Results 1 - 10
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335
The Impact of Individual Teachers on Student Achievement: Evidence From Panel Data
, 2003
"... Teacher quality is widely believed to be important for education, despite little ev-idence that teachers ’ credentials matter for student achievement. To accurately measure variation in achievement due to teachers ’ characteristics–both observ-able and unobservable–it is essential to identify teache ..."
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Cited by 428 (23 self)
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Teacher quality is widely believed to be important for education, despite little ev-idence that teachers ’ credentials matter for student achievement. To accurately measure variation in achievement due to teachers ’ characteristics–both observ-able and unobservable–it is essential to identify teacher fixed effects. Unlike previous studies, I use panel data to estimate teacher fixed effects while control-ling for fixed student characteristics and classroom specific variables. I find large and statistically significant differences among teachers: a one standard deviation increase in teacher quality raises reading and math test scores by approximately.20 and.24 standard deviations, respectively, on a nationally standardized scale. In addition, teaching experience has statistically significant positive effects on reading test scores, controlling for fixed teacher quality.
Experimental Analysis of Neighborhood Effects on Youth,” Working Paper 483, Industrial Relations Section,
, 2004
"... Families, primarily female-headed minority households with children, living in highpoverty public housing projects in five U.S. cities were offered housing vouchers by lottery in the Moving to Opportunity program. Four to seven years after random assignment, families offered vouchers lived in safer ..."
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Cited by 323 (18 self)
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Families, primarily female-headed minority households with children, living in highpoverty public housing projects in five U.S. cities were offered housing vouchers by lottery in the Moving to Opportunity program. Four to seven years after random assignment, families offered vouchers lived in safer neighborhoods that had lower poverty rates than those of the control group not offered vouchers. We find no significant overall effects of this intervention on adult economic self-sufficiency or physical health. Mental health benefits of the voucher offers for adults and for female youth were substantial. Beneficial effects for female youth on education, risky behavior, and physical health were offset by adverse effects for male youth. For outcomes that exhibit significant treatment effects, we find, using variation in treatment intensity across voucher types and cities, that the relationship between neighborhood poverty rate and outcomes is approximately linear.
Place of Work and Place of Residence: Informal Hiring Networks and Labor Market Outcomes
- JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
, 2004
"... We use a novel dataset and research design to empirically detect the effect of social interactions among neighbors on labor market outcomes. Specifically, using Census data that characterize residential and employment locations down to the city block, we examine whether individuals residing in the s ..."
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Cited by 154 (6 self)
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We use a novel dataset and research design to empirically detect the effect of social interactions among neighbors on labor market outcomes. Specifically, using Census data that characterize residential and employment locations down to the city block, we examine whether individuals residing in the same block are more likely to work together than individuals in nearby but not identical blocks. We find significant evidence of social interactions; the baseline probability of working together is 0.93 % at the block level compared to 0.51 % at the block group level (a collection of ten contiguous blocks). We also provide evidence as to which types of matches between individuals result in greater levels of referrals. These findings are robust to the introduction of detailed controls for socio-demographic characteristics and block group fixed effects, as well as across various specifications intended to address sorting and housing market rather than labor market referrals. Further, our estimated effects have a significant impact on a wide range of labor market outcomes more generally.
Does educational tracking affect performance and inequality? Differences-in-differences evidence across countries, NBER Working Paper 11124.
- National Bureau of Economic Research.
, 2005
"... Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international differences-indifferences ap ..."
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Cited by 112 (1 self)
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Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international differences-indifferences approach. We identify tracking effects by comparing differences in outcome between primary and secondary school across tracked and non-tracked systems. Six international student assessments provide eight pairs of achievement contrasts for between 18 and 26 cross-country comparisons. The results suggest that early tracking increases educational inequality. While less clear, there is also a tendency for early tracking to reduce mean performance. Many countries worry about the relative merits of a selective versus comprehensive school system and the resulting system choices are surprisingly different. Some countries track students into differing-ability schools as early as at age 10 (e.g., Austria, Germany, Hungary and the Slovak Republic). By contrast, others including Canada, Japan, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US essentially keep their entire lower secondary school system comprehensive. Parents and politicians alike would like to know whether it has consequences for the equity and efficiency of educational outcomes if a country tracks its students into different school types, hierarchically structured by performance. Such macro issues of institutional structure are extraordinarily difficult to evaluate within individual countries, largely because the variations in structure that exist within countries are almost certainly related to the characteristics of the families and schools choosing to follow an anomalous pattern. To deal with these analytical complexities, we provide evidence from international experiences across countries. The arguments about school placement policies -variously called tracking, streaming, or ability grouping -often rest on a perceived trade-off between equity and efficiency. 1 Some discussions of tracking are mainly concerned with placements between different types of schools and others with placements into different tracks within schools but the arguments for and against tracking are basically the same. 2 The central argument behind tracking is that homogeneous classrooms permit a focused curriculum and appropriately paced instruction that leads to the maximum learning by all students. In such a situation, the teacher does not have to * We thank the responsible editor, as well as participants at the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society in Nottingham, CESifo meetings in Munich and the education workshop at ZEW in Mannheim, for helpful comments and discussion. This research was supported by CESifo under the project ÔThe Human Capital of NationsÕ. 1 It appears that the costs of tracked and untracked systems are roughly comparable. Therefore, although we do not perform any direct efficiency calculations, we often refer to variations in outcomes in the loose manner of efficiency differences. 2 See the papers on Ôcomprehensive and selective schoolingÕ collected in Heath (1984) for examples of the UK-based discussion of streaming between schools and
New Evidence about Brown v. Board of Education: The Complex Effects
- of School Racial Composition on Achievement.’’ Working Paper No. w8741, National Bureau of Economic Research
, 2002
"... Uncovering the effect of school racial composition is difficult because racial mixing is not accidental but instead an outcome of government and family choices. Using rich panel data on the achievement of Texas students, we disentangle racial composition effects from other aspects of school quality ..."
