Sarah Cordes

Moving Matters: The Causal Effect of Moving Schools on Student Performance

Policy makers and analysts often view the reduction of student mobility across schools as a way to improve academic performance. Prior work indicates that children do worse in the year of a school move, but has been largely unsuccessful in isolating the causal effects of mobility. We use longitudinal data on students in New York City public elementary and middle schools to isolate the causal effects of school moves on student performance. We account for observed and time-invariant differences between movers and non-movers using rich data on student sociodemographic and education program characteristics and student fixed effects. To address the potential endogeneity of school moves arising from unobserved, time-varying factors, we use three sets of plausibly exogenous instruments for mobility: first-grade school grade span, grade span of zoned middle school, and building sale. We find that in the medium term, students making structural moves perform significantly worse in both English language arts (ELA) and math, whereas those making nonstructural moves experience a significant increase in ELA performance. In the short term, there is an additional negative effect for structural moves in ELA. These effects are meaningful in magnitude and results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications, instruments, and samples.

In Pursuit of the Common Good: The Spillover Effects of Charter Schools on Public School Students in New York City

A particularly controversial topic in current education policy is the expansion of the charter school sector. This paper analyzes the spillover effects of charter schools on traditional public school (TPS) students in New York City. I exploit variation in both the timing of charter school entry and distance to the nearest charter school to obtain credibly causal estimates of the impacts of charter schools on TPS student performance, and I am among the first to estimate the impacts of charter school co-location. I further add to the literature by exploring potential mechanisms for these findings with school-level data on per pupil expenditures (PPE), and parent and teacher perceptions of schools. Briefly, I find charter schools significantly increase TPS student performance in both English Language Arts and math, and decrease the probability of grade retention. Effects increase with charter school proximity and are largest in TPSs co-located with charter schools. Potential explanations for improved performance include increased PPE, academic expectations, student engagement, and a more respectful and safe school environment after charter entry. The findings suggest that more charter schools in New York City may be beneficial at the margin, and co-location may be mutually beneficial for charter and traditional public schools.