Testing,crime and punishment

The recent passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 solidified a national trend toward increased student testing for the purpose of evaluating public schools. This new environment for schools provides strong incentives for schools to alter the ways in which they deliver educational services. This paper investigates whether schools may employ discipline for misbehavior as a tool to bolster aggregate test performance. To do so, this paper utilizes an extraordinary data set constructed from the school district administrative records of a subset of the school districts in Florida during the 4 years surrounding the introduction of a high-stakes testing regime.It compares the suspensions of students involved in each of the 41,803 incidents in which two students were suspended and where prior test scores for both students are observed. While schools always tend to assign harsher punishments to low-performing students than to high-performing students throughout the year, this gap grows substantially during the testing window.Moreover, this testing window-related gap is only observed for students in testing grades. In summary, schools apparently act on the incentive to re-shape the testing pool through selective discipline in response to accountability pressures.     

Families,schools and primary-school learning: evidence for Argentina and Colombia in an international perspective

This article presents evidence on the associations between family background, school characteristics and student performance in primary school in Argentina, Colombia and several comparison countries. As a general pattern, educational performance is strongly related to family background, weakly to some institutional school features and hardly to schools’ resource endowments. In an international perspective, family-background effects are relatively large in Argentina, and relatively small in Colombia. A specific Argentine feature is the lack of performance differences between rural and urban areas. A specific Colombian feature is the lack of significant between-gender performance differences. Nonnative students and students not speaking Spanish at home perform particularly weak in both countries. In Argentina, students perform better in schools with a centralized curriculum and ability-based class formation.     

Crime and punishment: the role of student body characteristics in schools’ disciplinary behaviours

Discretion in schools’ discipline choices can provide an efficient and effective misconduct management structure, but could lead to discipline based on unrelated factors. Consequently, schools’ disciplinary decisions can significantly limit students’ access to education by removing students from familiar learning environments. We investigate schools’ disciplinary decisions for serious misconducts and show that punishments are more severe in schools that do not report misconducts to local law enforcement agencies. Moreover, we show that schools that report fewer misconducts to law enforcement impose more severe punishments when the student body is characterized as having a higher proportion of minority students, lower socioeconomic status students and a higher proportion of students who are below the 15th percentile of standardized test scores. These results suggest that between-school punishment differentials are associated with student body traits.     

PISA: What makes the difference?

The large difference in the level and variance of student performance in the 2000 PISA study between Finland and Germany motivates this paper. It analyses why Finnish students showed a significantly higher performance by estimating educational production functions for both countries, using a unique micro-level dataset with imputed data and added school type information. The difference in reading proficiency scores is assigned to different effects, using Oaxaca–Blinder and Juhn–Murphy–Pierce decomposition methods. The analysis shows that German students and schools have on average more favorable characteristics except for the lowest deciles, but experience much lower returns to these characteristics in terms of test scores than Finnish students. The role of school types remains ambiguous. Overall, the observable characteristics explain more of the variation in test scores in Germany than in Finland.      

Class-size effects in school systems around the world: Evidence from between-grade variation in TIMSS

We estimate the effect of class size on student performance in 11 countries, combining school fixed effects and instrumental variables to identify random class-size variation between two adjacent grades within individual schools. Conventional estimates of class-size effects are shown to be severely biased by the non-random placement of students between and within schools. While we find sizable beneficial effects of smaller classes in Greece and Iceland, we reject the possibility of even small effects in four countries and of large beneficial effects in an additional four countries. Noteworthy class-size effects are observed only in countries with relatively low teacher salaries.     

The psychological effects of academic labeling: The case of class tracks

This paper studies the psychological effects of academic labeling. Exploiting the class tracking policy in a Chinese university, we identify the psychological impacts of the academic labels associated with class tracks on the students via a regression discontinuity design in the track assignment rule. We establish causal evidence of positive effects of a better academic label on the academic self-concept and self-expectation of students as well as their academic interest. Our setup ensures that the identified effects of the labels are through the mechanism of student responses, not teachers and schools, suggesting that previous literature focusing on the mechanism of teachers and schools may have neglected an important channel through which academic labels may impact students.     

Individual teacher incentives and student performance

This paper is the first to systematically document the relationship between individual teacher performance incentives and student achievement using the United States data. We combine data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey on schools, students, and their families with our own survey conducted in 2000 regarding the use of teacher incentives. This survey on teacher incentives has unique data on frequency and magnitude of merit raises and bonuses, teacher evaluation, and teacher termination. We find that test scores are higher in schools that offer individual financial incentives for good performance. Moreover, the estimated relationship between the presence of merit pay in teacher compensation and student test scores is strongest in schools that may have the least parental oversight. The association between teacher incentives and student performance could be due to better schools adopting teacher incentives or to teacher incentives eliciting more effort from teachers; it is impossible to rule out the former explanation with our cross sectional data.     

