Ben Backes

Do Affirmative Action Bans Lower Minority College Enrollment and Attainment?: Evidence from Statewide Bans

Using institutional data on race-specific college enrollment and completion, I examine whether minority students were less likely to enroll in a four-year public college or receive a degree following a statewide affirmative action ban. As in previous studies, I find that black and Hispanic enrollment dropped at the top institutions; however, there is little evidence that overall black enrollment at public universities fell. Finally, despite evidence that fewer blacks and Hispanics graduated from college following a ban, the effects on graduation rates are very noisy.

WERE MINORITY STUDENTS DISCOURAGED FROM APPLYING TO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA CAMPUSES AFTER THE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BAN

This paper uses student-level data to investigate how the college application behavior of underrepresented minorities (URMs) changed in response to the 1998 end of affirmative action in admissions at the University of California (UC). We show that all URMs experienced a drop in their probability of admission to at least one UC campus. However, the relative decline in URM SAT score-sending rates—our proxy for application rates—was small and concentrated at Berkeley and UCLA among underrepresented minorities who experienced the largest relative drop in their predicted probability of admission. In addition, we find some evidence of a shift toward less-selective UC campuses rather than out of the UC system. Overall, our paper highlights the stability of URM application behavior in the face of substantial declines in their admission rates.

The Effect of Banning Affirmative Action on College Admissions Policies and Student Quality

Using administrative data from the University of California (UC), we present evidence that UC campuses changed the weight given to SAT scores, high school GPA, and family background in response to California’s ban on race-based affirmative action, and that these changes were able to substantially (though far from completely) offset the fall in minority admissions rates. For both minorities and nonminorities, these changes to the estimated admissions rule hurt students with relatively strong academic credentials and whose parents were relatively affluent and educated. Despite these compositional shifts, however, average student quality (as measured by expected first- year college GPA) remained stable.

The effect of banning affirmative action on human capital accumulation prior to college entry

This paper examines how banning affirmative action in university admissions affects both overall academic achievement and the racial gap in academic achievement prior to college entry. Focusing on college-bound high school students, we use a difference-in-difference methodology to analyze the impact of the end of race-based affirmative action at the University of California in 1998 on both the overall level of SAT scores and high school GPA, and the racial gap in SAT scores and high school GPA. We find little evidence of either a decline in academic achievement or a widening of the racial gap in academic achievement after the ban.JEL codesI21; I24

The Impact of Teach for America on Non-Test Academic Outcomes.

Recent evidence on teacher productivity suggests that teachers meaningfully influence non-test academic student outcomes that are commonly overlooked by narrowly focusing on test scores. Despite a large number of studies investigating the Teach For America (TFA) effect on math and English achievement, little is known about non-tested academic outcomes. Using administrative data from Miami-Dade County Public Schools, we investigate the relationship between being in a TFA classroom and five non-test student outcomes commonly found in administrative datasets: days absent, days suspended, GPA, classes failed, and grade repetition. We validate our use of non-test student academic outcomes to assess differences in teacher productivity using the quasi-experimental teacher switching methods of Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014) and fail to reject the null hypothesis of unbiasedness in most cases in elementary and middle school, although in some cases standard errors are large. We find suggestive evidence that students taught by TFA teachers in elementary and middle schools were less likely to miss school due to unexcused absences and suspensions compared with students taught by non-TFA teachers in the same school, although point estimates are very small. Other outcomes were found to be forecast-unbiased but showed no evidence of a TFA effect.

Teacher Attrition and Mobility During the Teach for America Clustering Strategy in Miami-Dade County Public Schools

Retaining effective teachers is a key policy priority nationwide, particularly in districts that serve large numbers of disadvantaged students. We investigate whether a change in the Miami region’s Teach for America (TFA) placement strategy was accompanied by changes in teacher attrition and mobility decisions. Our results suggest that the increased concentration of TFA corps members in schools was associated with a reduction in TFA mobility across schools after the first year of service, but showed no association with the overall retention of corps members in the district after the 2-year commitment. We also find that TFA corps members eventually retained beyond the 2-year commitment performed substantially better in mathematics during their first 2 years of teaching: evidence of positive selection into postcommitment retention.

Benefit or Burden? On the Intergenerational Inequity of Teacher Pension Plans

Most public school teachers in the United States are enrolled in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using administrative microdata from four states, combined with national pension funding data, we show these plans have accumulated substantial unfunded liabilities—effectively debt—owing to previous plan operations. On average across 49 state plans, an amount that exceeds 10% of current teachers’ earnings is being set aside to pay for previously accrued pension liabilities. To the extent that the costs of the unfunded liabilities drag on teacher compensation, they may exacerbate problems of teacher recruitment and retention. We briefly discuss three policy changes that could end or reduce the accumulation of unfunded liabilities in educator pension plans: (1) transition teachers to defined-contribution retirement plans, (2) transition teachers to cash-balance retirement plans, and (3) tighten the link between funding and benefit formulas within the current defined-benefit structure.

Examining Spillover Effects From Teach For America Corps Members in Miami-Dade County Public Schools:

This article examines Teach For America’s (TFA) placement strategy in Miami-Dade County Public Schools, in which large numbers of TFA corps members are placed as clusters into a targeted set of disadvantaged schools, to investigate whether the large-scale infusion of TFA corps members into these schools induced broader improvements across the school. Using 6 years of administrative data from the district, we exploit variation in TFA density over time within schools to measure the extent to which increases in density were associated with improvements in student test scores. We find that many of the schools chosen to participate in the cluster strategy experienced large subsequent gains in mathematics achievement. These gains were driven in part by the direct effect of having larger numbers of classrooms staffed by effective TFA teachers. However, we do not find any evidence that the clustering strategy led to any spillovers on schoolwide performance.