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Cited by 98 (8 self)
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Uncovering the effect of school racial composition is difficult because racial mixing is not accidental but instead an outcome of government and family choices. Using rich panel data on the achievement of Texas students, we disentangle racial composition effects from other aspects of school quality and from differences in abilities and family background. The estimates strongly indicate that a higher percentage of black schoolmates reduces achievement for blacks, while it implies a much smaller and generally insignificant effect on whites. These reJohn F. Kain fully participated in this research, but sadly he died before its publication. An early version of this article was presented at the Brookings Conference on Empirics of Social Interactions (January 2000). Our thanks to conference participants, David Armor, Phil Cook, Jonah Gelbach, Caroline Hoxby, and Jens Ludwig for helpful comments. Support for this work has been provided by the Spencer Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Packard Humanities Institute. Contact the corresponding author, Eric A. Hanushek, at hanushek@stanford.edu. 350 Hanushek et al. sults suggest that existing levels of segregation in Texas explain a small but meaningful portion of the racial achievement gap.
Taking race out of the equation: School reassignment and the structure of peer effects
, 2005
"... In the last and current decade, the Wake County school district has reassigned numerous students to schools, moving up to five percent of the student population in any given year. Before 2000, the explicit goal was balancing schools ' racial composition; after 2000, it was balancing schools&apo ..."
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Cited by 86 (6 self)
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In the last and current decade, the Wake County school district has reassigned numerous students to schools, moving up to five percent of the student population in any given year. Before 2000, the explicit goal was balancing schools ' racial composition; after 2000, it was balancing schools' income composition. Throughout, finding space for the area's rapidly expanding student population was the most important concern. The reassignments generate a very large number of natural experiments in which students experience new peers in the classroom. As a matter of policy, exposure to an "experiment " should have been and actually appears to have been random conditional on a student's fixed characteristics such as race and income. Using panel data on students before and after they experience policy-induced changes in peers, we explore which models of peer effects explain the data. Our results reject the popular Linear-in-Means and Single-Crossing models as standalone models of peer effects. We find support for the Boutique and Focus models of peer effects, as well as for a generic monotonicity property by which a higher achieving peer is better for a student's own achievement all else equal. Our results indicate that, when we properly account for the effects of peers ' achievement, peers ' race, ethnicity, income, and parental education have no or at most very slight effects. Thus, Wake County's numerous
Peer effects in European primary schools: Evidence from PIRLS
, 2006
"... We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable estim ..."
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Cited by 79 (0 self)
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We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable estimates of peer effects in standard OLS specifications. The size of the estimate is much reduced within schools. This could be explained either by selection into schools or by measurement error in the peer background variable. When we correct for measurement error we find within school estimates close to the original OLS estimates. Our results suggest that the peer effect is modestly large, measurement error is important in our survey data, and selection plays little role in biasing peer effects estimates. We find no significant evidence of non-linear peer effects.
2007): “Mechanisms and Impacts of Gender Peer Effects at School,” NBER Working Paper 13292
"... The consequences of gender social and learning interactions in the classroom are of interest to parents, policy makers, and researchers. However, little is known about gender peer effects in schools and their operational channels. In this paper, we estimate the effects of classroom gender compositio ..."
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Cited by 64 (1 self)
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The consequences of gender social and learning interactions in the classroom are of interest to parents, policy makers, and researchers. However, little is known about gender peer effects in schools and their operational channels. In this paper, we estimate the effects of classroom gender composition on scholastic achievements of boys and girls in Israeli primary, middle, and high schools and identify the mechanisms through which these peer effects are enacted. In particular, we examine whether gender peer effects work through changes in classroom learning and social environment, teaching methods and pedagogy, and teacher burnout and work satisfaction. In assessing these mechanisms, we distinguish between the effects generated by changes in the classroom gender composition and those generated by changes in the behavior of students. To control for potentially confounding unobserved characteristics of schools and students that might be correlated with peer gender composition, we rely on idiosyncratic variations in gender composition across adjacent cohorts within the same schools. Our results suggest that an increase in the proportion of girls leads to a significant improvement in students ’ cognitive outcomes. The estimated effects are of similar magnitude for boys and girls. As important mechanisms, we find that a higher proportion of female peers lowers the level of classroom disruption and violence, improves inter-student and student-teacher relationships as well as students’
Does segregation still matter? The impact of student composition on academic achievement in high school. Teachers College Record,
- Social Science Research,
, 2005
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