Learning Why More Learning Takes Place in Some Classrooms Than Others

Abstract. The relatively poor average performance of German students on the recent PISA international evaluations of 15- and 16-year-olds' literary skills (2000) and mathematical skills (2003) and the wide variation in performance, with low-income students scoring particularly poorly, have led to calls for reforms of the German educational system. Understanding why students in some classrooms learn more than do those in other classrooms is an important first step in considering alternative reform strategies. Possible explanations include differences in teacher quality, class sizes and peer groups, and also differences among the types of secondary schools that parents select for their children. This paper illustrates a set of techniques that are useful in examining the roles these factors play in predicting why, net of family background and prior achievement, the average achievement of children in some classrooms is much higher than that of children in other classrooms. We illustrate the use of these techniques with a dataset from Bogotá, Colombia, that has two attractive properties. First, some teachers teach multiple classes of students. Second, students are enrolled in schools in two sectors (public and private). Application of the techniques described in this paper could shed light on the reasons why the average academic achievement of German students attending some schools is much higher than that of German students attending other schools.     

PRIVATE EDUCATION IN INDIA: A NOVEL TEST OF CREAM SKIMMING

Students in private schools routinely outperform those in public schools both in the United States and around the world. But do private schools make students better or do they simply cream skim better students? In this article I take advantage of the remarkable fact that in many districts in India a majority of students attend private schools. As the private share of school enrollment increases, cream skimming becomes less plausible as the explanation for a higher rate of achievement in private schools. Evidence for cream skimming is found when the private share of schooling is low, in the range of 0–15%, and thus private schools have a large public pool from which to skim. But the private effect on achievement does not appear to diminish greatly even in districts where more than 70% of students are in private schools. Most importantly, mean scores taken over the entire population of students, private and public, increase with the share of private schooling. These findings support a significant productivity effect of private schools. (JEL I25, I2, L33)     

COMPETITION IN PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICTS: CHARTER SCHOOL ENTRY,STUDENT SORTING,AND SCHOOL INPUT DETERMINATION

This article develops and estimates an equilibrium model of charter school entry, school input choices, and student school choices. The structural model renders a comprehensive and internally consistent picture of treatment effects when there may be general equilibrium effects of school competition. Simulations indicate that the mean effect of charter schools on attendant students is positive and varies widely across locations. The mean spillover effect on public school students is small but positive. Lifting caps on charter schools would more than double entry but reduce gains for attendant students.     

A new international database on education quality: 1965–2010

The aim of this article is to propose a new database allowing a comparative evaluation of the relative performance of schooling systems around the world. We measure this performance through pupils’ achievement in standardized tests. We merge all existing regional and international student achievement tests by using a specific methodology. When compared with other existing databases, our approach innovates in several ways, especially by including regional student achievement tests and intertemporal comparable indicators. We provide a data set of indicators of quality of student achievement for 103 countries/areas in primary education and 111 countries/areas in secondary education between 1965 and 2010.     

HOW MUCH DO STUDENTS MATTER? APPLYING THE OAXACA DECOMPOSITION TO EXPLAIN DETERMINANTS OF ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS

The federal government and many state governments have recently passed legislation that punishes school districts for not showing consistent improvement in standardized test scores. This article measures the extent to which school performance reflects student characteristics. After splitting schools in the state of Washington based on adequate yearly progress, the authors find that an overwhelming percentage of the difference between high- and low-performing schools is explained by characteristics beyond the control of school administrators. Thus legislation designed to penalize poorly performing schools may hurt students who are most in need of academic aid. (JEL I2 )     

Is retention beneficial to low-achieving students? Evidence from Portugal

The role of retention as an educational tool to overcome under-achievement is a hotly debated issue, especially given that the results in the literature are not consensual. The Portuguese case is particularly well suited to study this issue: all students must take standardized national exams at specific grades. Moreover, the available dataset tracks the performance of students over time. Therefore, we are able to measure the impact of students’ retention on their subsequent academic performance since we can control for each student’s initial level of ability at the moment of retention. We use a propensity score matching approach, in which retained and promoted 4th grade students are matched according to their socioeconomic characteristics and the scores obtained in national exams. To address potentially remaining endogeneity biases, we also use the culture of retention at school level as an instrumental variable. The results suggest that in some situations retentions may have on average a positive impact on future achievement. However, in the cases where statistically significant impacts are found, the estimated magnitudes are relatively small. Our results are relevant for countries with high retention rates that are considering alternative educational policies to promote students’ achievement.     

