Randall Reback

True for Your School? How Changing Reputations Alter Demand for Selective U.S. Colleges.

There is a comprehensive literature documenting how colleges’ tuition, financial aid packages, and academic reputations influence students’ application and enrollment decisions. Far less is known about how quality-of-life reputations and peer institutions’ reputations affect these decisions. This article investigates these issues using data from two prominent college guidebook series to measure changes in reputations. We use information published annually by the Princeton Review—the best-selling college guidebook that formally categorizes colleges based on both academic and quality-of-life indicators—and the U.S. News and World Report—the most famous rankings of U.S. undergraduate programs. Our findings suggest that changes in academic and quality-of-life reputations affect the number of applications received by a college and the academic competitiveness and geographic diversity of the ensuing incoming freshman class. Colleges receive fewer applications when peer universities earn high academic ratings. However, unfavorable quality-of-life ratings for peers are followed by decreases in the college’s own application pool and the academic competitiveness of its incoming class. This suggests that potential applicants often begin their search process by shopping for groups of colleges where non-pecuniary benefits may be relatively high.

Fiscal Impacts of Charter Schools: Lessons from New York

This brief argues that charter school programs can have direct fiscal impacts on school districts for two reasons. First, operating two systems of public schools under separate governance arrangements can create excess costs. Second, charter school financing policies can distribute resources to or away from districts. Using the city school districts of Albany and Buffalo in New York, we demonstrate how fiscal impacts on local school districts can be estimated. We find that charter schools have had fiscal impacts on these two school districts. Finally, we argue that charter schools policies should seek to minimize any avoidable excess costs created by charter schools and ensure that the burden of any unavoidable excess costs is equitably distributed across traditional public schools, charter schools, and the state. We offer concrete policy recommendations that may help to achieve these objectives.

Fifty Ways to Leave a Child Behind Idiosyncrasies and Discrepancies in States’ Implementation of NCLB

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act required states to adopt accountability systems measuring student proficiency on state-administered exams. The federal legislation contained several strict requirements for NCLB implementation, such as escalating student proficiency targets that reach 100% proficiency by 2014. But it also gave states considerable flexibility to interpret and implement components of NCLB. Using a data set we constructed, this paper is the first national study examining which schools failed during the early years of NCLB and which performance targets they failed to meet. We explore how states’ NCLB implementation decisions were related to their schools’ failure rates, which ranged from less than 1% to more than 80% across states. Wide cross-state variation in failure rates resulted from how states’ decisions interacted with each other and with school characteristics, like enrollment size, grade span, and ethnic diversity. Subtle differences in policy implementation may cause dramatic differences in measured outcomes.

Entry Costs and the Supply of Public School Teachers

This article examines the impact of entry costs on the likelihood that recent college graduates will become public school teachers. I combine Barrons ratings of college selectivity, data on the types of teacher certification programs offered by colleges, and NELS data that track members of the high school class of 1988 into college and into the workforce. Restricting the sample to individuals who were not considering teaching careers when they were high school seniors, I estimate the marginal effect of the availability of undergraduate teacher certification programs on the likelihood that these individuals will become teachers. The results suggest that graduates from highly selective colleges are very sensitive to entry costs related to the number of years of schooling required for certification, while graduates from less selective colleges are not marginally influenced by these costs.

Tales from the Other Side of Education Finance: Other Districts' Schools, Other Pathways into Teaching, and Other People's Preferences

This policy brief discusses research concerning general equilibrium effects in three areas of education policy and discusses the policy implications of this research. Each section includes a brief summary of one chapter from my doctoral dissertation (Reback 2003), a review of the general literature on the chapter’s topic, and a discussion of policy implications and unresolved questions meriting further research. The three topics covered are the general equilibrium effects of school choice programs on housing markets, college course offerings on teacher labor markets, and the composition of the electorate on voters’ behavior in local public school referenda.