Education Level

What does it mean for students to be in a gifted program? While about 7% of students nationally participate in gifted programs, relatively little is known about the experiences of students in these programs or how they vary across districts. Combining administrative and survey data, we describe the structure of gifted programs across nearly 300 school districts in Washington State. Using covariate adjustments and student fixed effects, we find that participation in gifted programs increases access to advanced courses, high-achieving peers, smaller classrooms, and more qualified teachers. These effects are largely concentrated in larger urban and suburban school districts that frequently run large, self-contained gifted programs. Effects of participation are much smaller for small school districts, rural or town school districts, and districts with small gifted programs. While gifted participation changes the educational environment for the average student in the state, the median school district program effect is near zero across the measures of educational environments we consider. This divergence is driven by a pattern of large school districts, high-income school districts, and urban and suburban school districts having programs with significantly larger effects on learning environments. Finally, we find that gifted program effects are larger for some student subgroups, but this is entirely due to district treatment effect heterogeneity, not differential effects on subgroups within districts.

Citation: Benjamin Backes, James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber (2021). What Makes for a "Gifted" Education? Exploring How Participation in Gifted Programs Affects Students' Learning Environments. CALDER Working Paper No. 256-0821

Testing students and using test information to hold schools and, in some cases, teachers accountable for student achievement has arguably been the primary national strategy for school improvement over the past decade and a half. Tests are also used for diagnostic purposes, such as to predict students at-risk of dropping out of high school. But there is policy debate about the efficacy of this usage, in part because of disagreements about whether tests are an important schooling outcome. We use panel data from three states – North Carolina, Massachusetts and Washington State – to investigate how accurate early test scores are in predicting later high school outcomes: 10th grade test achievement, the probability of taking advanced math courses in high school, and graduation. We find 3rd grade tests predict all of these outcomes with a high degree of accuracy and relatively little diminishment from using 8th grade tests. We also find evidence that using a two-stage model estimated on separate cohorts (one predicting 8th grade information using 3rd grade information, and another predicting high school outcomes with 8th grade information) only slightly diminishes forecast accuracy. Finally, the use of machine learning techniques increases accuracy of predictions over widely used linear models, but only marginally.

Working Paper 235-0520 was originally released in May 2020. This is an updated version, released August 2021.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Malcolm Wolff, Timothy Daly (2021). Assessing the Accuracy of Elementary School Test Scores as Predictors of Students’ High School Outcomes. CALDER Working Paper No. 235-0821-2

We used survey and administrative data from Washington State to assess the degree to which special education teacher preparation, district literacy instructional practices, and the alignment between preparation and practice were associated with the reading test score gains of students with high-incidence disabilities taught by early-career special education teachers in grades 4-8. These students tended to have larger reading gains when their district emphasized evidence-based literacy decoding practices (e.g., phonological awareness, phonics, and reading fluency) and when their special education teacher graduated from a teacher education program that also emphasized these practices. Students with high-incidence disabilities in districts that emphasized balanced literacy practices tended to have lower reading gains. Finally, students with high-incidence disabilities taught by early-career special education teachers tended to have larger reading gains when their teacher’s student teaching placement was supervised by a more experienced cooperating teacher.

Citation: Roddy Theobald, Dan Goldhaber, Kristian Holden, Marcy Stein (2021). Special Education Teacher Preparation, Literacy Instructional Alignment, and Reading Achievement for Students with High-Incidence Disabilities. CALDER Working Paper No. 253-0621

We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among White and comparatively affluent students, in response to the presence of immigrant students in the school. We propose a new identification strategy to partial out the unobserved non-random selection into schools, and find that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of US-born students, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Moreover, the presence of immigrants does not affect negatively the performance of affluent US-born students, who typically show a higher academic achievement compared to immigrant students. We provide suggestive evidence on potential channels.

Citation: David Figlio, Paola Giuliano, Riccardo Marchingiglio, Umut Özek, Paola Sapienza (2021). Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students. CALDER Working Paper No. 250-0321

We evaluate the feasibility of estimating test-score growth for schools and districts with a gap year in test data. Our research design uses a simulated gap year in testing when a true test gap did not occur, which facilitates comparisons of district- and school-level growth estimates with and without a gap year. We find that growth estimates based on the full data and gap year data are generally similar, establishing that useful growth measures can be constructed with a gap year in test data. Our findings apply most directly to testing disruptions that occur in the absence of other disruptions to the school system. They also provide insights about the test stoppage induced by COVID-19, although our work is just a first step toward producing informative school- and district-level growth measures from the pandemic period.

