CALDER working papers have not undergone final formal review and should be cited as working papers. They are intended to encourage discussion and suggestions for revision before final publication. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in these papers are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of our funders.
This study examines the effects of internal migration driven by severe natural disasters on host communities, and the mechanisms behind these effects, using the large influx of migrants into Florida public schools after Hurricane Maria. I find adverse effects of the influx in the first year on existing student test scores, disciplinary problems, and student mobility among high-performing students in middle and high school that also persist in the second year. I also find evidence that compensatory resource allocation within schools is an important factor driving the adverse effects of large, unexpected migrant flows on incumbent students in the short-run.
This paper was published in The Journal of Human Resources in January 2021 and can be found here.
WP 233-0320 was originally released in March 2020. This updated version, WP 233-0320-2, was released in January 2021.
Citation: Umut Özek (2020). Examining the Educational Spillover Effects of Severe Natural Disasters: The Case of Hurricane Maria . CALDER Working Paper No. 233-0320-2
This study adds to the currently limited evidence base on the efficacy of interventions targeting non-college-ready high school students by examining the impact of Kentucky’s Targeted Interventions (TI) program. We focus on interventions that students received under TI in the senior year of high school based on their 11th grade ACT test scores. Using difference-in-regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference designs with seven cohorts of 11th grade students, we find that, for an average per-student cost of about $600, TI significantly reduces the likelihood that students enroll in remedial course in both 2- and 4-year postsecondary institutions by 5–10 percentage points in math and 3–4 percentage points in English. These effects are similar among students who are eligible for free-or reduced-price lunch, Black and Hispanic students, students with remediation needs in multiple subjects, and students in lower-performing schools. Evidence also shows that TI increases the likelihood that students enroll in and pass college math before the end of the first year by four percentage points in 4-year universities. However, little evidence exists for TI affecting credit accumulation or persistence.
This paper was published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis in August 2021 and can be found here.
Citation: Zeyu Xu, Benjamin Backes, Amanda Oliveira, Dan Goldhaber (2020). Targeted Interventions in High School: Preparing Students for College. CALDER Working Paper No. 232-0220
We use data on the teacher preparation experiences and workforce outcomes of more than 1,300 graduates of special education teacher education programs in Washington to provide a descriptive portrait of special education teacher preparation, workforce entry, and early career retention. We find high rates of workforce entry for special education candidates (over 80%), but we document considerably lower rates of entry into special education classrooms for candidates who hold a dual endorsement in special education and another subject. We also find that special education teachers who are dual endorsed and begin their careers teaching in special education classrooms are less likely stay in these classrooms. Both sets of findings are supported by an instrumental variable analysis that exploits passing score cutoffs on required licensure tests to provide plausibly causal evidence that obtaining a dual endorsement significantly reduces the likelihood that special education candidates teach in special education classrooms.
This paper has been published in Exceptional Children and can be found here, April 2021.
Citation: Roddy Theobald, Dan Goldhaber, Natsumi Naito, Marcy Stein (2020). The Special Education Teacher Pipeline: Teacher Preparation, Workforce Entry, and Retention. CALDER Working Paper No. 231-0220
Using detailed administrative data for public schools, we document racial and ethnic segregation at the classroom level in North Carolina, a state that has experienced a sharp increase in Hispanic enrollment. We decompose classroom-level segregation in counties into within-school and between-school components. We find that the within-school component accounted for a sizable share of total segregation in middle schools and high schools. Recognizing its importance could temper the praise for school assignment policies that reduce racial disparities between schools but allow large disparities within them. More generally, we observe between the two components a complementary relationship, with one component tending to be large when the other one is small. Comparing the degree of segregation for the state’s two largest racial/ethnic minority groups, we find that White/Hispanic segregation was more severe than White/Black segregation, particularly within schools. Finally, we examine enrollment patterns by course and show that school segregation brings with it differences by race and ethnicity in the courses that students take, with White students more likely to be enrolled in advanced classes.
