Journal of Policy Analysis and Management最新文献

Previous studies have confirmed the causal effect of performance information on citizen satisfaction, but they were primarily conducted in survey experimental settings that featured hypothetical and abstract scenarios and primed respondents to look at certain aspects of performance information. Whether the causal effects hold in the real world, which is a much more complex information environment, is questionable. We address the gaps by employing a regression discontinuity design to identify the impact of public schools’ performance grades on parents’ satisfaction with teachers and overall education in New York City. We find that performance signals have independent and lasting effects on citizens’ satisfaction. However, the effects are nonlinear, depending on the levels of performance signals. Parents’ responses are muted at the A/B performance grade cutoff, but their satisfaction increases significantly at the B/C and C/D cutoffs if their schools earn relatively higher grades.

Fundamentally, Reeves and I agree about the importance of boys’ educational under-achievement and the need to openly discuss and address it. I emphasize that when boys fail to thrive in school, it has downstream consequences not only for their own lives but for our nation's economic growth. Further, boys’ success need not come at the expense of girls’ success. This is not zero-sum; we all benefit when children reach their potential.

I must push back against the narrative that these gaps are being hidden from public view and researchers have not taken them seriously. Nothing could be further from the truth.

An old adage in business circles is “what gets measured gets done.” Indeed, a pillar of the school accountability movement is providing clear, disaggregated data at the state, district, and local levels so that parents and community members can better understand and monitor student achievement.

Reeves argues that we often choose to ignore gender gaps, stating “At the extreme, gender-neutrality veers into gender-blind approach: some school districts, for example, do not even routinely track differences in outcomes by gender.” Such actions would be in violation of the law. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA; 2015), states must publicly report school accountability data in a manner must be disaggregated by a number of categories, including gender.

In his Point in this exchange (and also in his book, Reeves, 2022), Reeves describes results from a randomized experiment aimed at improving academic performance among college students. In the experiment, students were offered academic support services, financial incentives ranging from $1000 to $5000 for attaining high grades, or both. While the treatment improved women's grades and academic standing, it had no effect on men's outcomes (Angrist et al., 2009). Reeves goes on to conclude, “Josh Angrist and co-authors wrote in 2009: ‘These gender differences in the response to incentives and services constitute an important area for further study.’ They do indeed. But as far as I can see, nobody has heeded this call.”

On the contrary, many have heeded the call. The Angrist et al. (2009) article has more than 700 citations, many of these citations came from studies that have attempted to better understand gender gaps and how to design policies to improve outcomes for males and females. (Indeed, there is a large literature on this topic; see Croson and Gneezy, 2009, for a review.) Many of these have been randomized-controlled trials, generally considered to be the gold standard of research. Curiously, none of these are cited in Reeves's work. Below I summarize primarily the work on higher education relevant to the Angrist et al. (2009) quote, but I also note that there is also substantial work on pre-K, elementary and secondary schools, and labor market outcomes.

When it comes to financial incentiv

In his recent book, Richard Reeves (2022) brought to the fore the important challenges faced by men and boys. The rapidly changing economy and evolving social norms have been particularly hard on men, resulting in too many of them—one in nine prime-age men in 2022—not in the labor force. This in turn influences a range of additional social maladies including fewer marriages (and fewer children living with their fathers) and increased deaths of despair. Boys have been falling behind girls across a range of measures of academic success from pre-kindergarten through college. Reeves is absolutely right to point out these ways in which the modern male is struggling. Men's success matters—to families, to communities, to our economy and to society.

To address these growing problems, Reeves suggests a series of reforms to policy and practice in education. Most of these I also endorse. More choices in educational options can help families find the best educational environment for their children to thrive. One size does not fit all in education. Some boys may be more likely to thrive in certain environments, such as the vocational high schools and apprenticeships endorsed by Reeves. They should also include a wider array of options such as single-sex public schools and charter schools.

Reeves also recognizes the importance of mentoring for boys’ educational success. He calls for policies to encourage more men to become teachers—a worthy goal, to be sure. I would add to this menu wider use of individual, in-school tutoring, which has been shown to be a cost-effective way to improve boys’ achievement in high school (Guryan et al., 2023).

