Carolina Seminar on Educational Inequality

Hosted by the UNC Chapel Hill departments of Education Policy (PLS), Public Policy, Economics, and Sociology, but open to all.

This seminar focuses on emerging research in the area of education and social inequality. We seek to understand the ways that schools, families, and broader social forces shape educational inequality and whether and under what conditions specific educational policies reduce, or increase, inequality.

2023-2024 Schedule

Dear friends and colleagues,

Welcome to the eighth year of the Carolina Seminar on Educational Inequality. The seminar this year will be led by Simona Goldin, Matt Springer, and Doug Lauen.

Here is our meeting schedule so you can mark your calendars:

Seminar time: 1:00 – 2:15 pm

Dates

September 14 (second Thurs)
October 5 (first Thurs)
November 2 (first Thurs)
December 7 (first Thurs)

We plan on first Thursday of the month next Spring.

We have chosen a theme: Opportunity Gaps, Pandemic Learning Delays, and Progress toward Recovery (theme title a work in progress and open to debate!). We propose using the theme to orient many, but not all of the academic year’s sessions, making space for conference warm up talks, practice job talks, etc.

We have invited two presenters so far working on Collaboratory grants. More information to come!

Best,

Doug Lauen

2022-23 Seminar

9.14.2022 Elc Estrera (Wake County Public Schools) & Lauren Sartain (UNC)

Presentation: Follow the Leader: Teacher Preferences over Principal Characteristics

Abstract: Amid heightened concerns of teacher shortages, we provide evidence of the importance of school leaders in shaping teacher labor market decisions. Using over 10 years of teacher transfer requests from a large urban district, we find that teachers are most likely to seek exit from schools with reports of weak school leadership and less experienced principals. The factors that most strongly predict applications to schools are related to school leaders, including reports of strong leadership, demographic congruence between the applicant and principal, and having worked with the principal previously. Nearly half of transfer applicants left their school at the end of the year, and these applicants tended to apply to a wider range of schools than teachers who ultimately stayed.

10.12.2022 Deven Carlson (Oklahoma) & Rachel Perera (Brookings)

Presentation: Structuring Choice: School Segregation at the Intersection of Policy and Preferences

Abstract: This paper uses a unique data describing the school choices available to incoming Kindergartners in North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System to shed new light on the way educational policy and individual decisions interact to produce segregated schools. First, we document and analyze a school choice policy designed with school diversity goals in mind, detailing how administrators specified schooling options in a way that shaped the choice sets of incoming Kindergarteners. Second, we examine the factors that influence family decisions among schools in their choice sets, paying particular attention to the role of race in the process. We also consider the potential for policy-constructed incentives to offset tendencies toward racial homophily. Together, these analyses shed important light on the way collective policy decisions structure the processes through which individual make complex decisions, such as selecting a residence or school, and how individuals and families choices can ultimately maintain racially segregated schools.

11.16.2022 Brian McManus (UNC, Economics), Jessica Howell and Michael Hurwitz

Presentation: Strategic disclosure of test scores: Evidence from US college admissions

Abstract: We study how strategic choices about information disclosure vary across individuals of different socioeconomic backgrounds and in situations with different disclosure incentives. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many US colleges shifted to test-optional admissions policies for the entering class of fall 2021. Using novel data on 1.7 million applicants to 50 US colleges for fall 2021, we show that applicants’ test disclosure choices were primarily determined by how their scores compared to those of enrolled students. An applicant whose score was at the 75th percentile of enrolled students was nearly twice as likely to disclose as an applicant at the 25th percentile. This disclosure pattern was in line with the incentives generated by colleges’ admissions practices, which tended to reward both lower-scoring applicants who withheld scores and higher-scoring applicants who disclosed scores. Differences in applicants’ race, parental education, and other characteristics had much smaller impacts on disclosure choices after controlling for test score, suggesting that demographic and socioeconomic differences in college access may not be exacerbated by the need to navigate test-optional admissions policies. In addition, we show that applicants’ disclosure choices are sensitive to colleges’ opportunities to infer applicant quality when applicants withhold their scores.

12.14.2023 Martin Braun (UNC Econ)

Presentation:

Abstract:

1.11.2023 Brennan Mange (UNC), Steve Hemelt (UNC), and Samantha Raynor (UNCG)

Presentation: The Math and the Path: Experimental Evidence on Enhanced Advising and Postsecondary Progress

Abstract: Over 40 percent of students starting at public 4-year institutions do not graduate within six years, and ample numbers of non-completers leave late in college. Barriers that grow in complexity as students move through college, fertilized by meager mid-college support, may contribute to late-college departure. In partnership with a diverse public 4-year university, we experimentally study the effects of an enhanced advising intervention that targets students partially through their college careers on persistence, performance, and completion. The yearlong intervention included access to a skilled advisor whose caseload was approximately one-quarter the typical size; up-to-date, easy-to-digest information on remaining financial aid and academic progress; and a modest grant structured as an incentive over two terms. Access to the intervention markedly increased 4-year completion rates among those with roughly a year of college remaining at baseline. Effects on a range of mechanisms suggest that the intervention achieved this completion effect by improving academic performance and reducing program churn (i.e., number of major and minor changes) among those in this late-stage group. Effects on those whose trajectories to completion extended beyond the length of the intervention at baseline are less clear cut. We will observe 5-year graduation for all students in the study sample by spring/summer 2023. Emerging results highlight the promise and potential pitfalls of time-limited, medium-touch interventions intended to improve complex outcomes such as college completion.

2.8.2023 Simona Goldin (UNC) & Darrius Robinson (Univ Michigan)

Presentation: Beyond technical fixes: Reconsidering equity sticks and expanding notions of equitable teaching

Abstract: Attention to equity and inequality in public schooling has animated and driven scholars and practitioners alike. And yet, deep, systemic inequities in access and opportunity still persist in the institution of US public education. We consider the ways that efforts at supporting equitable teaching and learning are complicated by the pervasiveness of under-articulated and under-resourced understandings of both what constitutes and how we might better support equitable instruction. We explore the ways a professional development program enabled a diverse group of educators to re-examine and stretch their ideas related to (1) equitable participation in elementary mathematics classrooms, and (2) their district's policy of using "equity sticks" to promote equitable participation. We found that participants’ views shifted as they came into evidence, in real time, of others’ sense-making about equity and opportunities to learn, all centered on the viewing of children’s mathematical work with their teacher and each other. What we see are the ways that tensions between policy, theory, and the mechanisms of teaching and learning create fissures – opportunities to shift participants’ views and understandings of equity.

3.8.2023 Spring 2023 conference talk sessions

Wesley Morris (UNC PLS) will present on “How Do Unexpected College Grades Shape Race and Gender Gaps in the Stem Pipeline?”

Will Zahran (UNC PLS) will present on “Grading the Pandemic: Student Outcomes and the Use of Pass/Fail Policies in Spring 2020.”