C. Kirabo Jackson

Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation

The reshuffling of students due to the end of student busing in Charlotte‐Mecklenburg provides a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between changes in student attributes and changes in teacher quality that are not confounded with changes in school or neighborhood characteristics. Comparisons of ordinary least squares and instrumental variable results suggest that spatial correlation between teachers’ residences, students’ residences, and schools could lead to spurious correlation between student attributes and teacher characteristics. Schools that experienced a repatriation of black students experienced a decrease in various measures of teacher quality. I provide evidence that this was primarily due to changes in labor supply.

Do Students Benefit from Attending Better Schools? Evidence from Rule‐based Student Assignments in Trinidad and Tobago*

In Trinidad and Tobago students are assigned to secondary schools after the fifth grade, based on achievement tests, leading to large differences in the school environments to which students of differing initial levels of achievement are exposed. I use instrumental variables based on the discontinuities created by the assignment mechanism and exploit rich data which include students’ test scores at entry and secondary school preferences to address self-selection bias. I find that attending a better school has large positive effects on examination performance at the end of secondary school. The effects are about twice as large for girls than for boys.

Teacher quality at the high school level: The importance of accounting for tracks

Unlike in elementary school, high school teacher effects may be confounded with both selection to tracks and track-level treatments. I document confounding track effects and show that traditional tests for the existence of teacher effects are biased. After accounting for biases, high school algebra and English teachers have smaller test score effects than found in previous studies and value-added estimates are weak predictors of teachers’ future performance. Results indicate that either (a) teachers are less influential in high school than in elementary school or (b) test score effects are a weak measure of teacher quality at the high school level.

DO COLLEGE-PREPARATORY PROGRAMS IMPROVE LONG-TERM OUTCOMES?

This paper presents an analysis of the longer�?run effects of a college�?preparatory program implemented in inner�?city schools that provided teacher training in addition to payments to 11th�? and 12th�?grade students and their teachers for passing scores on Advanced Placement (AP) exams. Affected students passed more AP exams, were more likely to remain in college beyond their first and second years, and earned higher wages. Effects are particularly pronounced for Hispanic students who experienced a 2.5�?percentage�?point increase in college degree attainment and an 11% increase in earnings. While the study is based on nonexperimental variation, the results are robust across a variety of specifications, and most plausible sources of bias are ruled out. The results provide credible evidence that implementing high�?quality college�?preparatory programs in existing urban schools can improve the long�?run educational and labor�?market outcomes of disadvantaged youth.

Reducing Inequality Through Dynamic Complementarity: Evidence from Head Start and Public School Spending

We explore whether early childhood human-capital investments are complementary to those made later in life. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts who were differentially exposed to policy-induced changes in pre-school (Head Start) spending and school-finance-reform-induced changes in public K12 school spending during childhood, depending on place and year of birth. Difference-in-difference instrumental variables and sibling- difference estimates indicate that, for poor children, increases in Head Start spending and increases in public K12 spending each individually increased educational attainment and earnings, and reduced the likelihood of both poverty and incarceration in adulthood. The benefits of Head Start spending were larger when followed by access to better-funded public K12 schools, and the increases in K12 spending were more efficacious for poor children who were exposed to higher levels of Head Start spending during their preschool years. The findings suggest that early investments in the skills of disadvantaged children that are followed by sustained educational investments over time can effectively break the cycle of poverty.

Privately Managed Public Secondary Schools and Academic Achievement in Trinidad and Tobago: Evidence from Rule-Based Student Assignments

Many nations allow private entities to manage publicly funded schools and grant them greater flexibility than traditional public schools. However, isolating the causal effect of attending these privately managed public schools relative to attending traditional public schools is difficult because students who attend privately managed schools may differ in unobservable ways from those who do not. This paper estimates the causal effect on academic outcomes in Trinidad and Tobago as a result of attending privately managed public secondary schools (assisted schools) relative to traditional public secondary schools. In Trinidad and Tobago, students are assigned to secondary schools based on an algorithm that created exogenous variation in school attendance, allowing us to remove self-selection bias. Despite large differences in teacher quality and peer quality across these school types, we find little evidence of any relative benefit in attending an assisted school between the ages of 10 and 15 in terms of dropout rates or examination performance at age 15.

Do Parents Know Best? The Short and Long-Run Effects of Attending The Schools that Parents Prefer

Recent studies document that, in many cases, the schools that parents prefer over others do not improve student test scores. This could be because (a) parents cannot discern schools causal impacts, and/or (b) parents value schools that improve outcomes not well-measured by test scores. To shed light on this, we employ administrative and survey data from Barbados. Using discrete choice models, we document that most parents have strong preferences for the same schools. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we estimate the causal impact of attending a preferred school on a broad array of outcomes. As found in other settings, more preferred schools have better peers, but do not improve short-run test scores. However, for females, these schools confer long-run benefits including reduced teen pregnancy, more educational attainment, increased employment, higher earnings, and improved health. In contrast, for males, the effects are mixed. The pattern for females is consistent with parents valuing school impacts on outcomes not well-measured by test scores, while the pattern for males is consistent with parents being unable to identify schools’ causal impacts.