Note that improving boys’ school performance does not imply harming girls’ performance. Skill development is not zero-sum, and when students learn more, they go on to add more to our shared economy. With this in mind, there is likely untapped potential both to improve educational outcomes and to close achievement gaps through improvements in curriculum, innovative use of educational technology, and in more traditional approaches such as reduced class size and increased school funding. We owe it to our nation's future to continuously improve education—which is especially needed as we work to offset the substantial learning losses during the COVID-19 pandemic (Hanushek & Woessman, 2020).

One of Reeves's most provocative recommendations is to change the default rule for school entry age, so that boys start kindergarten a year older than girls. This practice is commonly called “redshirting.” It is here that Reeves and I part company. I think one-size-fits-all redshirting will on net be socially and financially costly.

At first glance, Reeves's logic on redshirting is compelling. Boys are less mature than girls, and their brains develop differently. Boys have behavioral problems that improve with age. Girls might even benefit if they are in classes with m

When feminist scholars cite a “gendered injustice,” it was once a safe bet that they would be referring to inequities disfavoring girls or women. No longer. The feminist philosopher Cordelia Fine, for example, now uses the term to describe the wide gaps in U.S. education where, as a group, boys and men are lagging behind their female peers (Fine, 2023).

There are wide gender gaps favoring girls and women at every stage in the education system. But the ones getting the most attention are in higher education. On college campuses, the educational underperformance of men becomes suddenly obvious: they aren't there. There is a bigger gender gap in higher education today than in 1972, when Title IX was passed. Back then, 57% of bachelor's degrees went to men. Within a decade the gap had closed. In 2021, 58% of degrees went to women.1 We have Title IX–level gender gaps, just the other way around.

This gap is the result of both lower rates of college enrollment and lower rates of completion. In 2021, 51% of women graduating high school enrolled in a 4-year college, compared to 36% of men. Immediate enrollment rates into a 2-year college had no gender gap, at 18% for women and 19% for men. Having enrolled, women are more likely to complete their degree, and especially to do so quickly. Among women matriculating at a 4-year public college, 47% will have graduated 4 years later; for men the equivalent graduation rate is 37%.

These gaps reflect disparities that have emerged much earlier in the education system. There is a small and shrinking gender gap on the SAT and no gender gap on the ACT.2 (This is one reason why colleges and universities which go test-optional in admissions see an increase of 4 percentage points in the female share of students.) But there are wide gender gaps on most other measures, most importantly on GPA. The most common high school grade for girls is now an A; for boys, it is a B (Fortin et al., 2013). Girls now account for two-thirds of high schoolers in the top decile of students ranked by GPA, while the proportions are reversed on the bottom rung. Girls are also much more likely to be taking Advanced Placement, Honors, and International Baccalaureate classes (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012).

“There is now wide consensus that gender inequalities are unfair, and lead to wasted human potential,” says Francisco Ferreira (2018), Amartya Sen Chair in Inequality Studies at the London School of economics, commenting on education gaps. He adds, echoing Fine: “That remains true when the disadvantaged are boys, as well as girls.”

Narrowing gender gaps in educational outcomes is an important goal for policy; and today, that means concentrating on boys and men.

There are three broad policy approaches to tackling these challenges: gender-neutral, gender-sensitive, and gender-based.

Gender-neutral policies aim at improving over

This study evaluates the mental health effects of two simultaneously implemented but conflicting policies in the UK: the National Living Wage and the benefits freeze policy. We employed the Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021) DID estimator to evaluate the heterogeneous policy effects, and we found that NLW leads to positive improvements in mental health. Also, we find the negative impact of the benefits freeze policy constricts the NLW effects. Our result is robust to the sensitivity analysis of the parallel trend assumption and the comparison group definition. Additional results support the psychosocial hypothesis that increased job satisfaction is strongly correlated with improvements in mental health. Also, we found evidence of substitution effects between work hours and leisure. Overall, our findings suggest that the effects of the NLW cannot be understood in isolation from the way the entire suite of policy instruments operates on earnings and liveable income for affected low wage workers.