Three essays on urban schooling /

Three essays on urban schooling /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Sartain, Lauren, author.
Imprint:	2015. Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2015
Description:	1 electronic resource (185 pages)
Language:	English
Format:	E-Resource Dissertations
Local Note:	School code: 0330
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10773085

Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:	University of Chicago. degree granting institution.
ISBN:	9781321882971
Notes:	Advisors: Dan A. Black Committee members: Kerwin Charles; Ofer Malamud. This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. This item must not be sold to any third party vendors. This item must not be added to any third party search indexes. Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-11(E), Section: A. English
Summary:	National education policy has directed local school districts and states to initiate sweeping school reforms for the last 15 years in an unprecedented way. In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act went into place, requiring states to put a focus on testing and school accountability. As part of this work, many states built longitudinal data systems for the first time, making it possible to provide families with information about school performance. Two of the chapters in this dissertation provide evidence on the effectiveness of high-performing schools on students' academic outcomes and high school experiences. As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Race to the Top grant competition beginning in 2009 induced state legislatures across the country to mandate dramatic retooling of teacher evaluation systems. The first chapter explores the effect of teacher evaluation reform on the teacher labor market. Taken together, this dissertation adds to the discussion of the impact of recent national policies on educators and students. Central to the Obama's administration's education reform platform is the importance of teachers. The first chapter explores the relationship between teacher evaluation reform, teacher mobility, and the distribution of teacher quality. Traditional teacher evaluation systems have come under scrutiny for not identifying, supporting, and, if necessary, removing low-performing teachers from the classroom. Leveraging the experimental rollout of a pilot evaluation system in Chicago, we find that, while there was no main effect of the pilot on teacher exit, the pilot system increased exit for low-rated and non-tenured teachers. Further, teachers who exited were lower performing than those who stayed and those who replaced them. These findings suggest that reformed evaluation systems can induce low-performing teachers to exit schools and may also improve the overall quality of the teacher labor force. Another point of policy emphasis in recent years has been school choice. Chapters two and three contribute to the literature of school choice and the impact of providing different high school options to students on their outcomes. Specifically the second chapter examines the effects of selective public high schools on the outcomes of students, particularly for students who live in high-poverty neighborhoods. Prestigious selective enrollment public schools have been in existence in the U.S. for more than 100 years. Recent work in economics has suggested that many of the apparent advantages of attending these schools are due to selection. See Adulkadiroglu, Angrist, and Pathak (2014) and Dobbie and Fryer (2014) for evidence from Boston and New York City that these schools have little impact on outcomes such as test scores, college enrollment, and graduation. Public selective enrollment high schools (SEHS) are a relatively newer phenomenon in Chicago. However, admission quotas based on student's neighborhood socioeconomic (SES) rank and the availability of survey data on a variety of other outcomes such as peer relationships and safety allow us to examine whether these schools have different impacts on students coming from more disadvantaged neighborhoods and whether these schools may be highly desirable to parents and students because of impacts on other outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity design and outcomes for 9 th-grade students we find that students enrolling in a SEHS have similar test scores to those not admitted, even for students coming from the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. We also find SEHS students earn lower GPAs. On outcomes previously unmeasured, we find that students attending a SEHS rate high school as more important for their future and report better peer support, higher levels of teacher-student trust, and safer schools. We find no evidence that students from low SES neighborhoods benefit more from attending a SEHS than students from high SES neighborhoods. The third chapter takes a step back to look at the effects of attending higher-performing high schools, expanding beyond the selective options described in the second chapter. In school districts nationwide, policymakers are implementing reforms that rest on a simple assumption: Students do better when they attend schools with high achievement levels. Vouchers, school closing policies, and school choice policies all aim to improve student outcomes by shifting students from lower-performing schools to higher-performing schools. Yet, existing research is insufficient to tell us whether, how, and under what circumstances students benefit from attending higher-achieving schools. In this paper, we find that the effects of attending a higher-performing school depend on the level of performance of the school and on the outcomes being studied. At the top-performing selective (exam) schools, there are no academic benefits---test scores are not significantly better and GPAs are lower, but students experience better environments in terms of safety, peer behavior, relationships with teachers, and suspension rates. There are similar trade-offs from attending high-achieving nonselective schools rather than lower-achieving schools, but with some benefits for test scores. Moving out of bottom-tier schools to mid-tier schools has benefits for graduation rates and feelings of safety at school, but not for other outcomes.