Steven G. Rivkin

Disruption versus Tiebout improvement: the costs and benefits of switching schools

Most students change schools at some point in their academic careers, but some change very frequently and some schools experience a great deal of turnover. Many researchers, teachers, and administrators argue that mobility harms students, particularly disadvantaged students in high turnover, inner city schools. On the other hand, economists emphasize the importance of Tiebout type moves to procure better school quality. Empirical research on mobility has yielded inconclusive results, no doubt in part because of small sample sizes and the difficulty of separating mobility effects from other confounding factors. This paper develops a general theoretical model that identifies school quality changes resulting from moving. The empirical analysis, which exploits the rich longitudinal data of the UTD Texas Schools Project, disentangles the disruption effects associated with moves from changes in school quality. The results suggest that there is a small average increase in school quality for district switchers, while there is no evidence that those switching schools within districts obtain higher school quality on average. Perhaps most important for policy, the results also show a significant externality from moves: students in schools with high turnover suffer a disadvantage, and the cost is largest for lower income and minority students who typically attend much higher turnover schools.

Inferring Program Effects for Special Populations: Does Special Education Raise Achievement for Students with Disabilities?

Most discussion of special education has centered on the costs of providing mandated programs for children with disabilities and not on their effectiveness. As in many other policy areas, inferring program effectiveness is difficult because students not in special education do not provide a good comparison group. By following students who move in and out of targeted programs, however, we are able to identify program effectiveness from changes over time in individual performance. We find that the average special education program significantly boosts mathematics achievement of special-education students, particularly those classified as learning-disabled or emotionally disturbed, while not detracting from regular-education students. These results are estimated quite precisely from models of students and school-by-grade-by-year fixed effects in achievement gains, and they are robust to a series of specification tests.

Harming the best: How schools affect the black-white achievement gap

Sizeable achievement differences by race appear in early grades, but substantial uncertainty exists about the impact of school quality on the black-white achievement gap and particularly about its evolution across different parts of the achievement distribution. Texas administrative data show that the overall growth in the achievement gap between third and eighth grade is higher for students with higher initial achievement and that specific teacher and peer characteristics including teacher experience and peer racial composition explain a substantial share of the widening. The adverse effect of attending school with a high black enrollment share appears to be an important contributor to the larger growth in the achievement differential in the upper part of the test score distribution. This evidence reaffirms the major role played by peers and school quality, but also presents a policy dilemma. Teacher labor market complications, current housing patterns, legal limits in segregation efforts, and uncertainty about the overall effects of specific desegregation programs indicate that effective policy responses will almost certainly involve a set of school improvements beyond simple changes in peer racial composition and the teacher experience distribution.

Education and economic growth Some cross-sectional evidence from Brazil☆

Abstract Capital, labor, human capital and technical progress are the four principal sources of growth of aggregate real output. Based on data from individual Brazilian states in 1970 and 1980, an aggregate meta-production function relating aggregate real output of each state to capital, labor, average education and time is estimated. It is found that one additional year of average education per person of the labor force increases real output by approximately 20 percent. However, there is also evidence that this large measured effect of average education may be due to the existence of a threshold effect in average education at between three and four years. Of the four sources of growth, technical progress, or equivalently total factor productivity, is the most important, accounting for approximately 40 percent of the growth in Brazilian output in the 1970s; followed by human capital, accounting for approximately 25 percent. Physical capital and labor together account for the remainder.

Instruction Time, Classroom Quality, and Academic Achievement

It seems likely the magnitude of any causal link between achievement and instruction time depends upon the quality of instruction, the classroom environment and the rate that students translate classroom time into added knowledge. In this article, we use panel data methods to investigate instruction time effects in the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment data. The empirical analysis shows that achievement increases with instruction time and that the increase varies by both the amount of time and the classroom environment. The results indicate that school circumstances are important determinants of the benefits and desirability of increased instruction time.

Improving educational outcomes while controlling costs

An analysis of educational outcomes and costs in U.S. schools shows rapidly increasing expenditures per student but little in the way of increased student performance. A decomposition of costs in the 20th century shows the powerful effects of decreased pupil-teacher ratios and increased costs of teachers. In the postwar period, however, teacher salaries have fallen relative to other college graduates. Other analyses of education production functions indicate that pupil-teacher ratios and currently structured salaries are not directly related to student learning. The obvious implication is that output based incentives are required to improve performance at acceptable costs.