Papers & Publications

Balanced Score Cards and Management Data, Center for Education Policy Research Working Paper

Jon Fullerton and Fredrick Hess examine school districts and their use of data: “Put plainly, it is difficult to manage modern organizations for breakthrough improvement with¬out accurate, timely data and the knowledge and willingness to use them. Yet we see a vacuum in schooling when it comes to collecting crucial data that stretch beyond reading and math scores and auditable enrollment and financial information. Test results are an important measure of student learning. Attendance is an important element of budgeting. But ensuring the high-quality provision of services requires operational measures and data well beyond those of student achievement and body counts.”

Informing the Debate: Comparing Boston’s Charter, Pilot and Traditional Schools and Informing the Debate: Technical Appendix

This new study of Boston Charter and pilot schools finds charter schools have positive effects on student achievement: Findings of groundbreaking study suggest charter school students in Boston outperform their peers at other public schools in Boston.  Results for pilot schools were less clear; some analyses showed positive results at the elementary and high school level, while results for middle school students were less encouraging. The study uses an innovative research design based on school lotteries that allowed for a direct comparison of charter and pilot school students with their peers. 

“Evaluating the Impact of the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant Program,” Journal of Human Resources, Volume 42, Number 3, Summer 2007, pp. 555-582.

The D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program dramatically changed college prices for District of Columbia residents, allowing them to pay in-state tuition at public institutions around the country. Between 1998 and 2000, the number of D.C. residents attending public institutions in Virginia and Maryland more than doubled; when public institutions in other states were added, this number again nearly doubled. The impact was largest at nonselective public four-year colleges, particularly predominantly black institutions. The total number of financial aid applicants, Pell Grant recipients, and college entrants from D.C. also increased by 15 percent or more.

“The Effect of Randomized School Admissions on Voter Participation,” Journal of Public Economics, Volume 91, Issue 5/6, June 2007, pp. 915-937.

There is little causal evidence on the effect of economic and policy outcomes on voting behavior. This paper uses randomized outcomes from a school choice lottery to examine if lottery outcomes affect voting behavior in a school board election. We show that losing the lottery has no significant impact on overall voting behavior; however, among white families, those with above median income and prior voting history, lottery losers were significantly more likely to vote than lottery winners. Using propensity score methods, we compare the voting of lottery participants to similar families who did not participate in the lottery. We find that losing the school choice lottery caused an increase in voter turnout among whites, while winning the lottery had no effect relative to non-participants. Overall, our empirical results lend support to models of expressive and retrospective voting, where likely voters are motivated to vote by past negative policy outcomes.

“School Quality, Neighborhoods, and Housing Prices,” American Law and Economics Review, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2006, pp. 183-212.

We study the relationship between school characteristics and housing prices in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, between 1994 and 2001. During this period, the school district was operating under a court-imposed desegregation order and drew school boundaries so that students living in the same neighborhoods were often sent to very different schools in terms of racial mix and average test scores of the students. We use differences in housing prices along assignment zone boundaries to disentangle the effect of schools and other neighborhood characteristics. We find systematic differences in house prices along school boundaries although the impact of schools is only one-quarter as large as the naive cross-sectional estimates would imply. Part of the impact of school assignments is mediated by differences in the characteristics of the population and the quality of the housing stock that have arisen on either side of the school assignment boundary.

“Gender and Performance: Evidence from School Assignment by Randomized Lottery,” American Economic Review, Volume 96, Issue 2, May 2006, pp. 232-236.

We estimate the impacts on academic outcomes by race and gender of attending a first-choice school. Overall there was no gain in academic achievement for those winning the lottery. However, white females did experience significant improvements in test scores when randomized into their first choice school. White females were also more likely to choose academically focused magnets and, among those who won the lottery, reported significant increases in time spent on homework. Our evidence suggests that school choice programs may have heterogeneous treatment effects by gender, which are related to differences in the factors driving parental choices.

The Brookings Institution: The Hamilton Project, “Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job, April 2006.

