Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

Inside the War on Poverty: The Impact of Food Stamps on Birth Outcomes

This paper evaluates the health impacts of a signature initiative of the War on Poverty: the introduction of the modern Food Stamp Program (FSP). Using variation in the month FSP began operating in each U.S. county, we find that pregnancies exposed to FSP three months prior to birth yielded deliveries with increased birth weight, with the largest gains at the lowest birth weights. We also find small but statistically insignificant improvements in neonatal mortality. We conclude that the sizable increase in income from FSP improved birth outcomes for both whites and African Americans, with larger impacts for African American mothers.

Do School Lunches Contribute to Childhood Obesity

This paper assesses whether school lunches contribute to childhood obesity. I employ two methods to isolate the causal impact of school lunches on obesity. First, using panel data, I find that children who consume school lunches are more likely to be obese than those who brown bag their lunches even though they enter kindergarten with the same obesity rates. Second, I leverage the sharp discontinuity in eligibility for reduced-price lunch to compare children just above and just below the eligibility cutoff. Students are more likely to be obese, and weigh more if they are income-eligible for reduced price school lunches.

First in the Class? Age and the Education Production Function

We estimate the effects of relative age in kindergarten using data from an experiment where children of the same age were randomly assigned to different kindergarten classmates. We exploit the resulting experimental variation in relative age in conjunction with variation in expected kindergarten entry age based on birthdate to account for negative selection of some of the older school entrants. We find that, holding constant own age, having older classmates on average improves educational outcomes, increasing test scores up to eight years after kindergarten, and raising the probability of taking a college-entry exam. These findings suggest that delaying kindergarten entry, or so-called academic “redshirting,” does not harm other children—and may in fact benefit them—consistent with positive spillovers from higher-scoring or better-behaved peers.

What Have Researchers Learned from Project STAR

Project STAR was a large-scale randomized trial of reduced class sizes in grades K-3. Because of the scope of the experiment, it has been used in many policy discussions. For example, the California state-wide Class Size Reduction was justified in part on the successes of Project STAR. Recent (failed) proposals for Federal assistance for class size reductions in the Senate were motivated by Project STAR research. Even the recent discussion of small schools often conflates the notion of small schools and smaller classrooms. Because of the importance of Project STAR, it has been studied by many scholars looking at a wide variety of outcomes and even exploiting the randomization using its variation to understand variations in inputsother aspects of the education production function that do not directly relate to class size. This paper provides an overview of the academic literature using the Project STAR experiment.

The economic costs of childhood poverty in the United States

This paper attempts to estimate the aggregate annual costs of child poverty to the US economy. It begins with a review of rigorous research studies that estimate the statistical association between children growing up in poverty and their earnings, propensity to commit crime, and quality of health later in life. We also review estimates of the costs that crime and poor health impose on the economy. Then we aggregate all of these average costs per poor child across the total number of children growing up in poverty in the United States to obtain our estimate of the aggregate costs of the conditions associated with childhood poverty to the US economy. Our results suggest that these costs total about

The Impacts of Expanding Access to High-Quality Preschool Education

500 billion per year, or the equivalent of nearly 4% of gross domestic product (GDP). More specifically, we estimate that childhood poverty each year: (1) reduces productivity and economic output by an amount equal to 1.3% of GDP, (2) raises the costs of crime by 1.3% of GDP, and (3) raises health expenditures and reduces the value of health by 1.2% of GDP.

The Impact of Children's Public Health Insurance Expansions on Educational Outcomes

President Obama’s “Preschool for All” initiative calls for dramatic increases in the number of 4-year-olds enrolled in public preschool programs and in the quality of these programs nationwide. The preschools proposed by the initiative share many characteristics with the universal preschools that have been offered in Georgia and Oklahoma since the 1990s. This study draws together data from multiple sources to estimate the impacts of these “model” state programs on preschool enrollment and a broad set of family and child outcomes. We find that the state programs have increased the preschool enrollment rates of children from lower- and higher-income families alike. Among lower-income families, our findings also suggest that the programs have increased the amount of time mothers and children spend together on activities such as reading, the likelihood that mothers work, and children’s test performance as late as eighth grade. Among higher-income families, however, we find that the programs have shifted children from private to public pre-schools, resulting in less of an impact on overall enrollment but a reduction in childcare expenses, and that they have had no positive effect on children’s later test scores.

Is Being in School Better? the Impact of School on Children's BMI When Starting Age is Endogenous

This paper examines the impact of public health insurance expansions through both Medicaid and SCHIP on childrens educational outcomes, measured by 4th and 8th grade reading and math test scores, available from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We use a triple difference estimation strategy, taking advantage of the cross-state variation over time and across ages in childrens health insurance eligibility. Using this approach, we find that test scores in reading, but not math, increased for those children affected at birth by increased health insurance eligibility. A 50 percentage point increase in eligibility is found to increase reading test scores by 0.09 standard deviations. We also examine whether the improvements in educational outcomes can be at least partially attributed to improvements in health status itself. First, we provide further evidence that increases in eligibility are linked to improvements in health status at birth. Second, we show that better health status at birth (measured by rates of low birth-weight and infant mortality), is linked to improved educational outcomes. Although the methods used to support this last finding do not completely eliminate potentially confounding factors, we believe it is strongly suggestive that improving childrens health will improve their classroom performance.

Adequate (or Adipose?) Yearly Progress: Assessing the Effect of "No Child Left Behind" on Children's Obesity

In this paper, we investigate the impact of attending school on body weight and obesity using a regression-discontinuity design. As is the case with academic outcomes, school exposure is related to unobserved determinants of weight outcomes because some families choose to have their child start school late (or early). If one does not account for this endogeneity, it appears that an additional year of school exposure results in a greater BMI and a higher probability of being overweight or obese. When we compare the weight outcomes of similar age children with one versus two years of school exposure due to regulations on school starting age, the significant positive effects disappear, and most point estimates become negative, but insignificant. However, additional school exposure appears to improve weight outcomes of children for whom the transition to elementary school represents a more dramatic change in environment (those who spent less time in childcare prior to kindergarten).

LIMITATIONS OF EXPERIMENTS IN EDUCATION RESEARCH

This paper investigates how accountability pressures under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) may have affected students’ rate of overweight. Schools facing pressure to improve academic outcomes may reallocate their efforts in ways that have unintended consequences for childrens health. To examine the impact of school accountability, we create a unique panel dataset containing school-level data on test scores and students’ weight outcomes from schools in Arkansas. We code schools as facing accountability pressures if they are on the margin of making Adequate Yearly Progress, measured by whether the schools minimum-scoring subgroup had a passing rate within 5 percentage points of the threshold. We find evidence of small effects of accountability pressures on the percent of students at a school who are overweight. This finding is little changed if we controlled for the schools lagged rate of overweight, or use alternative ways to identify schools facing NCLB pressure.