The Effects of Teacher Quality on Adult Criminal Justice Contact (with Evan K. Rose and Yotam Shem-Tov), revision requested at Econometrica
This paper develops new approaches for estimating multidimensional teacher effects and uses them to understand teachers’ impacts on their students’ future criminal justice contact (CJC). Using a unique data set linking the universe of North Carolina public school data to administrative arrest records, we find a standard deviation of teacher effects on students’ future arrests of 2.7 percentage points (11% of the sample mean). Teachers’ effects on CJC are orthogonal to their effects on academic achievement, implying assignment to a high test score value-added teacher does not reduce future CJC. However, teachers who reduce suspensions and improve attendance substantially reduce future arrests. Similar patterns emerge when allowing teacher impacts to vary by student sex, race, and socio-economic status. The results suggest that the development of non-cognitive skills is central to the returns to education for crime and highlight an important dimension of teachers’ social value missed by test score-based quality metrics.
Do Parents Value School Effectiveness? (with Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters), American Economic Review 110(5), 2020.
School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents’ choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to New York City’s centralized high school assignment mechanism. We use applicants’ rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores, high school graduation, college attendance, and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. Preferences are unrelated to school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality.