Deming's work is broadly in the economics of education, with a focus on the impact of policies and interventions on outcomes other than test scores. His research on the impact of school choice in Charlotte, North Carolina on youth crime and incarceration will appear in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. His research on the impact of Head Start on long-term outcomes such as high school graduation and college attendance was published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
His current work includes a project on the evaluation of high school performance using non-test score outcomes that is funded by the Spencer Foundation, and an IES-funded project on the outcomes of students who attend for-profit colleges. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.P.P. from the University of California-Berkeley, and a B.S. from The Ohio State University.
Evaluating School Performance Using Long-Term Measures of Student Outcomes, Spencer Foundation, (2011-2011) We study the sharp increase in school segregation following the end of court-ordered busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (“CMS”). In 2001, the state Supreme Court declared CMS unitary, and the district could no longer consider race explicitly in the construction of school boundaries. Yet the neighborhoods in Charlotte remained racially segregated. Thus the redrawing of school attendance boundaries as contiguous neighborhood zones led to a marked increase in segregation in CMS schools (Mickelson 2005, Godwin et al. 2007, Jackson 2009).
Criminal activity in the U.S. begins in early adolescence and peaks at age 18 (Levitt and Lochner 2001), years when most American youth are enrolled in school. Thus, the school setting may have an important influence on criminal behavior during adolescence and into adulthood. We study the long-term impact of increased school segregation on crime by matching students’ enrollment records from CMS to their arrest and incarceration records from 1998 to 2010. In addition, we have obtained historical data on reported criminal incidents in Mecklenburg County that is geocoded to the exact address of the crime, which allows us to measure variation in crime in and around particular schools and neighborhoods.
Our results will have important implications for research on racial inequality. The most recent decade has been one of “stalled progress” in narrowing the black-white test score gap (Neal 2005, Magnuson and Waldfogel, 2008). It is important to know what role schools play in this lack of progress, and if their influence extends to adult outcomes such as crime.
