Who Benefits From Attending Effective High Schools?

Abstract

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, but the least advantaged students experience larger improvements in high-school graduation, college going, and school-based arrests. This heterogeneity is not solely due to less-advantaged groups being marginal for particular outcomes. Commonly used test-score value-added understates the long-run importance of effective schools, particularly for less-advantaged populations. Patterns suggest this partly reflects less-advantaged students being relatively more responsive to non-test-score dimensions of school quality. ∗Jackson: kirabo-jackson@northwestern.edu. Kiguel: skiguel@u.northwestern.edu. Porter: shanette@studentexperiencenetwork.org. Easton: jqeaston@uchicago.edu. The authors thank the staff at Chicago Public Schools, particularly the Office of Social and Emotional Learning and the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, for providing access to, and information about, the Chicago Public Schools data. This paper benefited from discussion with seminar participants at the UChicago Consortium, and data management was facilitated by their archivist, Todd Rosenkranz. The authors acknowledge funding for this research from the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors.