Research Areas

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

CALDER Policy Brief No. 26-0721

Students’ performance on standardized tests is clearly predictive of their later outcomes (Goldhaber & Özek, 2019) but whether the costs of administering tests are justified by the value of the tests for improving students’ outcomes is controversial. This controversy fuels heated debates over federal testing requirements, such as those instituted under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and continued under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). All ESSA-required tests were canceled in the 2019-20 school year due to COVID-19, and there was significant political debate about whether they ought to be required in 2020-21. Ultimately the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) allowed for some testing flexibility in the form of ESSA waivers.
In this policy brief, we outline some of the common ways states might use tests to improve student outcomes and the implications of requested and approved waivers on these uses. In particular, we highlight features of waiver requests that are especially important if tests are to be used by specific actors (e.g., families) to benefit students in specific ways. We conclude with a discussion of how testing policy needs to be designed if statewide tests are going to both be useful and maintain political support.

Citation: Paul Bruno, Dan Goldhaber (2021). Reflections on What Pandemic-Related State Test Waiver Requests Suggest About the Priorities for the Use of Tests. CALDER Policy Brief No. 26

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

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

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

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

Using a regression discontinuity design generated by school-entry cutoffs and school records from an anonymous district in Florida, we identify externalities in human capital production function arising from sibling spillovers. We find positive spillover effects from an older to a younger child in less affluent families and negative spillover effects from a younger to an older child in more affluent families. These results provide empirical evidence that educational policies could create both positive and negative within-family externalities depending on the characteristics of the affected households.

CALDER Working Paper 217-0219 was originally published in February 2019, this is the second version, published September 2021. 

This paper has been published in The Journal of Human Resources and can be found here, September 2021.

Citation: Krzysztof Karbownik, Umut Özek (2019). Setting a Good Example? Examining Sibling Spillovers in Educational Achievement Using a Regression Discontinuity Design. CALDER Working Paper No. 217-0219-2

Free and reduced-price meal (FRM) data are used ubiquitously to proxy for student disadvantage in education research and policy applications. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP)—a recently-implemented policy change to the federally-administered National School Lunch Program—allows schools serving low-income populations to identify all students as FRM-eligible regardless of individual circumstances. We study the CEP’s effect on FRM eligibility as a proxy for student disadvantage, and relatedly, we examine the viability of direct certification (DC) status as an alternative disadvantage measure. Our findings on whether the CEP degrades the informational content of FRM data are mixed. At the individual level there is essentially no effect, but the CEP does meaningfully change the information conveyed by the FRM-eligible share of students in a school. Our comparison of FRM and DC data in the post-CEP era shows that these measures are similarly informative as proxies for disadvantage, despite the CEP-induced information loss in FRM data. Using both measures together can improve the identification of disadvantaged students, but only marginally.

WP 214-0119-1 is no longer available. It has been replaced by two different papers, the first of which is available here: https://caldercenter.org/publications/effect-community-eligibility-provision-ability-free-and-reduced-price-meal-data

Citation: Cory Koedel, Eric Parsons (2019). Using Free Meal and Direct Certification Data to Proxy for Student Disadvantage in the Era of the Community Eligibility Provision. CALDER Working Paper No. 214-0119-1

We present evidence of a positive relationship between school starting age and children’s cognitive development from age 6 to 18 using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and large-scale population-level birth and school data from the state of Florida. We estimate effects of being old for grade (being born in September versus August) that are remarkably stable – always around 0.2 SD difference in test scores – across a wide range of heterogeneous groups, based on maternal education, poverty at birth, race/ethnicity, birth weight, gestational age, and school quality. While the September-August difference in kindergarten readiness is dramatically different by subgroup, by the time students take their first exams, the heterogeneity in estimated effects on test scores effectively disappears. We do, however, find significant heterogeneity in other outcome measures such as disability status and middle and high school course selections. We also document substantial variation in compensatory behaviors targeted towards young for grade children. While the more affluent families tend to redshirt their children, young for grade children from less affluent families are more likely to be retained in grades prior to testing. School district practices regarding retention and redshirting are correlated with improved out- comes for the groups less likely to use those remediation approaches (i.e., retention in the case of more-affluent families and redshirting in the case of less-affluent families.) Finally, we find that very few school policies or practices mitigate the test score advantage of September born children.

Citation: Elizabeth Dhuey, David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, Jeffrey Roth (2018). School Starting Age and Cognitive Development. CALDER Working Paper No. 191