Expense Preference and Student Achievement in School Districts

There is little direct evidence on the widely held view that school districts spend too few of available resources on student instruction. I find evidence of such an expense preference by assessing the effect of competition from private schools on the allocation of resources by school districts. I also examine the effects of instructional and non-instructional spending on high school completion rates. The results suggest that school districts direct too few of available resources towards instruction. The results also demonstrate, however, that money spent on instruction is highly effective when conditioned on the decision to spend outside the classroom.Education

The effects of school reform under NCLB waivers: Evidence from focus schools in Kentucky.

Under waivers to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the federal government required states to identify schools where targeted subgroups of students have the lowest achievement and to implement reforms in these “Focus Schools.” In this study, we examine the Focus School reforms in the state of Kentucky. The reforms in this state are uniquely interesting for several reasons. One is that the state developed unusually explicit guidance for Focus Schools centered on a comprehensive school-planning process. Second, the state identified Focus Schools using a “super subgroup” measure that combined traditionally low-performing subgroups into an umbrella group. This design feature may have catalyzed broader whole-school reforms and attenuated the incentives to target reform efforts narrowly. Using regression discontinuity designs, we find that these reforms led to substantial improvements in school performance, raising math achievement by 17 percent and reading achievement by 9 percent

Do High School Exit Exams Influence Educational Attainment or Labor Market Performance?

State requirements that high school graduates pass exit exams were the leading edge of the movement towards standards-based reform and continue to be adopted and refined by states today. In this study, we present new empirical evidence on how exit exams influenced educational attainment and labor market experiences using data from the 2000 Census and the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data (CCD). Our results suggest that the effects of these reforms have been heterogeneous. For example, our analysis of the Census data suggests that exit exams significantly reduced the probability of completing high school, particularly for black students. Similarly, our analysis of grade-level dropout data from the CCD indicates that Minnesota's recent exit exam increased the dropout rate in urban and high-poverty school districts as well as in those with a relatively large concentration of minority students. This increased risk of dropping out was concentrated among 12th grade students. However, we also found that Minnesota's exit exam lowered the dropout rate in low-poverty and suburban school districts, particularly among students in the 10th and 11th grades. These results suggest that exit exams have the capacity to improve student and school performance but also appear to have exacerbated the inequality in educational attainment.

Conditional Cash Penalties in Education: Evidence from the Learnfare Experiment

Wisconsin’s influential Learnfare initiative is a conditional cash penalty program that sanctions a family’s welfare grant when covered teens fail to meet school attendance targets. In the presence of reference-dependent preferences, Learnfare provides uniquely powerful financial incentives for student performance. However, a 10-county random-assignment evaluation suggested that Learnfare had no sustained effects on school enrollment and attendance. This study evaluates the data from this randomized field experiment. In Milwaukee County, the Learnfare procedures were poorly implemented and the random-assignment process failed to produce balanced baseline traits. However, in the nine remaining counties, Learnfare increased school enrollment by 3.7 percent (effect size = 0.08) and attendance by 4.5 percent (effect size = 0.10). The hypothesis of a common treatment effect sustained throughout the six-semester study period could not be rejected. These effects were larger among subgroups at risk for dropping out of school (e.g., baseline dropouts, those over age for grade). For example, these heterogeneous treatment effects imply that Learnfare closed the enrollment gap between baseline dropouts and school attendees by 41 percent. These results suggest that well-designed financial incentives can be an effective mechanism for improving the school persistence of at-risk students at scale.

My Brothers Keeper? The Impact of Targeted Educational Supports

The My Brother's Keeper (MBK) Challenge developed by President Obama supports communities that promote civic initiatives designed to improve the educational and economic opportunities specifically for young men of color. In Oakland, California, the MBK educational initiative features the African American Male Achievement (AAMA) program. The AAMA focuses on regularly scheduled classes exclusively for Black, male students and taught by Black, male teachers who focus on social-emotional training, African-American history, culturally relevant pedagogy, and academic supports. In this study, we present quasi-experimental evidence on the dropout effects of the AAMA by leveraging its staggered scale-up across high schools in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). We find that AAMA availability led to a significant reduction in the number of Black males who dropped out as well as smaller reductions among Black females, particularly in 9th grade

Stereotype Threat and the Student-Athlete

Achievement gaps may reflect the cognitive impairment thought to occur in evaluative settings (e.g., classrooms) where a stereotyped identity is salient (i.e., stereotype threat). This study presents an economic model of stereotype threat that reconciles prior evidence on how student effort and performance are influenced by this social-identity phenomenon. This study also presents empirical evidence from a laboratory experiment in which students at a selective college were randomly assigned to a treatment that primed their awareness of a stereotyped identity (i.e., student-athlete). This treatment reduced the test-score performance of athletes relative to non-athletes by 14 percent (effect size = -1.0).

Data Dissemination Performance in Large-Scale Sensor Networks

As the use of wireless sensor networks increases, the need for (energy-)efficient and reliable broadcasting algorithms grows. Ideally, a broadcasting algorithm should have the ability to quickly disseminate data, while keeping the number of transmissions low. In this paper we develop a model describing the message count in large-scale wireless sensor networks. We focus our attention on the popular Trickle algorithm, which has been proposed as a suitable communication protocol for code maintenance and propagation in wireless sensor networks. Besides providing a mathematical analysis of the algorithm, we propose a generalized version of Trickle, with an additional parameter defining the length of a listen-only period. This generalization proves to be useful for optimizing the design and usage of the algorithm. For single-cell networks we show how the message count increases with the size of the network and how this depends on the Trickle parameters. Furthermore, we derive distributions of inter-broadcasting times and investigate their asymptotic behavior. Our results prove conjectures made in the literature concerning the effect of a listen-only period. Additionally, we develop an approximation for the expected number of transmissions in multi-cell networks. All results are validated by simulations