This contains instruction on how to obtain the data used in "Can Online Off-The-Shelf Lessons Improve Student Outcomes? Evidence from A Field Experiment." this folder also includes the code use for the main annalists.
Data Lessons AEJ.zip
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Teacher Effects and Teacher Related Policies
The emergence of large longitudinal data sets linking students to teachers has led to rapid growth in the study of teacher effects on student outcomes by economists over the past decade. One large literature has documented wide variation in teacher effectiveness that is not well explained by observable student or teacher characteristics. A second literature has investigated how educational outcomes might be improved by leveraging teacher effectiveness through processes of recruitment, assignment, compensation, evaluation, promotion, and retention. These two lines of inquiry are closely tied; the first tells us about the importance of individual teachers, and the second tells us how this information can be used in policy and practice. We review the most recent findings in economics on the importance of teachers and on teacher-related policies aimed at improving educational production.
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Reducing Inequality Through Dynamic Complementarity: Evidence from Head Start and Public School Spending
We explore whether early childhood human-capital investments are complementary to those made later in life. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts who were differentially exposed to policy-induced changes in pre-school (Head Start) spending and school-finance-reform-induced changes in public school spending during childhood, depending on place and year of birth. Difference-in-difference instrumental variables and sibling-difference estimates indicate that, for poor children, increases in Head Start spending and increases in public K12 spending each individually increased educational attainment and earnings, and reduced the likelihood of both poverty and incarceration in adulthood. The benefits of Head Start spending were larger when followed by access to better-funded public K12 schools, and the increases in K12 spending were more efficacious for poor children who were exposed to higher levels of Head Start spending during their preschool years. The findings suggest that early investments in the skills of disadvantaged children that are followed by sustained educational investments over time can effectively break the cycle of poverty.
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Do Parents Know Best? The Short and Long-Run Effects of Attending The Schools that Parents Prefer
Recent studies document that, in many cases, the schools that parents prefer over others do not improve student test scores. Two explanations are (a) parents cannot discern schools’ causal impacts, and/or (b) parents value schools that improve outcomes not well measured by test scores. To shed light on this, we employ administrative and survey data from Barbados. Using discrete choice models, we document that most parents have strong preferences for the same schools. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we estimate the causal impact of attending a preferred school on a broad array of outcomes. As found in other settings, preferred schools have better peers, but do not improve short-run test scores. However, for females, these schools confer long-run benefits including reduced teen motherhood, more educational attainment, increased employment, higher earnings, and improved health. In contrast, for males, the effects are mixed. The pattern for females is consistent with parents valuing school impacts on outcomes not well measured by test scores, while the pattern for males is consistent with parents being unable to identify schools’ causal impacts.
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Per Pupil Spending 1967 through 2010
This data-set has the raw annual district-level per-pupil spending data used in Jackson, Johnson, and Persico (2016). Note that these data report school spending in 2010 dollars.
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The Effects of School Spending on Educational and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from School Finance Reforms
Since Coleman (1966), many have questioned whether school spending affects student outcomes. The school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused some of the most dramatic changes in the structure of K–12 education spending in US history. To study the effect of these school-finance-reform-induced changes in school spending on long-run adult outcomes, we link school spending and school finance reform data to detailed, nationally-representative data on children born between 1955 and 1985 and followed through 2011. We use the timing of the passage of court-mandated reforms, and their associated type of funding formula change, as an exogenous shifter of school spending and we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts that were differentially exposed to school finance reforms, depending on place and year of birth. Event-study and instrumental variable models reveal that a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for all twelve years of public school leads to 0.27 more completed years of education, 7.25 percent higher wages, and a 3.67 percentage-point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty; effects are much more pronounced for children from low-income families. Exogenous spending increases were associated with sizable improvements in measured school quality, including reductions in student-to-teacher ratios, increases in teacher salaries, and longer school years.