WP 230-0220 was originally released in February 2020. This is the third update, WP 230-0220-3, released in January 2021.
This paper has been published in Race and Social Problems and can be found here, January 2021.
Citation: Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, Calen R. Clifton, Mavzuna Turaeva (2020). School Segregation at the Classroom Level in a Southern ‘New Destination’ State. CALDER Working Paper No. 230-0220-3
Teacher turnover has adverse consequences for student achievement and imposes large financial costs for schools. Some have argued that high-stakes testing may lower teachers’ satisfaction with their jobs and could be a major contributor to teacher attrition. In this paper, we exploit changes in the tested grades and subjects in Georgia to study the effects of eliminating high-stakes testing on teacher turnover and the distribution of teachers across grades and schools. To measure the effect of testing pressures on teacher mobility choices we use a "difference-in-differences" approach,comparing changes in mobility over time in grades/subjects that discontinue testing vis-à-vis grades/subjects that are always tested. Our results show that eliminating testing did not have an impact on the likelihood of leaving teaching, changing schools within a district, or moving between districts. We only uncover small negative effects on the likelihood of grade switching. However,we do find relevant positive effects on retention of beginning teachers in the profession. In particular, the average probability of exit for teachers with 0-4 years of experience fell from 14 to13 percentage points for teachers in grades 1 and 2 and from 14 to 11 percentage points in grades 6 and 7.
Citation: Dillon Fuchsman, Tim Sass, Gema Zamarro (2020). Testing, Teacher Turnover and the Distribution of Teachers Across Grades and Schools. CALDER Working Paper No. 229-0220
While the majority of students with disabilities (SWDs) receive instruction from general education teachers, little empirical work has investigated the ways in which these students have equitable access to high-quality teachers. We explore the differences in teacher quality experienced by SWDs and general education (GEN) students and how that access varies with school-level disadvantage by estimating SWD teacher quality gaps in the Los Angeles Unified School District. We examine several different indicators of teacher effectiveness (hiring scores, teacher experience, teachers’ ratings on their observation-based performance evaluations, and value-added measures) for general education teachers who instruct both SWDs and general education (GEN) students. We find that SWDs are significantly more likely to have lower math VAM teachers than their GEN peers, and these gaps do not vary by school-level disadvantage. We find no differences on the other indicators of teacher effectiveness.
This paper has been published in Educational Researcher and can be found here, September 2020.
Citation: Ijun Lai, W. Jesse Wood, Scott A. Imberman, Nathan Jones, Katharine O. Strunk (2020). Teacher Quality Gaps by Disability and Socioeconomic Status: Evidence from Los Angeles. CALDER Working Paper No. 228-0220
Using value-added models, we find that high schools impact students’ self-reported socio-emotional development (SED) by enhancing social well-being and promoting hard work. Conditional on schools’ test score impacts, schools that improve SED, reduce school-based arrests, and increase high-school completion, college-going, and college persistence. Schools that improve social well-being have larger effects on attendance and behavioral infractions in high school, while those that promote hard work have larger effects on GPA. Results suggest that adolescence can be a formative period for socio-emotional growth, high-school impacts on SED can be captured using self-report surveys, and SED can be fostered by schools to improve longer-run outcomes. These findings are robust to tests for plausible forms of selection.
This paper has been published in American Economic Review and can be found here, December 2020.
Citation: Kirabo Jackson, Shanette C. Porter, John Q. Easton, Alyssa Blanchard, Sebastián Kiguel (2020). School Effects on Socio-emotional Development, School-Based Arrests, and Educational Attainment. CALDER Working Paper No. 226-0220
We study the effects of exposure to non-resident students on the outcomes of undergraduate in-state students during a period of high non-resident enrollment growth at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Our models leverage within-major, cross-time variation in non-resident exposure for identification. We find no evidence that increased exposure to domestic non-residents affects in-state student outcomes and our null results are precisely estimated. We find evidence of modest negative impacts on in-state students when their exposure to foreign students increases using our preferred specification. However, the identifying variation in exposure to foreign students in our data is limited and this result is not robust in all of our models.
