Abstracts
Programs that promote success in college for high-ability low-income students are of great importance to policy makers at both the state and national level. This study analyzes the Texas Top 10% Scholarship that is awarded to low-income students that rank within the top decile of their high school graduating class. Bonus awards were also distributed through the program to students majoring in STEM and other workforce shortage fields. I use student level administrative data from the Texas Education Agency, and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to compare the education outcomes of students that just meet the financial need eligibility requirement to students who just miss it with a regression discontinuity design. I find that the scholarship did not affect the likelihood that students complete a bachelors degree within five years, nor did it impact the cumulative GPAs of recipients. However, eligible students are more likely to major in STEM.
The Evolution of Charter School Quality, with Patrick L. Baude, Marcus Casey, Eric A. Hanushek, and Steven G. Rivkin, Forthcoming in Economica
Studies of the charter sector typically compare charters and traditional public schools at a point in time. These comparisons are potentially misleading because many charter-related reforms require time to generate results. We study quality dynamics among charter schools in the State of Texas from 2001-2011. School quality in the charter sector was initially highly variable and on average lower than traditional public schools. However, exits, improvement of existing charter schools, and higher quality of new entrants increased charter effectiveness relative to traditional public schools despite an acceleration in the rate of sector expansion in the latter half of the decade. We present evidence that reduced student mobility and an increased share of charters adhering to No Excuses- style curricula contribute to these improvements. Although selection into charter schools becomes more favorable over time in terms of prior achievement and behavior, such compositional improvements appear to contribute little to the charter sector gains. Moreover, accounting for composition in terms of prior achievement and behavior has only a small effect on estimates of the higher average quality of No Excuses schools.
Performance Information and Personnel Decisions in the Public Sector: The Case of School Principals, with Julie Berry Cullen, Eric A. Hanushek, and Steven G. Rivkin
School ratings based on test scores provide performance information to administrators, board members, parents and other stakeholders with the hope of driving quality improvements and efficiency gains. Accountability systems standardly report both categorical school ratings and the continuous underlying student pass rates that determine them, permitting direct investigation of how different information affects key school personnel, specifically principals. This study uses regression discontinuity design methods to investigate how accountability ratings affect principal labor-market outcomes. Results reveal no significant differences in salary growth and the probability of principal retention across the acceptable-recognized and recognized exemplary boundaries but large and significant discontinuities at the unacceptable-acceptable boundary. This divergence is consistent with the notion that school district administrators access the continuous underlying information on achievement and productivity but that parents, school board members or other stakeholders respond to cruder unacceptable ratings in ways that jeopardize the principal’s career opportunities. This apparent information breakdown could nonetheless be welfare improving if it raised the distribution of principal quality through disproportionate departures of less effective school leaders. However, the extensive overlap of achievement value-added distributions across school rating categories suggests that a categorical accountability system based on pass rates does not distinguish well among principals of varying levels of effectiveness. Moreover, it almost certainly disadvantages principals in schools serving low-income populations that already have general difficulties in attracting and retaining effective educators.
Who's Online? An Evaluation of Texas Virtual Schools
Despite rapid growth of full-time online schools, we know little about the students who attend them. We use a student level panel of administrative micro data in Texas to explore the characteristics of students that in enroll in public online schools and examine their academic performance relative to traditional public school students. We make several key findings. First, we find that virtual school students pass standardized math assessments at a lower rate than their counterparts in brick and mortar campuses. Second, the proportion of white students is significantly greater in virtual schools than in traditional brick and mortar schools. Third, enrollment is highest in grades six through nine. Finally, we find that virtual school students leave traditional brick and mortar public schools with the highest levels of low income students, student discipline, and student achievement.
Less Support and More Interest: The end of Subsidized Loans for Graduate Students, with Sara Muehlenbein, and John Thompson
We examine the impacts of a major federal policy on borrowing decisions of graduate students, a group who are underrepresented in the literature regarding these topics. Because graduate students hold a disproportionately large fraction of total student debt (40% of student debt is held by graduate students, who make up 16% of post-secondary students), it is important to understand the impact of policies on their borrowing decisions. The Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) eliminated access to Subsidized Stafford loans for students pursuing graduate degrees. Using administrative data housed at the University of Texas at Dallas's education research center, this study evaluates the effects of eliminating graduate student access to Subsidized Stafford loans. Our preliminary results demonstrate that graduate students take out substantially more Unsubsidized loans after the law change, averaging $5,569 more in unsubsidized loans in the post-BCA period. We find that the elimination of Subsidized Stafford Loans increases the cost of financial aid for graduate students by $2,121 over the lifetime of the loan, representing a 22.4% increase in the lifetime cost of attending graduate school.