Albert Cheng

Does Homeschooling or Private Schooling Promote Political Intolerance? Evidence From a Christian University

Political tolerance is the willingness to extend civil liberties to people who hold views with which one disagrees. Some have claimed that private schooling and homeschooling are institutions that propagate political intolerance by fostering separatism and an unwillingness to consider alternative viewpoints. I empirically test this claim by measuring the political tolerance levels of undergraduate students attending an evangelical Christian university. Using ordinary least squares regression analysis, I find that for these students, greater exposure to private schooling instead of traditional public schooling is not associated with any more or less political tolerance, and greater exposure to homeschooling is associated with more political tolerance.

No Excuses Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement

While charter schools differ widely in philosophy and pedagogical views, the United States’s most famous urban charter schools typically use the No Excuses approach. Enrolling mainly poor and minority students, these schools feature high academic standards, strict disciplinary codes, extended instructional time, and targeted supports for low-performing students. The strenuous and regimented style is controversial amongst some scholars, but others contend that the No Excuses approach is needed to rapidly close the achievement gap. We conduct the first meta-analysis of the achievement impacts of No Excuses charter schools. Focusing on experimental studies, we find that No Excuses charter schools significantly improve math scores and reading scores. We estimate gains of 0.25 and 0.16 standard deviations on math and literacy achievement, respectively, as the effect of attending a No Excuses charter school for one year. Though the effect is large and meaningful, we offer some caveats to this finding and discuss policy implications for the United States as well as other countries.

Homeschool Parents and Satisfaction with Special Education Services.

ABSTRACT Homeschooling is controversial for a variety of reasons. One concern is whether families are sufficiently equipped to serve students with disabilities. We investigate this issue by assessing parental satisfaction with the special education services that their child is receiving in various educational sectors (e.g., homeschool, traditional public, public charter, and private). Using a nationally representative sample of U.S. households from the National Household Education Survey, we find that parents who homeschool are more satisfied than parents of children in traditional public schools and a variety of private schools with the special education services that they are receiving. Despite obvious selection bias in our sample, we view parental satisfaction as one of many important indicators for the quality of special education services. The results from this study suggest that homeschooling is a potentially beneficial option for serving students with disabilities, though additional research examining other student outcomes would be invaluable.

Personality as a Predictor of Unit Nonresponse in an Internet Panel

Unit nonresponse in panel data sets is often a source of bias. Why certain individuals attrite from longitudinal studies and how to minimize this phenomenon have been examined by researchers. However, this research has typically focused on data sets collected via telephone, postal mail, or face-to-face interviews. Moreover, this research usually focuses on using demographic characteristics such as educational attainment or income to explain variation in the incidence of unit nonresponse. We make two contributions to the existing literature. First, we examine the incidence of unit nonresponse in an Internet panel, a relatively new, and hence understudied, approach to gathering longitudinal data. Second, we hypothesize that personality traits, which typically remain unobserved and unmeasured in many data sets, affect the likelihood of unit nonresponse. Using data from an Internet panel that includes self-reported measures of personality in its baseline survey, we find that conscientiousness and openness to experience predict the incidence of unit nonresponse in subsequent survey waves, even after controlling for cognitive ability and demographic characteristics that are usually available and used by researchers to correct for unit nonresponse. We also test the potential to use paradata as proxies for personality traits related to unit nonresponse. Although we show that these proxies are correlated with personality traits and predict unit nonresponse in the same way as self-reported measures of personality traits, it is also possible that they capture other idiosyncrasies related to future survey completion. Our results suggest that obtaining explicit measures of personality traits or finding better proxies for them could be valuable for more fully addressing the potential bias that may arise as a result of unit nonresponse.

Do Personnel Policies Matter for Organizational Mission Coherence? A Public School Test

Public administration theory suggests that building mission coherence within an organization is important for its effectiveness. Personnel policies may influence the capacity to foster mission coherence. Through hiring or dismissal, managers could compose a staff of workers who match with the organizational mission and abide by its associated norms and values. Policies that limit the manager’s influence over personnel may have the opposite effect. This article empirically tests this link between personnel policies and mission coherence within the U.S. public schools system. Ordinary least squares regression is used to analyze a nationally representative sample of nearly 6,500 schools. Results indicate that schools where administrators have greater influence over hiring decisions or face fewer formal barriers against dismissing teachers tend to have teachers who report greater mission coherence. Implications for theory and practice as well as study limitations are also discussed.

Experimental Estimates of Impacts of Cost-Earnings Information on Adult Aspirations for Children’s Postsecondary Education

ABSTRACT Economic information may close aspiration disparities for postsecondary education across socioeconomic, ethnic, and partisan divides. In 2017, we estimated impacts of information on such disparities by means of a survey experiment administered to a nationally representative sample of 4,214 adults. A baseline group was asked whether they preferred a 4-year degree, a 2-year degree, or no further education for their oldest child younger than the age of 18 years (or the option they would prefer if they had a child younger than 18 years). Before 3 other randomly selected segments of our sample were asked the same question, they were given either information about (a) both net costs and returns, (b) net costs, or (c) returns to a 2-year and 4-year degree. Information about both costs and returns did not reduce socioeconomic-status disparities but did affect ethnic and partisan divides. The findings suggest that reductions in socioeconomic inequalities in educational opportunity require more than simple changes in the dissemination of information aimed at altering economic cost–benefit calculations. Sustained effort that mitigates deeper-seated cultural and social barriers seems necessary.

Gendered Ambition: Men’s and Women’s Career Advancement in Public Administration

We explore the relationships between gender, career ambition, and the emergence of executive leadership. Growing research in public administration shows that career systems shape bureaucrats’ ambitions, political behavior, and management. Yet career systems are not neutral conduits of talent: Administrators are more likely to pursue advancement when career systems favor them. This study proposes that women and men respond to gendered public career systems. Using national- and state-level data on public school managers in the United States, we find gender disparities in the career paths that lead educators from the classroom to the superintendent’s suite. Specifically, we find that female and elementary school teachers advance more slowly than male and secondary school teachers. We also find gender disparities in certification and experience among principals. Accordingly, female and elementary principals report lower levels of ambition. Such gendered career systems may lead to biases in policy agendas and public management.

Boys will be superintendents: School leadership as a gendered profession

Even though the teaching profession is dominated by women, men hold more superintendent positions. The authors examine the pipeline that leads to the principalship and the superintendency and how it has evolved over time. They note school boards are more likely to perceive high school principals and athletic coaches as plausible superintendents, in contrast to elementary principals and curriculum specialists. In addition, elementary education majors, mostly women, tend to be more conservative and thus may choose family over advancement to a more demanding position. They discuss why having more women in high-level leadership is valuable and ways to reform the gendered career track.

Gendered Ambition: Career Advancement in Public Schools

We explore the relationships between gender, career ambition, and the emergence of executive leadership. In Bureaucratic Ambition, Teodoro (2011) shows that public administration career systems shape bureaucrats’ ambitions, political behavior, and management strategies. But career systems are not neutral conduits of talent: administrators are more likely to pursue advancement when career systems favor them. This research proposes that women and men respond to gendered public career systems. Using national and state-level data on public school managers, we find marked gender disparities in the career paths that lead educators from the classroom to the superintendent post. Specifically, we find that female and elementary school teachers take longer to advance than male and secondary school teachers. We also find gender disparities in certification and experiences among school principals. Accordingly, female and elementary principals report lower levels of ambition. Such gendered career systems may lead to biases in policy agendas and management styles.