This paper has been published in Contemporary Economic Policy and can be found here, January 2020.
Citation: Diyi Li, Cheng Qian, Cory Koedel (2020). Non-Resident Postsecondary Enrollment Growth and the Outcomes of In-State Students. CALDER Working Paper No. 225-0120
We describe the postsecondary transitions of students taking CTE courses in high school using administrative data on one cohort of high school graduates in Washington State. Conditional on observable characteristics, CTE concentrators—high school graduates who complete at least four CTE credits—are about 4 percentage points less likely to enroll in college than other high school graduates. However, CTE students are significantly more likely to enroll in and complete vocational programs, especially in certificate programs in applied STEM and public safety fields. Among students not enrolled in college, CTE students are also more likely to obtain full-time employment—and to work more intensively—within the first three years following high school graduation. Although the improvements in employment outcomes do not offset reductions in college enrollment, the higher completion rates of vocational credentials among CTE concentrators indicate some important positive outcomes for this population.
Citation: James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber, Harry Holzer, Natsumi Naito, Zeyu Xu (2019). Career and Technical Education in High School and Postsecondary Pathways in Washington State. CALDER Working Paper No. 224-1119
CALDER Policy Brief No. 19-1119
Theory suggests that clinical experiences—sometimes referred to as pre-service teaching, internships, or student teaching—affect teacher effectiveness by connecting teacher preparation coursework to PK–12 students and schools. Until recently, we have had little quantitative evidence indicating that these clinical experiences matter. This brief provides an overview of some of the research documenting the connections between different components of clinical experience—such as school culture, performance assessments, mentor teacher performance, and congruence between student teaching and in-service environments—and the in-service outcomes of teachers. Recent evidence shows that the environment in the schools in which clinical practice occurs, the alignment between the student demographics of internship schools and early career schools, is associated with the later effectiveness of those teacher candidates who go on to become teachers. There is also increasing evidence pointing toward to the value of working with an effective and/or high-performing mentor (also known as “cooperating”) teacher. This brief also highlights areas where less is definitively known (or no quantitative evidence exists), such as whether the introduction of assessments (like edTPA) improve teacher effectiveness.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Venessa Keesler (2019). What Do We Know About the Effects of Clinical Practice Experiences and Teacher Performance?. CALDER Policy Brief No. 19
We evaluate the predictive validity of the Massachusetts Candidate Assessment of Performance (CAP), a practice-based assessment of teaching skills that is typically taken during a candidate’s student teaching placement and is a requirement for teacher preparation program completion in Massachusetts. We find that candidates’ performance on the CAP predicts their in-service summative performance evaluations in their first 2 years in the teaching workforce and provides a signal of these ratings beyond what is already captured by the state’s traditional licensure tests, but is not predictive of their value added to student test scores. These findings suggest that the CAP captures aspects of candidates’ skills and competencies that are better reflected in their future performance evaluations than by their impacts on student performance.
Working paper 223-1019 was orginally published in October 2019. This is an updated version, published in February 2021.
Citation: Bingjie Chen, James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald (2019). From the Clinical Experience to the Classroom: Assessing the Predictive Validity of the Massachusetts Candidate Assessment of Performance . CALDER Working Paper No. 223-1019-2
Prior research has shown that about 15% of teachers are hired into the same school in which they student taught, about 40% are hired into their student teaching district, and the location of teachers’ student teaching placements is more predictive of where they are hired than where they went to high school or college. While this suggests that strategic student teaching placements are a potential policy lever for addressing regional teacher shortages, there is no prior empirical evidence of a relationship between student teaching placements and teacher shortages. In this paper, we describe research from Washington state that descriptively explores the relationship between student teaching placements and a proxy for teacher shortages, the proportion of new teacher hires in a school or district with emergency teaching credentials. We find that schools and districts that host fewer student teachers tend to hire significantly more new teachers with emergency credentials the following year, and that these relationships are robust to controlling for school and district urbanicity, distance to a teacher education program, and other observable school and district characteristics. This descriptive evidence suggests exploring efforts to place student teachers in schools and districts that struggle to staff their classrooms.