Traditionally, policymakers have attempted to improve the quality of the teaching force by raising minimum credentials for entering teachers.  Recent research, however, suggests that such paper qualifications have little predictive power in identifying effective teachers.  We propose federal support to help states measure the effectiveness of individual teachers--based on their impact on student achievement, subjective evaluations by principals and peers, and parental evaluations. States would be given considerable discretion to develop their own measures, as long as student achievement impacts (using so-called “value-added” measures) are a key component.  The federal government would pay for bonuses to highly-rated teachers willing to teach in high-poverty schools.  In return for federal support, schools would not be able to offer tenure to new teachers who receive poor evaluations during their first two years on the job without obtaining district approval and informing parents in the schools.  States would open further the door to teaching for those who lack traditional certification but can demonstrate success on the job. This approach would facilitate entry into teaching by those pursuing other careers.  The new measures of teacher performance would also provide key data for teachers and schools to use in their efforts to improve their performance.

Economic Outcomes and the Decision to Vote: The Effect of Randomized School Admissions on Voter Participation, NBER Working Paper #11794, November 2005

We provide empirical evidence on the determinants of voter turnout using the random assignment of economic outcomes to potential voters generated by a school choice lottery. This is the first paper to use random assignment of real outcomes resulting from a policy experiment to understand the factors that influence voter turnout. We show that school lottery losers are significantly more likely to vote in the ensuing school board election than lottery winners. The asymmetric effect increases with income and past election participation. The results support a model of ‘expressive’ voting where negative economic outcomes increase the probability of voting. Such results may account for loss minimizing behavior by public officials, particularly for voters in middle and higher income neighborhoods.

Parental Preferences and School Competition: Evidence from a Public School Choice Program, NBER Working Paper #11805, November 2005

This paper uses data from the implementation of a district-wide public school choice plan in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina to estimate preferences for school characteristics and examine their implications for the local educational market. We use parental rankings of their top three choices of schools matched with student demographic and test score data to estimate a mixed-logit discrete choice demand model for schools. We find that parents value proximity highly and the preference attached to a school’s mean test score increases with student’s income and own academic ability. We also find considerable heterogeneity in preferences even after controlling for income, academic achievement and race, with strong negative correlations between preferences for academics and school proximity. Simulations of parental responses to test score improvements at a school suggest that the demand response at high-performing schools would be larger than the response at
low-performing schools, leading to disparate demand-side pressure to improve performance under school choice.

“Higher Education Appropriations and Public Universities: Role of Medicaid and the Business Cycle,” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, Issue 6, 2005, pp. 99-146.

Evaluating the Impact of D.C. Tuition Assistance Program, NBER Working Paper #10658, August 2004

In the Fall of 2000, the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program dramatically changed the menu of college prices offered to residents of the District of Columbia. The program allowed residents of
D.C. to attend public institutions in Maryland and Virginia and pay the same tuition as residents of those states. Between 1998 and 2000 (the first year of the program), the number of D.C. residents attending public institutions in Virginia and Maryland more than doubled. When public institutions in other states were included in subsequent years, the number of D.C. residents attending these institutions also nearly doubled. The increases were largest at non-selective public 4-year institutions in the mid-Atlantic states, particular predominantly black public institutions in Maryland and Virginia. College entry rates by D.C. residents also seemed to increase. The number of first-time federal financial aid applicants, the number of first-year college students receiving Pell Grants and the number of district residents reported as freshmen by colleges and universities nationwide all increased by 15 percent or more, while the number of graduates from D.C. public high schools remained flat.

“School Accountability Ratings and Housing Values,” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, Issue 4, 2003, pp. 83-137.

“The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Imprecise School Accountability Measures,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volune 16, Issue 4, Fall 2002, pp. 91-114.

By the spring of 2002, nearly every state had implemented some form of accountability for public schools using test scores. The nature of the incentives presented to schools ultimately depends upon the strengths and weaknesses of the school-level mean test score measures up on which most accountability systems are based. Kane and Staiger describe the statistical properties of school test score measure, which are less reliable than is commonly recognized, and explore the implications for school incentives.