Brian Kisida

Learning to Think Critically: A Visual Art Experiment

This article examines whether exposure to the arts has an effect on the ability of students to engage in critical thinking. We conduct a randomized controlled trial involving 3,811 students who were assigned by lottery to participate in a School Visit Program at the newly opened Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Students who participated in the School Visit Program demonstrated significantly stronger critical thinking skills when analyzing a new painting. These effects were larger for students from more disadvantaged backgrounds. In light of recent declines in the availability of the arts for disadvantaged populations, our results have important policy implications for efforts to restore and expand access to the arts.

School Governance and Information: Does Choice Lead to Better-Informed Parents?

Political theorists have long argued that low information levels among average citizens provide the rationale for public policy to be guided by experts and elites. Other scholars counter that deference to elites perpetuates and even exacerbates the problem. Here we look at school choice programs as an environment to elucidate this important debate. Theories of school choice suggest that parents need to and can make informed decisions. Choice parents should have more incentives to gather information about their child’s schools than parents without schooling options. Alternatively, a lack of any increase in information levels among school choosers would suggest that having choices per se is not sufficient motivation to overcome the costs of information gathering. Analyzing data from an experimental evaluation of the Washington Scholarship Fund, we find that presenting parents with choices does lead to significantly higher levels of accurate information on measures of important school characteristics.

Creating Cultural Consumers The Dynamics of Cultural Capital Acquisition

The theories of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility have largely shaped the study of the effects of cultural capital on academic outcomes. Missing in this debate has been a rigorous examination of how children actually acquire cultural capital when it is not provided by their families. Drawing on data from a large-scale experimental study of schools participating in an art museum’s educational program, we show that students’ exposure to a cultural institution has the effect of creating ‘‘cultural consumers’’ motivated to acquire new cultural capital. We find that the experience has the strongest impact on students from more disadvantaged backgrounds. As such, our analysis reveals important aspects about the nature of cultural capital acquisition. To the extent that the evidence supporting cultural mobility is accurate, it may be because disadvantaged children can be activated to acquire cultural capital, thus compensating for family background characteristics and changing their habitus.

Conducting Experiments in Public Management Research: A Practical Guide

ABSTRACT This article provides advice on how to meet the practical challenges of experimental methods within public management research. We focus on lab, field, and survey experiments. For each of these types of experiments we outline the major challenges and limitations encountered when implementing experiments in practice and discuss tips, standards, and common mistakes to avoid. The article is multi-authored in order to benefit from the practical lessons drawn by a number of experimental researchers.

Urban School Choice and Integration: The Effect of Charter Schools in Little Rock

We examine the impact of charter schools on school integration in the Little Rock, Arkansas metropolitan area. We find that charters are less likely to be hyper-segregated than traditional public schools (TPS), but TPS have compositions more closely reflecting the region. However, differences in each case are slight. Using student-level data to follow students who left TPS for charters, we find that most transfers improve integration levels at the schools they left. This finding is attributed to the fact that most transfers involve minority students leaving predominately minority schools or White students leaving predominantly White schools.

Customer Satisfaction and Educational Outcomes: Experimental Impacts of the Market-Based Delivery of Public Education

ABSTRACT School choice, through private school vouchers or direct government subsidies, is a mechanism of outsourcing government services in the United States, Europe, South America, and the Pacific Rim. While extensive research exists on the effects of private school choice programs, nearly all focus on test score outcomes. Lost in the heated debates about the effectiveness of private school vouchers is substantial discussion of the effects on parental satisfaction. Drawing from a federally funded evaluation of a means-tested private school choice program in Washington, DC, we examine whether customer satisfaction is greater when education is delivered through a market-based governance structure. Because the program was oversubscribed in its early years of operation, vouchers were awarded by lottery, allowing us to experimentally determine the impacts. Our analysis reveals evidence that the program had a sustained positive impact on parental satisfaction. Moreover, positive student achievement and attainment impacts strengthen the validity of parental satisfaction as a reliable outcome measure.

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.

A knowing ear: The effect of explicit information on children’s experience of a musical performance

Program notes are distributed before performances at arts centers throughout the country, but research on the effects of this kind of explicit information on audience experience has led to contradictory findings. This study experimentally manipulated the kind of information given to 506 schoolchildren attending a music performance at a local arts center, and assessed the effects of this information on their enjoyment of, attention to, and comprehension of the performance. Results suggest that explicit information of the sort found in a program note can elevate the attention children pay to a performance and their comprehension of it. Program notes did not as a rule elevate enjoyment, except in the case of a subgroup of participants for whom the performance was likely a new experience. This difference suggests that listeners’ prior experience may be an important mediating factor in the relationship between program notes and enjoyment.

The art of partnerships: Community resources for arts education

The shift from the No Child Left Behind Act to the recently authorized Every Student Succeeds Act could beckon a renaissance of K-12 arts education in the U.S. Over the past decade, NCLB’s increased emphasis on accountability testing in core subjects has coincided with a notable decline in school-based arts exposure. Recognizing this trend and anticipating its consequences, many school districts and arts education advocacy organizations have been tackling this challenge through innovative, community-based partnerships that leverage existing arts education resources, bringing local arts organizations, cultural institutions, artists, and philanthropic efforts together to provide enriching opportunities for students in high-need schools. These partnerships provide models that schools, districts, and states could adopt to strengthen their arts programs.

Science Standards, Science Achievement, and Attitudes about Evolution.

This article explores the relationships between (a) the quality of state science standards and student science achievement, (b) the public’s belief in teaching evolution and the quality of state standards, and (c) the public’s belief in teaching evolution and student science achievement. Using multiple measures, we find no evidence of a relationship between the quality of a state’s science standards and student science achievement. We also examine the relationship between state-level beliefs about evolution and student achievement. Here, we find a positive and consistent relationship between a state’s acceptance of evolution and student science achievement. Our results suggest that the attitudes that the public has toward evolutionary science are strongly related to student science achievement—more so than the quality of state science standards.