Narrowing The Charter Enrollment Gap: Denver's Common-Enrollment System

As charter schools continue their rapid expansion in America's cities, questions related to equitable access to these schools of choice have jumped to the forefront of the policy conversation. Indeed, the proportion of students in charters with classifications that suggest that they are difficult to educate -- such as students with disabilities, those who are not proficient in English, and those who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch -- is often substantially below their respective proportions in traditional ("district") public schools. This paper uses longitudinal data from Denver to measure whether adoption of common enrollment increased the proportion of disadvantaged students enrolled in that city's charter elementary schools. It finds that Denver's adoption of common enrollment substantially increased the proportion of students enrolling in charter kindergartens who are minority, eligible for free/reduced-priced lunch, or speak English as a second language. Importantly, this paper considers only one specific effect of common enrollment on the charter-school sector. While policymakers should take a more expansive measure of the merits of common enrollment before adopting it, this paper suggests that an effective way to boost disadvantaged students' enrollment in charters is to make applying to them easier

School Choice and Home Prices: Evidence from Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Researchers have paid a great deal of attention to the impact of school choice policies on student educational outcomes. The emphasis on evaluating the impact of school choice policies on student academic proficiency is certainly justified in that the explicit goal of such policies is to improve educational productivity. However, the effects of school choice policies may not end at the schoolhouse door. As with any other large public policy, as they grow in size school choice has the potential for externalities -- either positive or negative -- that could have an impact on the overall community

Understanding the Charter School Special Education Gap: Evidence from Denver, Colorado

CRPE commissioned Dr. Marcus Winters to analyze the factors driving the special education gap between Denver's charter and traditional public elementary and middle schools.Using student-level data, Winters shows that Denver's special education enrollment gap starts at roughly 2 percentage points in kindergarten and is more than triple that in eighth grade. However, it doesn't appear to be caused by charter schools pushing students out. Instead, the gap is mostly due to student preferences for different types of schools, how schools classify and declassify students, and the movement of students without disabilities across sectors

How pensions contribute to the premium paid to experienced public school teachers

Many argue that public school systems should stop linking teachers’ salaries so closely to their years of experience. However, the effect of deferred retirement compensation on the premium paid to experienced teachers has, to date, been underappreciated. To shed more light on this issue, we calculate the total compensation earned by teachers in New York City and Philadelphia from both salary and deferred retirement compensation under each system’s currently operating defined-benefit plan. Retirement compensation in both cities is back-loaded, which substantially increases the premium paid to highly experienced teachers. In late-career years, teachers often earn a larger compensation premium from the accrual of pension benefits than from salary. We show that cash-balance retirement plans, which are less back-loaded, would substantially reduce experience premiums without reducing the total compensation for the average entering teacher.http://sites.bu.edu/marcuswinters/files/2017/09/Pensions-and-Experience-Premium.pdfAccepted manuscrip

An Evaluation of the effects of DC\u27s voucher program on public school achievement and racial integration after one year

This study evaluates the initial effect Washington D.C.\u27s Opportunity Scholarship Program (OPS) on the academic performance of public schools and its effects on the opportunities District students have to attend integrated schools. OPS is a federally sponsored school voucher program that provides vouchers worth up to $7,500 for an estimated 1,800 to 2,000 students in the District of Columbia. Students can use the scholarships to pay tuition at participating private schools in the District. The pilot program is designed to last for 5 years

Does attending a charter school Reduce the likelihood of being placed into special education? Evidence from Denver, Colorado

