Education Finance and Policy最新文献

In fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first-year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a regression-discontinuity-in-time design. Students shifted to lower-grading science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses in the first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester students declined by 0.13 grade points, or 23 percent of a standard deviation. We evaluate causal channels of the grade effect—including sorting into lower-grading STEM courses and declining instructional quality—and conclude that the effect is consistent with declining student effort.

Teacher turnover has adverse consequences for student achievement and imposes large financial costs for schools. Some have argued that high-stakes testing may lower teachers’ satisfaction with their jobs and could be a major contributor to teacher attrition. In this paper, we exploit changes in the tested grades and subjects in Georgia to study the effects of eliminating high-stakes testing on teacher turnover and the distribution of teachers across grades and schools. To measure the effect of testing pressures on teacher mobility choices we use a difference-in-differences approach, comparing changes in mobility over time in grades/subjects that discontinue testing vis-à-vis grades/subjects that are always tested. Our results show that eliminating testing did not have an impact on the likelihood of leaving teaching, moving between districts, changing schools within a district, or changing grades. Our findings hold for all teachers as well as for the subsample of early career teachers.

Early college high schools (ECHSs) in North Carolina are small public schools of choice on college campuses that seek to promote attaining postsecondary credits in high school, college readiness, and postsecondary enrollment for underrepresented groups. Evidence from randomized control trials (RCTs) has shown positive effects of the ECHS model on important high school and postsecondary outcomes but appear to be underpowered to detect moderation effects. Furthermore, RCTs rarely address the key question of primary policy interest: Is the program effective on average across the population? This leaves us uncertain about (1) whether the early college intervention is a good strategy for helping to close enrollment and attainment gaps between under- and overrepresented groups, and (2) whether the expansion of the ECHS model will lead to the positive results that the RCT studies suggest. This study uses administrative data on all ECHSs in North Carolina including those that were part of a lottery study. This allows us to generate RCT estimates for the ECHSs in the lottery sample and quasi-experimental estimates for both the lottery and non-lottery ECHSs. We leverage this unique circumstance to generate estimates of the effect of ECHS on postsecondary outcomes that simultaneously maximize both internal and external validity. Specifically, because generalization depends on both moderation and sample selection, we (1) investigate sample selection, (2) conduct a moderation analysis to determine whether the effects of the intervention vary by key factors that also predict sample selection, and (3) produce a pooled estimate by extending a method called cross-design synthesis to incorporate both RCT evidence and quasi-experimental evidence. We find strong evidence that the positive results of the RCTs generalize to the full sample of ECHSs, which provides stronger evidence of effectiveness.