind: while accountability pressure led to a long-run increase in skill captured by tests, these learning gains were not strong or broad enough to yield meaningful improvements in other long-run outcomes like educational attainment. Chapter 2 evaluates the test score effects of individual teacher performance pay schemes implemented in a number of high-need schools in North Carolina. Since performance bonuses were paid to teachers with value-added above a threshold toward the top of the district-wide distribution, I evaluate whether this policy generates larger incentives for teachers with higher probability of attaining the bonus. I find evidence for the opposite: those expected to be further away from the threshold increased their value-added, though the performance incentives did not have a significant overall effect. I show that the single-year value-added estimates are quite noisy, which likely was a reason for this. I also find that almost all of the teachers in these high-need schools were predicted to have value-added below the performance threshold. Both of these factors could explain the lack of overall incentive effectiveness. One possibility is that lower value-added teachers have more scope to improve effort. Chapter 3 addresses the questions of whether the assignment of less effective teachers contributes to worse short-term and longer-term outcomes for disadvantaged students. We leverage transfers of elementary teachers across schools in North Carolina to measure differences in teachers' effects on contemporaneous and future test scores according to students' socio-economic characteristics. We quantify the importance of these differences to account for the observed test score gaps between disadvantaged and advantaged students. Variation in teacher quality accounts for 3% of the total variation in contemporaneous test scores. We also find that teacher quality accounts for similar proportions when we consider variability in test scores taken two and three years after. Our estimates are robust to bias-correction methods that account for limited mobility bias."--Pages viii-ix.
Author: Emily P. Hoffman
Publisher: W. E. Upjohn Institute
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Author: Peter Sturmthal Bergman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 123
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I study three separate questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I examine how information frictions between parents and their children affect human capital investment, and how much reducing those friction can improve student effort and achievement. I find that providing additional information to parents regarding missing assignments is a potentially cost-effective strategy to increase parental investments and improve student achievement. In Chapter 2, we measure the impact of high-quality charter schools on teen fertility using admission lotteries to several Los Angeles charter schools as a natural experiment. We find evidence that admission to high-quality charter schools can substantially reduce teen pregnancies. In Chapter 3, we semi-parametrically estimate teacher effects on student test scores using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District. We document that there is significantly more within-teacher variation in teachers' effects than across teacher variation. We find that interacting the teacher indicator variables with a function of the students' lagged test scores captures most of the nonlinearities, preserves the heterogeneity of teacher effects, and provides more accurate estimates.
Author: Ryan Veiga
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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The first chapter of this dissertation discusses selective teacher retention, where retention rates differ for teachers based on their performance in their schools. We use data from a large US school district and derive a persistent measure of teacher quality from previously calculated value-added metrics for use in our retention models. Using probit models of retention probabilities with school-level random effects, we look for evidence that selective retention exists, and investigate heterogeneity at the school-level that might contribute to inequalities in teaching quality. We look to see if these differences may correlate with race or poverty. In the second chapter, we look at school-level heterogeneity in the performance of new teacher hires, as measured by teacher value-added metrics. We investigate whether these heterogeneities may be partly explained by race, poverty, or survey data from teachers on school climate. We investigate how new teacher quality depends on their experience, and quantify the school-level heterogeneity in the probability of hiring inexperienced teachers using a probit model. In the third and final chapter, we use a value-added model with student fixed effects to investigate the quality of charter schools in Minnesota. We identify charter school performance using students who switch in and out of charter schools, thus allowing their time in traditional public schools to serve as a control for their years in charter schools. We break down the effects by student gender, race, grade-level, and number of years spent by the student in a charter school.
