Research
Research
Works in Progress
This paper assesses the implications of heterogeneity in teacher effects for student achievement and classroom segregation. Leveraging administrative data, I estimate a teacher value-added model that incorporates heterogeneity in teacher effects on test scores across five student demographics: English language learner (ELL) status, economic disadvantage, disability, gender, and race. There is substantial variation in teacher effects, particularly for ELL students and students with disabilities. Using these estimates, I identify student-teacher reassignment policies that maximize achievement under varying constraints. Reassignment yields notable gains in average test scores (up to 0.04σ in both math and reading). A weak correlation between comparative advantage for teaching ELL students and a teacher's absolute quality allows ELL students to benefit from large match effects without sacrificing the overall quality of their assigned teachers. As a result, reassignment significantly narrows the achievement gap between ELL and English-proficient students, with modest reductions across the other dimensions. However, these improvements are accompanied by large increases in classroom segregation, indicating a trade-off between raising achievement and maintaining classroom diversity.
In a large urban setting with school choice, we examine whether transportation poses a barrier to attending high-rated high schools. By analyzing public transportation travel times, we find significant racial disparities in student travel times to the nearest high-rated school. Black students experience the longest travel times and are the least likely to rank a high-rated school as their top choice. We estimate a discrete choice model using ranked school choice data to estimate parental preferences for schools and their distaste to distance. Next, we simulate new express bus routes to high-rated schools from low socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods that are poorly connected to the public transportation network. Our findings suggest that with reduced travel times, up to 25% of students would switch to a high-rated school as their first choice. This indicates that transportation time significantly influences school choice decisions, and targeted policies, such as express bus routes, could encourage families to select higher-rated schools.
We study the prospects for changes in school priorities to reduce income segregation in a context of centralized school assignment, accounting for behavioral responses to school offers. Promoting integration is a central objective for large urban school districts in the US, and reforms to school assignment priorities are a prominent means of pursuing this goal. Such efforts may be constrained by students’ decisions to exit the public school system in response to less-preferred school offers. Using data on kindergarten applicants to the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), we show that offers of spots at first-choice schools boost the likelihood that applicants remain in OUSD. Nevertheless, simulations show that policy reforms giving priority for low-income students at high-income schools can substantially reduce segregation with minimal impacts on retention in the district.