A Statewide Assessment of Precollege Economic Understanding and DEEP

Effects of various student, teacher, and school system characteristics on levels of student economic understanding and learning during the 1982–83 school year are estimated using a stratified random sample of schools from around the state of Indiana. Particular attention is paid to a binary variable indicating which schools are participating in the Developmental Economic Education Program (DEEP).     

Which school systems sort weaker students into smaller classes? International evidence

We examine whether the sorting of high- and low-achieving students into classes of different sizes results in a regressive or compensatory pattern of class sizes for 18 national school systems. Sorting effects are identified by subtracting the causal effect of class size on performance from their total correlation. Our empirical results reveal strongly compensatory patterns of sorting within and especially between schools in many countries. Only the United States, which has a decentralized education finance and considerable residential mobility, exhibits regressive between-school sorting. Between-school sorting is more compensatory in systems with ability tracking. Within-school sorting is more compensatory where administrators rather than teachers assign students to classrooms.     

Impact of the economic downturn on nursing schools

The challenges posed by the economic downturn on baccalaureate nursing schools in the southeast as it relates to their perceptions of changes in the number of applicants, acceptance rates, employer recruitment efforts, and student clinical and job placement were explored. Responses from deans and program directors indicated nursing schools are experiencing negative effects of the economic downturn in the form of graduates having difficulty finding employment, decreased recruitment efforts from prospective employers, difficulty locating clinical placements for students, and no change in faculty applicants despite an increase in undergraduate student applicants as well as graduate student applicants. These multiple factors combined could signal the death knell for programs that are ill-prepared to deal with such a crisis. Programs need to be aggressive in their efforts to draw health care recruiters as well as qualified faculty applicants to their campuses. Nursing schools must be able to clearly show why their graduates are superior to other programs' graduates when competing for both highly qualified faculty applicants and prospective student employers.     

Choice of Ontario high schools and student sorting by ability

To what extent can offering more choice in schooling lead to ‘cream skimming,’ or the sorting of students by ability? I study whether increased choice leads to student sorting by ability into high schools in the Greater Toronto Area. On average, 41% of students ‘opt out’ of the high school to which they would normally be assigned based on their residence. Students are more likely to opt out in areas where accessibility to other schools is greatest due to population density and explicit ‘open enrolment’ policies. While students of higher ability are generally more likely to opt out, an interaction term between school choice and ability is insignificant, suggesting that increased choice does not have differential impacts by student ability. Findings are robust to changes in assumptions about instrument exogeneity.     

Competition Among Italian Junior‐Secondary Schools: A Variance‐Decomposition Empirical Analysis

The public economic theory emphasizes the potential role of competition in fostering the performance of educational systems. The rationale for pro‐competitive policies in education (i.e. vouchers, charter schools, tax deductions) is that schools can improve their quality responding to ‘pressures’ from nearby competitors. The objective of this paper is to analyze the potential relationship between (i) competition among schools and (ii) students’ achievement in Italy. While previous studies used OECD‐Pisa data for this purpose, here a new dataset about Italian schools has been employed: about 19,000 students in 150 schools constitute the sample. The reference framework is the idea that the presence of more schools in a certain area, and/or the proportion of students enrolled in private schools, should raise the performance of schools operating in that area through a ‘competition effect’. A multilevel strategy, which allows separating between‐areas variance in achievement scores, is employed. The findings support the view that competition has an impact, albeit little, on students’ achievement, and such competitive pressure is due to the number of schools, no matter if public or private.     

Educational Production in East Asia: The Impact of Family Background and Schooling Policies on Student Performance

Abstract. East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family background is a strong predictor of student performance in Korea and Singapore, while Hong Kong and Thailand achieve more equalized outcomes. There is no evidence that smaller classes improve student performance in East Asia. But other schooling policies such as school autonomy over salaries and regular homework assignments are related to higher student performance in several of the considered countries.     

Constrained school choice

Recently, several school districts in the US have adopted or consider adopting the Student-Optimal Stable mechanism or the Top Trading Cycles mechanism to assign children to public schools. There is evidence that for school districts that employ (variants of) the so-called Boston mechanism the transition would lead to efficiency gains. The first two mechanisms are strategy-proof, but in practice student assignment procedures typically impede a student to submit a preference list that contains all his acceptable schools. We study the preference revelation game where students can only declare up to a fixed number of schools to be acceptable. We focus on the stability and efficiency of the Nash equilibrium outcomes. Our main results identify rather stringent necessary and sufficient conditions on the priorities to guarantee stability or efficiency of either of the two mechanisms. This stands in sharp contrast with the Boston mechanism which has been abandoned in many US school districts but nevertheless yields stable Nash equilibrium outcomes.