Author: Eric S. Taylor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Across three papers I study how differences in the quality and quantity of classroom instruction contribute to differences in what students learn in school. The first two papers focus on teachers--specifically what gives rise to differences between teachers in student learning. The third paper focuses on the quantity of instruction time students receive. The results are immediately relevant to both ongoing education policy debates about teaching quality and the day-to-day management of a large workforce. First, in paper one, I study the effects of a labor-replacing computer technology on the productivity of classroom teachers. In a series of field-experiments, teachers were provided computer-aided instruction (CAI) software for use in their classrooms; CAI provides individualized tutoring and practice to students one-on-one. In math classes, CAI reduces by one-fifth the variance of teacher productivity, as measured by student test score gains. The smaller variance comes both from productivity improvements for otherwise low-performing teachers, but also losses among high-performers. The change in productivity partly reflects changes in teachers' level of work effort and teachers' decisions about how to allocate class time. Second, I study whether and how teachers' assigned job tasks--the basic instructional practices they are asked to use in the classroom--affect the returns to math skills in teacher productivity. The empirical results demonstrate the value distinguishing between workers' skills and the job tasks to which those skills are applied, as in Acemoglu and Autor (2011). I use data from a randomized-trial of different approaches to teaching early-elementary math, each approach codified in a set of day-to-day tasks for teachers; the data include a baseline test of each teacher's math skills--knowledge of math concepts, procedures, and pedagogy. Teacher productivity, as measured by contributions to student math test score growth, is increasing in math skills when teachers are asked to follow conventional "direct-instruction" practices which rely on teachers explaining and modeling math rules and procedures for their students. The relationship is weaker, perhaps even negative, when teachers use newer "student-led" practices. The difference in productivity is pronounced for the high-skilled (top-tercile) teachers where the difference between direct-instruction and student-led is 0.13-0.16 student standard deviations. Additionally, assigning teachers to use student-led practices reduces the total variation in productivity by one-third or more compared to direct-instruction. Finally, for students whose math skills lag expectations, public schools often increase the fraction of the school day spent on math instruction. Studying middle-school students and using regression discontinuity methods, I estimate the causal effect of requiring two math classes--one remedial, one regular--instead of just one class. Math achievement grows much faster under the requirement, 0.16-0.18 student standard deviations. Yet, one year after returning to a regular one-class schedule, the initial gains decay by as much as half, and two years later just one-third of the initial treatment effect remains. This pattern of decaying effects over time mirrors other educational interventions--assignment to a more skilled teacher, reducing class size, retaining students--but spending more time on math carries different costs. One cost is notable, more time in math crowds out instruction in other subjects.
Author: Hwanoong Lee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781392075777
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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This dissertation comprises three essays on the Economics of Education. Its ultimate focus is to understand how different agents in the education market respond to releasing information about teacher and school performance and how public interventions influence human capital accumulation. The first essay "The Effect of Releasing Teacher Performance Information to Schools: Teachers' Response and Student Achievement" examines the effects of releasing teacher value-added (VA) information on student performance in two settings; in the first, VA data was released to all potential employers within the district, while in the second, only the current employer received the data. I find that student achievement increased only in the district where the VA scores were provided to all potential employers. These effects were driven solely by improved performance among ex-ante less-effective teachers; the null effects in the other setting, however, were driven by moderate declines in performance among ex-ante highly-effective teachers and small improvements among less-effective teachers. These results highlight the importance of understanding how the design features of VA disclosure translate into the productivity of teachers. The second essay "The Role of Credible Threats and School Competition within School Accountability Systems: Evidence from Focus Schools in Michigan" studies the impact of receiving accountability labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of Focus (schools with the largest achievement gaps) labels and find that schools receiving the Focus label improved the performance of low-achieving students relative to their barely non-Focus counterparts, and they did so without hurting high-achieving students. The positive achievement effects for Focus schools were entirely driven by Title 1 Focus schools that faced financial sanctions associated with being labeled the following year. There is no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine heterogeneous effects by looking at the number of alternative nearby schooling options. I find that when schools are exposed to a competitive choice environment, receiving the Focus label increased math test scores across the scoring distribution, while schools located in an uncompetitive choice environment improved the test scores of low achievers only. This evidence may suggest the importance of incorporating credible sanctions and school choice options into the school accountability system to maximize the effectiveness of the system on student achievement. Finally, the third essay "The Effects of School Accountability Systems Under NCLB Waiver: Evidence from Priority Schools in Michigan" investigates the impact of receiving Priority labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of the Priority (schools with the lowest performance) label and find no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine whether assigning the Priority label induced the changes in the composition of students. I define several key measures of student composition and find no evidence that the Priority designation influenced the student composition of schools.
Author: Douglas N. Harris
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Charter schools
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Author: Franklin G. Mixon Jr.
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595338062
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
This edited volume contains a collection of essays that reflect a broad area of economic education inquiry ranging from teaching assessment to the philosophy of the classroom. Written by economics scholars from across the nation, this volume presents recent discoveries in presentation, assessment, and other aspects of economic education at colleges and universities in the U.S. These articles represent but a sample of the growing commentary among academics on the importance of effective teaching and economic education scholarship.
Author: Clement Kirabo Jackson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780549037446
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
In Chapter 3, I analyze how students affect the schooling environment. In 2001 Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district terminated its long standing race-based school busing policy. I use the sudden changes in schools' student demographics due to the policy change, that were uncorrelated with changes in neighborhood and school characteristics to make inferences about teachers' preferences for student characteristics. Using a simulated instrumental variables approach, I find that schools that experienced an inflow of black students gained black teachers and lost experienced white teachers. This in turn, led to increased teacher turnover, and a lower teacher qualifications. The results suggest that teacher quality is endogenous to student demographics.
Author: Steven Dieterle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781267381996
Category : Class size
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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