Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

States increasingly lean on charter organizations to take responsibility for their most underperforming turnaround schools. These efforts employ a different constellation of regulation, market forces, and community involvement that constitute more complex environments for charters. This article relates the experience of operators within the Tennessee Achievement School District adapting to stringent performance demands, weak markets, and a vocal community. Results show the pressures this environment placed on operators to improve outcomes with restricted controls while simultaneously acting as community organizations dedicated to a wide range of goals. We conclude that while charter organizations can support school turnaround, the demands of a contested and complex environment require well-resourced organizations capable of meeting diverse expectations from varying stakeholders.

Discipline reformers claim that suspensions negatively affect suspended students, while others suggest reforms have unintended consequences for peers. Using student panel data from the School District of Philadelphia, we implement student fixed effects and instrumental variable (IV) strategies to examine the consequences of suspensions for offending students and their peers. A suspension decreases math and reading achievement for suspended students. The effects are robust to IV estimates leveraging a district-wide policy change in suspension use. Suspensions are more salient for students who personally experience suspension than for their peers. Exposure to suspensions for more serious misconduct has very small, negative spillovers onto peer achievement, but does not change peer absences.

Most U.S. public school teachers participate in defined benefit retirement plans, which base benefits on years of service and their last few years of salary. These plans are often backloaded and include sharp economic incentives. We consider the implications of transitioning to a cost-equivalent defined benefit plan under which teachers would earn benefits more evenly across their careers. We show that new teachers who are risk averse would prefer the alternative plan. The magnitude is often substantial. For example, for an entering teacher the certainty equivalent for the CB plan is about 2.1 times the certainty equivalent for the respective FAS plan in New York City and 29 times larger than the respective heavily backloaded FAS plan in Philadelphia.

This article uses a difference-in-differences strategy to evaluate the impact of a one-to-one laptop program. Teaching practices changed with the introduction of the program, and the district worked to make wireless Internet more accessible in the community. We find that while short-term impacts of the program were statistically insignificant, math scores improved by 0.13 standard deviations in the medium term. Time spent on homework stayed constant, but students spent more of their homework time using a computer. We also investigate the impact of the program on other measures of student behavior as well as heterogeneity in impacts. A limitation of this study is that we cannot distinguish which aspects of the program were most important in improving student outcomes.

We examine the role of information in college matching behavior of low- and high-income students, exploiting a state automatic admissions policy that provides some students with perfect a priori certainty of college admissions. We find that admissions certainty encourages college-ready low-income students to seek more rigorous universities. However, low-income students who are less college ready are not influenced by admissions certainty and are more sensitive to college entrance exams scores. Most students also prefer campuses with students of similar demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Only highly qualified, low-income students choose institutions where they have fewer same-race and same-income peers. These results suggest that automatic admission policies can reduce income-based inequities in college quality by encouraging low-income students who are highly qualified for college to seek out better matched institutions.