Here are a few school-related studies from the recent American Economic Association meeting in Philadelphia.  (Emphasis added throughout.)

 

The Effect of High School Peers on Juvenile Delinquency

Songman Kang, Hanyang University 

In this paper, I examine the extent to which the presence of delinquent peers influences students’ delinquency risk, using large administrative data from North Carolina public high schools. Fixed effect regression estimates, which exploit the year-to-year variation in the share of delinquents in a 9th grade cohort within a school, show that having more delinquent peers in school significantly increases a 9th grader’s delinquency risk. Furthermore, I find evidence that 1) negative spillovers largely come from peers with similar demographic characteristics and 2) the magnitude of spillovers is positively correlated with the extent of academic tracking in high school. These findings suggest that students who are from similar demographic background and spend more classroom time together are more likely to develop close relationships and influence each other’s behavior.

 

School Boards and Student Segregation

Hugh Macartney, Duke University and John D. Singleton, Duke University 

This paper provides the first causal evidence about how elected local school boards affect student segregation across schools. The key identification challenge is that the composition of a school board is potentially correlated with characteristics of the district, such as the extent and nature of household sorting. We overcome this issue using a regression discontinuity design at the electoral contest level, exploiting quasi-random variation from narrowly-decided elections. Such an approach is made possible by a unique dataset, which combines matched information about North Carolina school board candidates (including vote shares and political affiliation) with time-varying district-level racial and economic segregation outcomes. Focusing on the political composition of school board members, two-stage least squares estimates reveal that (relative to their non-Democrat counterparts) Democrat board members decrease racial segregation across schools: an electoral victory that shifts the board to majority Democrat causes a reduction in the black dissimilarity index across schools of 8 percentage points, while the election of even a single Democrat in the minority leads to a reduction of 15 percentage points. These estimates significantly differ from their OLS counterparts, indicating that the latter are biased upward (understating the effects). Our findings suggest that school boards realize such reductions in segregation by shifting attendance zones, a novel measure of which we construct without the need for exact geocoded boundaries. We identify two associated knock-on effects in districts with high proportions of black students: the initial boundary adjustments are somewhat counteracted through additional neighborhood sorting and board actions to reduce segregation give rise to “white flight” out of the district.

(Note: I responded to the authors of this study here.)

 

New Evidence on National Board Certification as a Signal of Teacher Quality 

Irina Horoi, Amazon and Moiz Bhai, University of Arkansas at Little Rock  

Using longitudinal data from North Carolina that contains detailed identifiers, we estimate the effect of having a National Boards for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) teacher on academic achievement. We identify the effects of an NBPTS teacher exploiting multiple sources of variation including the traditional lagged achievement models, twin and sibling effects, and aggregate grade level variation. Our preferred estimates show that students taught by National Board certified teachers have higher math and reading scores by 0.04 and 0.01 of a standard deviation. We find that an NBPTS math teacher increases the present value of students’ lifetime income by $48,000.