Research

Dissertation

In the Wake of the Storm:  Assessing State Education Budgetary Responses to the Great Recession

Lindblom (1959) asserts that policy processes are small incremental changes from past policies rather than rational decision-making processes comparing every possible option. This "Muddling Through" indicates the possibility of causing tremendous discrepancies between new policy needs due to those events and new policies relying on past policies. I suggest cutting state aid decisions by New York State in the post-Great Recession era as an example of this widening learning gap between school districts by missing significant new resource needs such as the degree of parental job losses due to the recession.       

How Do School Districts Manage Cutbacks? Evidence from New York State School Districts

Levine (1979) lists nine problems that public managers encounter while responding to fiscal retrenchment. Some of these problems can be more substantial for school district superintendents due to unique institutional restrictions compared to other public managers. For example, superintendents need support from teachers to implement certain coping strategies, but their collective action and protected labor contracts can become significant challenges (The Participation Paradox). To overcome these challenges, superintendents require adequate resources, such as a proper size of professional staff, which school districts tend not to have during fiscal retrenchment (The Management Science Paradox). In the context of New York State, preliminary results show that school districts cut non-permanent and novice teachers first when expenditure cuts are inevitable. I am conducting further analyses to identify the categories of strategies and the impact of professional staff through hierarchical clustering methods and school districts' staffing data, respectively.

Do They Make Differences? School District Responses to Surging Pension Burden by Supterintendents' Experiences

Pandey (2010) warns that focusing solely on short-term financial goals while managing fiscal pressures can lead to long-term negative consequences for public services. To avoid these situations, exceptional leadership is necessary when planning and implementing responses to fiscal pressures. I examined whether superintendents who have previously experienced similar fiscal pressures adopt different coping strategies compared to other superintendents. In the context of the increasing pension burden in New York State school districts, I found that these districts manage the rising pension costs by reducing non-permanent teachers and new teacher recruitment. These responses can result in long-term negative consequences by disrupting the supply of experienced teachers and discouraging potential new teachers from entering the labor market. Experienced superintendents managed through a lower retention rate of the most experienced teacher group, which is likely to be the highest salary group. Still, the magnitude of this difference was marginal. Strong institutional constraints, such as unionized teachers, limited revenue sources, and mandatory expenditures, may contribute to the uniformity of these responses across school districts. This result raises questions about whether public managers can exercise exceptional leadership under institutional constraints during periods of fiscal retrenchment.

Other Research Projects (Published)

Sorensen, L., Kim, Y., & Hwang, M. (2021). The Distributional Effects of Property Tax Constraints on School Districts. National Tax Journal, 74(3).

Sorensen, L. C., & Hwang, M. (2021). The Importance of Place: Effects of Community Job Loss on College Enrollment and Attainment Across Rural and Metropolitan Regions. AERA Open, 7, 2332858421997170.

(Replication: https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/131921/version/V1/view;jsessionid=0BCB0477C40C75156E4E0EF339AF1D6E)

Other Research Projects (In Progress)

Sorensen, L., Hwang, M. & Radia, M. A Breath of Fresh Air: The Effects of School Building Ventilation Conditions on Student Attendance and Learning.