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Replication code for JPE
This files contains all the code required to replicate the findings in
Jackson, C. Kirabo. (forthcoming) "What Do Test Scores Miss? The Importance of Teacher Effects on Non-Test Score Outcomes" Journal of Political Economy
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What Do Test Scores Miss? The Importance of Teacher Effects on Non-Test Score Outcomes
I present a model in which teachers affect a variety of student outcomes through their influence on both cognitive and noncognitive skill. Empirically, I proxy for students’ noncognitive skill using non-test-score behaviors. These behaviors include absences, suspensions, course grades, and on-time grade progression in 9th grade. Teachers have meaningful effects on both test scores and behaviors. However, teacher effects on test scores and those on behaviors are weakly correlated. Teacher effects on noncognitive proxy measures (i.e. behaviors) predict larger impacts on high-school completion and other longer-run outcomes than their effects on test-scores. Relative to using only test-score measures, using teacher effects on both test-score and noncognitive proxy measures more than doubles the variance of predictable teacher impacts on longer-run outcomes. (JEL I21, J00)
Replication code is availbe at this link: https://northwestern.box.com/s/nd1xavywccqev7eq6jrebiw1keb6vvmj
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The Effect of Single-Sex Education on Test Scores, School Completion, Arrests, and Teen Motherhood: Evidence from School Transitions
In 2010, the Ministry of Education in Trinidad and Tobago converted 20 low-performing secondary schools from coeducational to single-sex. I exploit these conversions to identify the causal effect of single-sex schooling holding other school inputs constant. After also accounting for student selection, single-sex cohorts at conversion schools score higher on national exams and are four percentage points more likely to complete secondary school. There are also important non-academic effects; all-boys cohorts have fewer arrests as teens, and all-girls cohorts have lower teen pregnancy rates. These benefits are achieved at zero financial cost. Survey evidence suggests that these single-sex effects reflect both direct gender peer effects due to interactions between classmates, and indirect effects generated through changes in teacher behavior.
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Does School Spending Matter? The New Literature on an Old Question
Social scientist have long sought to examine the causal impact of school spending on child outcomes. The literature on this topic was largely descriptive so that it had been difficult to draw strong causal claims. However, there have been several recent studies in this space that employ larger data-sets and use quasi-experimental methods allowing for much more credible causal claims. This paper briefly discusses the older literature and highlights some of its limitations. It then describes a recent quasi-experimental literature on the impact of school spending on child outcomes, highlights some key papers, and presents a summary of the recent findings. Policy implications are discussed.
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What is a Good School, and Can Parents Tell? Evidence on the Multidimensionality of School Output
Is a school’s impact on high-stakes test scores a good measure of its overall impact on students? Do parents value school impacts on high-stakes tests, longer-run outcomes, or both? To answer the first question, we apply quasi-experimental methods to data from Trinidad and Tobago and estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several outcomes. Schools' impacts on high-stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on low-stakes tests, dropout, crime, teen motherhood, and formal labor market participation. To answer the second question, we link estimated school impacts to parents’ ranked lists of schools and employ discrete choice models to estimate parental preferences. Parents value schools that causally improve high-stakes test scores conditional on average outcomes, proximity, and peer quality. Consistent with parents valuing the multidimensional output of schools, parents of high-achieving girls prefer schools that increase formal labor market participation, and parents of high-achieving boys prefer schools that reduce arrests.
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School Effects on Socio-emotional Development, School-Based Arrests, and Educational Attainment
Using value-added models, we find that high schools impact students’ self-reported socio-emotional development (SED) by enhancing social well-being and promoting hard work. Conditional on schools’ test score impacts, schools that improve SED, reduce school-based arrests, and increase high-school completion, college-going, and college persistence. Schools that improve social well-being have larger effects on attendance and behavioral infractions in high school, while those that promote hard work have larger effects on GPA. Results suggest that adolescence can be a formative period for socio-emotional growth, high-school impacts on SED can be captured using self-report surveys, and SED can be fostered by schools to improve longer-run outcomes. These findings are robust to tests for plausible forms of selection.
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Data and Code for: Do School Spending Cuts Matter? Evidence from The Great Recession
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Rebuttal_AEJ_arkansas_post.pdf
This is a response to Goldstein and McGee (2020). For access the to forthcoming paper and the online appendix click here: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20180674&&from=f
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Who Benefits From Attending Effective Schools? Examining Heterogeneity in High School Impacts
We estimate the longer-run effects of attending an effective high school (one that improves a combination of test scores, survey measures of socio-emotional development and behaviors in 9th grade) for students who are more versus less educationally advantaged (i.e., likely to attain more years of education based on 8th-grade characteristics). All students benefit from attending effective schools. However, the least advantaged students experience the largest improvements in high-school graduation, college going, and school-based arrests. These patterns are driven by the least advantaged students benefiting the most from school impacts on the non-test-score dimensions of school quality. However, while there is considerable overlap in the effectiveness of schools attended by more and less advantaged students, it is the most advantaged students that are most likely to attend highly effective schools. These patterns underscore the importance of quality schools, and the non-test score components of quality schools, for improving the longer-run outcomes for less advantaged students.
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The Distribution of School Spending Impacts
We use estimates across all known "credibly causal" studies to examine the distributions of the causal effects of public K12 school spending on test scores and educational attainment in the United States. Under reasonable assumptions, for each of the 31 included studies, we compute the same parameter estimate. Method of moments estimates indicate that, on average, a $1000 increase in per-pupil public school spending (for four years) increases test scores by 0.044 standard deviations, high-school graduation by 2.1 percentage points, and college-going by 3.9 percentage points. The pooled averages are significant at the 0.0001 level. When benchmarked against other interventions, test score impacts are much smaller than those on educational attainment -- suggesting that test-score impacts understate the value of school spending. The benefits to capital spending increases take about five-to-six years to materialize, but after this, one cannot reject that the average marginal effects differ across capital and non-capital spending types. The marginal spending impacts are much less pronounced for economically advantaged populations. Consistent with a cumulative effect, the educational attainment impacts are larger with more years of exposure to the spending increase. Average impacts are similar across a wide range of baseline spending levels -- providing little evidence of diminishing marginal returns at current spending levels.
To speak to generalizability, we estimate the variability across studies attributable to effect heterogeneity (as opposed to sampling variability). This heterogeneity explains about 40 and 70 percent of the variation across studies for educational attainment and test scores, respectively, which allows us to provide a range of likely policy impacts. A policy that increases per-pupil spending for four years will improve test scores 92 percent of the time, and educational attainment even more often. We find suggestive evidence consistent with small possible publication bias, but demonstrate that any effects on our estimates are minimal.
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Education_covid_post.pdf
Canonical human capital theories posit that education, by enhancing worker skills, reduces the likelihood that a worker will be laid-off during times of economic change. Yet, this has not been demonstrated causally. We link administrative education records from 1987 through 2002to nationally representative surveys conducted before and after COVID-19 onset in Barbados to explore the causal impact of improved education on job loss during this period. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, Beuermann and Jackson (2020) show that females (but not males) who score just above the admission threshold for more selective schools in Barbados attain more years of education than those that scored just below (essentially holding initial ability fixed). Here, in follow-up data, we show that these same females (but not males) are much less likely to have lost a job after the onset of COVID-19. We show that these effects are not driven by sectoral changes, or changes in labor supply. Because employers observe incumbent worker productivity, these patterns are inconsistent with pure education signalling, and suggest that education enhances worker skill.
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Can Introducing Single-Sex Education into Low-Performing Schools Improve Academics, Arrests, and Teen Motherhood?
In 2010, the Ministry of Education in Trinidad and Tobago converted 20 low-performing secondary schools from coeducational to single-sex. I exploit these conversions to identify the policy-relevant causal effect of introducing single-sex education into existing schools (holding other school inputs constant). After accounting for student selection, boys in single-sex cohorts at conversion schools score higher on national exams taken around age 15, both boys and girls take more advanced coursework, and girls perform better on secondary-school completion exams. There are also important non-academic effects; all-boys cohorts have fewer arrests as teens, and all-girls cohorts have lower teen pregnancy rates. Survey evidence suggests that these single-sex conversion effects reflect both direct gender peer effects due to interactions between classmates, and indirect effects generated through changes in teacher behavior.
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Linking Social-Emotional Learning to Long-Term Success
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Beyond Test Scores
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More Pages to Explore .....