This paper has been published in Educational Researcher and can be found here, September 2020.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Natsumi Naito, Roddy Theobald (2019). Student Teaching and the Geography of Teacher Shortages. CALDER Working Paper No. 222-1019
Indiana, Oklahoma, and Washington have programs designed to address college enrollment and completion gaps by offering a promise of state-based college financial aid to low-income middle school students in exchange for making a pledge to do well in high school, be a good citizen, not be convicted of a felony, and apply for financial aid to college. Using a triple-difference specification, we find that Washington’s College Bound Scholarship shifted enrollment from out-of-state to in-state colleges at which the scholarship could be used. While we find suggestive evidence that the program increased the likelihood of attending a postsecondary institution and attaining a bachelor’s degree within five years of high school, we discuss why the program might be more successful if it did not require students to sign a pledge.
This paper has been published in Education Finance and Policy and can be found here, October 2021.
Citation: Mark C. Long, Dan Goldhaber, Trevor Gratz (2019). Washington’s College Bound Scholarship Program and its Effect on College Entry, Persistence, and Completion. CALDER Working Paper No. 221-0919
CALDER Policy Brief No. 18-0919
Over the past two decades, charter schools have become the most popular form of school choice, especially in urban school districts. As such, a great deal of empirical research has focused on charter schools. Looking at the literature on the student achievement effects of charter school attendance, the weight of the evidence suggests a moderately positive effect with significant heterogeneity in effectiveness across different types of charter schools and across different states/school districts. For example, “No Excuses” charters such as Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools have been shown to outperform other charters and traditional public schools in raising student achievement. Educational attainment effects of charter schools have been more positive, with significant effects on high school graduation, college enrollment, and persistence in college. That said, there is still need for more research on (1) the effects of charter schools on later life outcomes including earnings and risky behavior; (2) whether effective charter providers will remain effective at a larger scale; (3) whether the policies and practices of effective charter schools can be successfully implemented in the traditional public school sector; and (4) whether certain state/school district policies better facilitate the growth of an effective charter school sector.
Citation: Umut Özek, Tim Sass (2019). Charter Schools and Student Outcomes: What Have We Learned Over Two Decades?. CALDER Policy Brief No. 18
We leverage nationally representative data and statewide data from Washington to investigate trends in occupational career and technical education (CTE) participation for students with and without disabilities. Consistent with prior work, we document declines in occupational CTE participation since the early 2000s, and provide the first empirical evidence that students with disabilities disproportionately contributed to this decline. But we also show that occupational CTE participation has stabilized for all students in the past decade in Washington, and that participation by students with disabilities in applied science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (applied STEMM) CTE courses has increased since the early 2000s. These trends are encouraging given prior evidence linking applied STEMM-CTE participation to better long-term outcomes for students with disabilities.
Citation: Roddy Theobald, Jay Plasman, Michael Gottfried, Trevor Gratz, Kristian Holden, Dan Goldhaber (2019). Sometimes Less, Sometimes More: Trends in Career and Technical Education Participation for Students With Disabilities. CALDER Working Paper No. 220-0819
CALDER Policy Brief No. 17-0519
Highlights
• Many community college students do not complete any credentials, or earn credentials with low labor market value, which leads to significant default rates despite quite moderate debts.
• Many students at community colleges, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, are plagued by weak academic preparation and financial pressures to work full time, as well as too little information about their own academic skills and what the labor market rewards.