This is an updated version of the paper originally titled "Estimating Test-Score Growth with a Gap Year in the Data", released in January 2021.

This paper has been published in AERA Open and can be viewed here, August 2021.

Citation: Ishtiaque Fazlul, Cory Koedel, Eric Parsons, Cheng Qian (2021). Estimating Test-Score Growth for Schools and Districts with a Gap Year in the Data. CALDER Working Paper No. 248-0121-2

Prior work has documented a substantial penalty associated with taking the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) online relative to on paper (Backes & Cowan, 2019). However, this penalty does not necessarily make online tests less useful. For example, it could be the case that computer literacy skills are correlated with students’ future ability to navigate high school coursework, and thus more predictive of later outcomes. Using a statewide implementation of PARCC in Massachusetts, we test the relative predictive validity of online and paper tests. We are unable to detect a difference between the two and in most cases can rule out even modest differences. Finally, we estimate mode effects for the new Massachusetts statewide assessment. In contrast to the first years of PARCC implementation, we find very small mode effects, showing that it is possible to implement online assessments at scale without large online penalties.

Citation: Benjamin Backes, James Cowan (2020). Is Online a Better Baseline? Comparing the Predictive Validity of Computer- and Paper-Based Tests. CALDER Working Paper No. 241-0820

The clinical teaching experience is one of the most important components of teacher preparation. Prior observational research has found that more effective mentors and schools with better professional climates are associated with better preparation for teacher candidates. We test these findings using an experimental assignment of teacher candidates to placement sites in two states. Candidates who were randomly assigned to higher quality placement sites experienced larger improvements in performance over the course of the clinical experience, as evaluated by university instructors. The findings suggest that improving clinical placement procedures can improve the teaching quality of candidates.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Matt Ronfeldt, James Cowan, Trevor Gratz, Emanuele Bardelli, Matt Truwit, Hannah Mullman (2020). Room for Improvement? Mentor Teachers and the Evolution of Teacher Preservice Clinical Evaluations. CALDER Working Paper No. 239-0620

There is growing interest in using measures of teacher applicant quality to improve hiring decisions, but the statistical properties of such measures are poorly understood. We present evidence on structured ratings solicited from teacher applicants’ references. We find that the reference ratings capture only one underlying dimension of applicant quality, which may indicate a need to broaden the range of questions posed to professional references. Point estimates of inter-rater reliability range between 0.23 and 0.31 and are significantly lower for novice applicants. It is difficult to judge whether these levels of reliability are high or low in the current context given so little evidence on comparable applicant assessment tools.

This paper was published in Economics of Education Review in August 2021 and can be found here. 

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Malcolm Wolff, Patricia Martinkova (2020). Evidence on the Dimensionality and Reliability of Professional References’ Ratings of Teacher Applicants. CALDER Working Paper No. 237-0620

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program that allows schools serving low-income populations to classify all students as eligible for free meals, regardless of individual circumstances. This has implications for the use of free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications, which is a common practice. We document empirically how the CEP has affected the value of FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage. At the individual student level, we show that there is essentially no effect of the CEP. However, the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the share of FRM-eligible students in a school. It is this latter measure that is most relevant for policy uses of FRM data.

This paper was published in Educatinal Evaluation and Policy Analysis in November 2020 and can be found here.

Note: Portions of this paper were previously circulated under the title “Using Free Meal and Direct Certification Data to Proxy for Student Disadvantage in the Era of the Community Eligibility Provision.” We have since split the original paper into two parts. This is the first part.

WP 234-0320 was originally released in March 2020. This is the third update, WP 234-0320-3, released in September 2020.

Citation: Cory Koedel, Eric Parsons (2020). The Effect of the Community Eligibility Provision on the Ability of Free and Reduced-Price Meal Data to Identify Disadvantaged Students. CALDER Working Paper No. 234-0320-3