Helen F. Ladd

Teacher-Student Matching and the Assessment of Teacher Effectiveness

Administrative data on fifth grade students in North Carolina shows that more highly qualified teachers tend to be matched with more advantaged students, both across schools and in many cases within them. This matching biases estimates of the relationship between teacher characteristics and achievement; we isolate this bias in part by focusing on schools where students are distributed relatively evenly across classrooms. Teacher experience is consistently associated with achievement; teacher licensure test scores associate with math achievement. These returns display a form of heterogeneity across students that may help explain why the observed form of teacher-student matching persists in equilibrium.

The Impacts of Charter Schools on Student Achievement: Evidence from North Carolina

Using an individual panel data set to control for student fixed effects, we estimate the impact of charter schools on students in charter schools and in nearby traditional public schools. We find that students make considerably smaller achievement gains in charter schools than they would have in public schools. The large negative estimates of the effects of attending a charter school are neither substantially biased, nor substantially offset, by positive impacts of charter schools on traditional public schools. Finally, we find suggestive evidence that about 30 percent of the negative effect of charter schools is attributable to high rates of student turnover.

School Vouchers: A Critical View

This paper marshals available evidence from both the U.S. and other countries on the effects of private schools, peer effects, and competition to demonstrate that that any gains in overall student achievement from a large scale voucher program are at best likely to be small. Moreover, given the tendency of parents to judge schools in part by the characteristics of a schools students, a universal voucher system would undoubtedly harm large numbers of disadvantaged students. Although the case for a small means tested voucher program is somewhat stronger, it will do little to improve education for low-performing students.

Population Growth, Density and the Costs of Providing Public Services:

Recent policy interest in managing local population growth has drawn attention to the fiscal pressures that population growth imposes on local governments. This paper uses 1985 data for 247 large county areas to determine the separate impacts on local government spending of two dimensions of residential development patterns, the rapidity of population growth and the intensity of land use as measured by gross residential densities. Based on a regression model that controls for other determinants of per capita spending, this study provides careful estimates of the nonlinear impacts of population growth and population density on three types of local government spending: current account spending, capital outlays and spending on public safety. The study balances the engineering and planning view that greater population density lowers the costs of providing public services by documenting a U-shaped relationship between spending and density; except in sparsely populated areas, higher density typically increases public sector spending. In addition, the results suggest that rapid population growth imposes fiscal burdens on established residents in the form of lower service levels.

Implementing value-added measures of school effectiveness: getting the incentives right

Abstract As part of their efforts to hold schools accountable, several states now calculate and publicize value-added measures of school effectiveness. This paper provides a careful evaluation of the value-added approach to measuring school success with particular attention to its implementation as a tool for increasing student achievement. In practice, even the more sophisticated of the measures currently in use fail to account for differences in resources, broadly defined, across schools and to address the problem of measurement error. The authors find that, as implemented, value-added measures of school effectiveness distort incentives and are likely to discourage good teachers and administrators from working in schools serving concentrations of disadvantaged students. The authors use a large longitudinally-matched data set of fifth grade students in North Carolina to document that approximately two-fifths of the differentially favorable outcome for schools serving advantaged students result from statistical bias associated with measurement error and that correcting for the measurement error leads to significant changes in the relative rankings of schools.

The Dallas School Accountability and Incentive Program: An Evaluation of Its Impacts on Student Outcomes

Consistent with the current emphasis on performance-based accountability in K-12 education, several states and a few local districts have introduced school-based incentive programs. This paper provides one of the few evaluations of such programs on student outcomes. Using a panel data set for schools in large Texas cities, it measures the gains in student performance in Dallas relative to those in other cities. It finds positive and relatively large effects for Hispanic and white seventh graders, but not for black students. Potentially positive effects also emerge for drop out rates and principal turnover rates.

Teachers’ Perceptions of Their Working Conditions: How Predictive of Planned and Actual Teacher Movement?

This quantitative study examines the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of their working conditions and their intended and actual departures from schools. Based on rich administrative data for North Carolina combined with a 2006 statewide survey administered to all teachers in the state, the study documents that working conditions are highly predictive of teachers’ intended movement away from their schools, independent of other school characteristics such as the racial mix of students. Moreover, school leadership, broadly defined, emerges as the most salient dimension of working conditions. Although teachers’ perceptions of their working conditions are less predictive of one-year actual departure rates than of intended rates, their predictive power is still on a par with that of other school characteristics. The models are estimated separately for elementary, middle and high school teachers and generate some policy-relevant differences among the three levels.

Mimicking of Local Tax Burdens Among Neighboring Counties

This article contributes to the small literature on the determination of local taxes by testing hypotheses about whether local officials consider the tax burdens of neigh boring counties when making their own decisions about taxes on residents. Based on data for large U.S. counties, evidence of tax mimicking appears first in compar isons of the degree of clustering of tax burdens among neighboring counties within metropolitan areas to that among nonneighboring counties within states. In addition, regression equations based on both 1978 and 1985 data confirm the presence of tax mimicking for total local tax burdens and for property tax burdens, but not for sales tax burdens.

Intergenerational conflict reconsidered: county demographic structure and the demand for public education

Abstract The observation that the elderly may be less willing to support K-12 education than other voters raises the specter of decreasing support for schools as the US population ages. In this article, we examine that support using a national panel of counties over time. Building on earlier models estimated for state level data, we conclude that the direct differential effect within each county of the presence of elderly households is not distinguishable from zero but that the elderly have the potential to affect spending on education indirectly through where they live. To the extent that the elderly live in counties with low proportions of children, the tax price of education in other counties is higher which could in turn reduce financial support for education in those counties. Thus one cannot predict the impact of an increasing share of the elderly on education spending without paying attention to how the elderly are likely to be distributed among counties relative to children.

The Benefits and Costs of Residential Mobility Programmes for the Poor

By enabling low-income families to move from high- to low-poverty neighbourhoods, tenant-based rental subsidies for poor families have the potential to reduce the degree of economic segregation in the US. This paper provides a framework for identifying the benefits and costs of such housing mobility programmes, and reviews the available empirical evidence on the net effects of quasi- or formal randomised housing mobility experiments. The best available evidence suggests that families in public housing who receive rental subsidies to move from high- to lower-poverty areas may experience reductions in welfare receipt and improvements in health status. Such moves may also improve schooling outcomes for children and reduce their problem behaviours. The benefits to society from these changes are substantial when measured in dollar terms. Unfortunately, very little is currently known about the effects of housing-mobility efforts on non-participants.