Sarah Cohodes

The Effect of Child Health Insurance Access on Schooling: Evidence from Public Insurance Expansions

Although a sizable literature analyzes the effects of public health insurance programs on short-run health outcomes, little prior work has examined their long-term effects. We examine the effects of public insurance expansions among children in the 1980s and 1990s on their future educational attainment. We find that expanding health insurance coverage for low-income children increases the rate of high school and college completion. These estimates are robust to only using federal Medicaid expansions and mostly are due to expansions that occur when the children are not newborns. Our results indicate that the long-run benefits of public health insurance are substantial.

Teaching to the Student: Charter School Effectiveness in Spite of Perverse Incentives.

Recent work has shown that Boston charter schools raise standardized test scores more than their traditional school counterparts. Critics of charter schools argue that charter schools create those achievement gains by focusing exclusively on test preparation, at the expense of deeper learning. In this paper, I test that critique by estimating the impact of charter school attendance on subscales of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System and examining them for evidence of score inflation. If charter schools are teaching to the test to a greater extent than their counterparts, one would expect to see higher scores on commonly tested standards, higher-stakes subjects, and frequently tested topics. Despite incentives to reallocate effort away from less frequently tested content to highly tested content, and to coach to item type, I find no evidence of this type of test preparation. Boston charter middle schools perform consistently across all standardized test subscales.

School Accountability, Postsecondary Attainment and Earnings

We study the impact of accountability pressure in Texas public high schools in the 1990s on postsecondary attainment and earnings, using administrative data from the Texas Schools Project. Schools respond to the risk of being rated Low Performing by increasing student achievement on high-stakes exams. Years later, these students are more likely to have attended college and completed a four-year degree, and they have higher earnings at age 25. However, we find no overall impact of accountability pressure to achieve a higher rating, and large negative impacts on attainment and earnings for the lowest-scoring students.

The Strategic Data Project's Strategic Performance Indicators

Strategic Performance Indicators (SPIs) are summary measures derived from parallel, descriptive analyses conducted across educational agencies. The SPIs are designed to inform agency management and efforts to improve student outcomes. We developed the SPIs to reveal patterns common across partner agencies, to highlight exceptions to those patterns, and to provide tools for educational agencies to understand their own successes and challenges. We present two examples of SPI briefs and highlight specific steps partner agencies have taken in response to such analyses. Our goal is that, with data, the SPIs will catalyze educational agencies to engage in deep investigation. If educational systems must rely on academic researchers to make progress on core management challenges, progress will be slow. The ability to use and analyze administrative data must be integrated into the everyday management of educational systems, much as it has been in many other sectors of the modern economy.