We use administrative data to measure whether attending a charter school in Denver, Colorado, reduces the likelihood that students are newly classified as having a disability in primary grades. We employ an observational approach that takes advantage of Denver’s Common Enrollment System, which allows us to observe each school that the student listed a preference to attend. We find evidence that attending a Denver charter school reduces the likelihood that a student is classified as having a specific learning disability, which is the largest and most subjectively diagnosed disability category. We find no evidence that charter attendance reduces the probability of being classified as having a speech or language disability or autism, which are two more objectively diagnosed classifications.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this research came from The Searle Freedom Trust. (The Searle Freedom Trust)http://sites.bu.edu/marcuswinters/files/2017/09/Does-Charter-Attendence-Reduce-Likelihood-of-SPED-Placement.pdfhttp://sites.bu.edu/marcuswinters/files/2017/09/Does-Charter-Attendence-Reduce-Likelihood-of-SPED-Placement.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Are low-performing students more likely to exit charter schools? Evidence from New York City and Denver, Colorado

A common criticism of charter schools is that they systematically remove or “counsel out” their lowest performing students. However, relatively little is currently known about whether low-performing students are in fact more likely to exit charter schools than surrounding traditional public schools. We use longitudinal student-level data from two large urban school systems that prior research has found to have effective charter school sectors–New York City and Denver, Colorado–to evaluate whether there is a differential relationship between low-performance on standardized test scores and the probability that students exit their schools by sector attended. We find no evidence of a differential relationship between prior performance and the likelihood of exiting a school by sector. Low-performing students in both cities are either equally likely or less likely to exit their schools than are student in traditional public schools.We would like to thank the Denver Public School System for providing the data necessary for this paper, and we especially appreciated the assistance of Josh Drake, Yu-lu Hsiung, and Alisha Anuscencion. Funding for this project comes from the Searle Charitable Trust. We thank the Foundation for its support, but acknowledge that the findings and conclusions presented are our own and do not necessarily represent those of the Foundation. All remaining errors are our own. (Searle Charitable Trust)http://sites.bu.edu/marcuswinters/files/2017/09/Exiting-Charter-Schools.pdfAccepted manuscrip

The effects of test-based retention on student outcomes over time: Regression discontinuity evidence from Florida

Many American states require that students lacking basic reading proficiency after third grade be retained and remediated. We exploit a discontinuity in retention probabilities under Florida's test-based promotion policy to study its effects on student outcomes through high school. We find large positive effects on achievement that fade out entirely when retained students are compared to their same-age peers, but remain substantial through grade 10 when compared to students in the same grade. Being retained in third grade due to missing the promotion standard increases students' grade point averages and leads them to take fewer remedial courses in high school but has no effect on their probability of graduating.We are grateful to the Florida Department of Education for providing the primary dataset for this study. We thank Stefan Bauernschuster, Matthew Chingos, Andrew Ho, Paul Peterson, Ludger Woessmann, and the seminar participants at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard University, the Ifo Institute, Mathematica Policy Research, Stanford University, the European Economic Association Meeting in Gothenburg, the European Association of Labour Economists Meeting in Turin and the Swedish Institute for Social Research for helpful comments. The Helios Education Foundation provided financial support for this research. The views contained herein are not necessarily those of the Helios Education Foundation. Any errors are our own. (Helios Education Foundation)http://sites.bu.edu/marcuswinters/files/2017/09/NBER-Grade-Retention.pdfhttp://sites.bu.edu/marcuswinters/files/2017/09/NBER-Grade-Retention.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Representation in the classroom: The effect of own-race teachers on student achievement

Previous research suggests that there are academic benefits when students and teachers share the same race/ethnicity because such teachers can serve as role models, mentors, advocates, or cultural translators. In this paper, we obtain estimates of achievement changes as students are assigned to teachers of different races/ethnicities from grades 3 through 10 utilizing a large administrative dataset provided by the Florida Department of Education that follows the universe of test-taking students in Florida public schools from 2001–2002 through 2008–2009. We find small but significant positive effects when black and white students are assigned to race-congruent teachers in reading (.004–.005 standard deviations) and for black, white and Asian/Pacific Island students in math (.007–.041 standard deviations). We also examine the effects of race matching by students' prior performance level, finding that lower-performing black and white students appear to particularly benefit from being assigned to a race-congruent teacher.http://sites.bu.edu/marcuswinters/files/2017/09/Egalite-et-al-2015-FLTM_EER.pdfAccepted manuscrip