• Outcomes among community college students are also limited by too few institutional resources, and likely by too few incentives to respond to the labor market and too little guidance for students as well.
• More resources for community colleges in general, as well as a limited number of specific community college support or job training programs, have strong positive impacts on student and worker outcomes, although many others remain untested or unproven.
Citation: Harry Holzer, Zeyu Xu (2019). Community Colleges and Pathways to the Labor Market. CALDER Policy Brief No. 17
Traditionally, teacher salaries have been determined solely by experience and educational attainment. This has led to chronic shortages of teachers in particular subject areas, such as math, science and special education. We study the first long-running statewide program to differentiate teacher pay based on subject area, Georgia’s bonus system for math and science teachers. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find the bonuses reduce teacher attrition by 18 to 28 percent. However, we find no evidence the program increases the probability that education majors become secondary math or science teachers upon graduation or alters specific major choices within the education field.
Citation: Carycruz Bueno, Tim Sass (2019). The Effects of Differential Pay on Teacher Recruitment and Retention . CALDER Working Paper No. 219-0519
CALDER Policy Brief No. 16-0519
The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a recently-implemented policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program (NSLP). It allows schools and districts serving low-income populations to identify all students as eligible for free lunch, regardless of students’ individual circumstances. The purpose of the CEP is to expand meal access to students who attend low income schools, while at the same time reducing paperwork and streamlining the process of participating in the NSLP. An unintended consequence of the CEP is that it reduces the informational content of NSLP-based measures of student poverty because all students at CEP schools are classified as eligible for free lunch. This has important implications for school accountability and finance policies at all levels of government as these policies have become highly dependent on the use of free and reduced-price lunch (FRL) data to proxy for student disadvantage.
Citation: Cory Koedel, Stacey Preis (2019). The Community Eligibility Provision, Free and Reduced-Price Lunch, and Measurement of Poverty: Implications for Education Policy. CALDER Policy Brief No. 16
In this paper we estimate the impacts of the “pathways” chosen by community college students—in terms of desired credentials and fields of study, as well as other choices and outcomes along the paths—on the attainment of credentials with labor market value. We focus on the extent to which there are recorded changes in students’ choices over time, whether students make choices informed by their chances of success and by labor market value of credentials, and the impacts of choices on outcomes. We find that several characteristics of chosen pathways, such as field of study and desired credential as well as early “momentum,” affect outcomes. Student choices of pathways are not always driven by information about later chances of success, in terms of probabilities of completing programs and attaining strong earnings. Students also change pathways quite frequently, making it harder to accumulate the credits needed in their fields. Attainment of credentials with greater market value could thus likely be improved by appropriate guidance and supports for students along the way, and perhaps by broader institutional changes as well.
This paper was published in Community College Review in April 2021 and can be found here.
Citation: Harry Holzer, Zeyu Xu (2019). Community College Pathways for Disadvantaged Students . CALDER Working Paper No. 218-0519
A growing literature documents the importance of student teaching placements for teacher development. Emerging evidence from this literature highlights the importance of the mentor teacher who supervises this placement. This brief provides an overview of this research, which suggests that teachers tend to be more effective when they student teach with a more effective mentor. We illustrate that there is ample scope for change in student teacher placements by using data from Washington State to demonstrate that there are far more highly effective teachers who could serve as mentors in each year than who actually do serve. We also discuss the considerable challenges to improvement efforts related to the need for better coordination between teacher education programs, K–12 school systems, and states. If policymakers value teacher candidate development equivalently to teacher inservice development, we argue that they should be willing to pay mentor teachers about 15 times more to recruit a highly effective teacher to host student teachers than the average current compensation for mentor teachers.
CALDER Policy Brief No. 15-0519
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Natsumi Naito, Roddy Theobald (2019). Making the Most of Student Teaching: The Importance of Mentors and Scope for Change. CALDER Policy Brief No. 15
