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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (9 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2016)
This paper examines the effect of Teach For America (TFA) on the distribution of student achievement in elementary school. It extends previous research by estimating quantile treatment effects (QTE) to examine how student achievement in TFA and non-TFA classrooms differs across the broader distribution of student achievement. It also updates prior distributional work on TFA by correcting for previously unidentified missing data and estimating unconditional, rather than conditional QTE. Consistent with previous findings, results reveal a positive impact of TFA teachers across the distribution of math achievement. In reading, however, relative to veteran non-TFA teachers, students at the bottom of the reading distribution score worse in TFA classrooms, and students in the upper half of the distribution perform better.
    Cover page: Teaching for All? Teach For America's Effects Across the Distribution of Student Achievement
    • Thesis
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2023)

    Recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers and diversifying the teaching force are pressing needs in many school districts. This dissertation aims to understand the policies and programs that address these needs during the hiring process and early years of teacher employment. Study 1 examines the causal effect of a state-level mentoring program for beginning teachers on teacher turnover. The analysis suggests that this mentoring program affects the retention of novice teachers within schools, districts, and the state in different ways. While the programs have a positive impact on novice teacher retention at the state-level, it has no significant impact on school-level retention and may contribute to an increased likelihood of teachers moving to other school districts. In addition, the results suggest that participation in a mentoring program may have greater benefits for teachers of color and those working in less disadvantaged school districts. Study 2 examines, for those who participated in the mentoring program, whether the better matching of mentors and mentees resulted in better retention outcomes. Evidence suggests that novice teacher retention is significantly improved when mentors have prior experience at the novice teacher’s school site. The benefit of school site matches is particularly pronounced in rural, medium-size, and high-poverty districts. Finally, Study 3 analyzes short essay samples written by teacher candidates to understand whether essay characteristics are associated with applicant background, hiring outcomes, and their on-the-job outcomes. Results suggest that there are a number of significant relationships between essay attributes and applicants’ personal and professional backgrounds. Controlling for applicant characteristics, essay attributes identified by machine learning techniques are significantly correlated with essay scores assessed by district recruiters. Essay scores, as assessed by human resource professionals, significantly predict teacher hiring status and on-the-job outcomes. Essay topics, detected by machine learning techniques, are associated with teacher hiring status and value-added in math but have less predictive power for retention and value-added in ELA.

      • Thesis
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2024)

      This dissertation examines various facets of school climate and discipline in three studies. In Study 1, I look at racial disproportionalities in student arrests, particularly with school police presence. This study extends Homer and Fisher’s (2020) work, which finds higher arrest rates and stronger effects of police presence for Black than White students across schools, by investigating school racial compositions and context factors that are associated with the strongest relationships between police presence and higher arrest rates of Black than White students. Results show the largest within-school arrest rate differences between Black and White students in high schools with officers and that schools with lower Black student enrollment percentages show larger Black-White student arrest gaps. In Study 2, I examine the relationship between student discipline receipt and student socioemotional outcomes among elementary school students in a large urban school district from 2016-17 to 2018-19. Results show that students who were disciplined 30 days before they took a socioemotional survey reported lower a sense of belonging at school that was more than half a standard deviation lower than students who were disciplined in the 30 days after they took the survey. In contrast, there were no significant differences in students’ knowledge and perception of rules. Results also suggest that the effect of discipline on students’ sense of belonging may be most acute closer to the disciplinary incident. In Study 3, I examine the relationship between restorative justice practices and student socioemotional outcomes across elementary, middle, and high schools in a large southern California school district. Using school climate survey data on students’ sense of belonging and knowledge and perception of rules, this chapter assesses how such student sentiments change with increasing restorative practice rates in schools. I find evidence that students' sense of belonging and knowledge and perception of rules differ based on school level. These findings suggest that restorative justice practices can show diverging results based on students’ age and developmental stages and that such differences could be taken into account for improved student outcomes.

        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Davis Previously Published Works (2021)
        We apply "value-added" models to estimate the effects of teachers on an outcome they cannot plausibly affect: student height. When fitting commonly estimated models to New York City data, we find that the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading, raising potential concerns about value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness. We consider two explanations: non-random sorting of students to teachers and idiosyncratic classroom-level variation. We cannot rule out sorting on unobservables, but find students are not sorted to teachers based on lagged height. The correlation in teacher effects estimates on height across years and the correlation between teacher effects on height and teacher effects on achievement are insignificant. The large estimated "effects" for height appear to be driven by year-to-year classroom by teacher variation that is not often separable from true effects in models commonly estimated in practice. Reassuringly for use of these models in research settings, models which disentangle persistent effects from transient classroom-level variation yield the theoretically expected effects of zero for teacher value added on height.
          Cover page: Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2014)
          The impact of a baby book intervention on promoting positive reading beliefs and increasing reading frequency for low-income, new mothers (n = 167) was examined. The Baby Books Project randomly assigned low-income, first-time mothers to one of three study conditions, receiving educational books, non-educational books, or no books, during pregnancy and over the first year of parenthood. Home-based data collection occurred through pregnancy until 18 months post-partum. Mothers who received free baby books had higher beliefs about the importance of reading, the value of having resources to support reading, and the importance of verbal participation during reading. The results showed that providing any type of baby books to mothers positively influenced maternal reading beliefs, but did not increase infant-mother reading practices. Maternal reading beliefs across all three groups were significantly associated with self-reported reading frequency when children were at least 12 months of age.
            Cover page: The effect of baby books on mothers' reading beliefs and reading practices
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2015)
            Current educational policies in the United States attempt to boost student achievement and promote equality by intensifying the curriculum and exposing students to more advanced coursework. This paper investigates the relationship between one such effort - California's push to enroll all 8th grade students in Algebra - and the distribution of student achievement. We suggest that this effort is an instance of a "collective effects" problem, where the population-level effects of a policy are different from its effects at the individual level. In such contexts, we argue that it is important to consider broader population effects as well as the difference between "treated" and "untreated" individuals. To do so, we present differences in inverse propensity score weighted distributions investigating how this curricular policy changed the distribution of student achievement. We find that California's attempt to intensify the curriculum did not raise test scores at the bottom of the distribution, but did lower scores at the top of the distribution. These results highlight the efficacy of inverse propensity score weighting approaches for examining distributional differences, and provide a cautionary tale for curricular intensification efforts and other policies with collective effects.
              Cover page: Curricular policy as a collective effects problem: A distributional approach
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2016)
              Prizes - formal systems that publicly allocate rewards for exemplary behavior - play an increasingly important role in a wide array of social settings, including education. In this paper, we evaluate a prize system designed to boost achievement at two high schools by assigning students color-coded ID cards based on a previously low stakes test. Average student achievement on this test increased in the ID card schools beyond what one would expect from contemporaneous changes in neighboring schools. However, regression discontinuity analyses indicate that the program created new inequalities between students who received low-status and high-status ID cards. These findings indicate that status-based incentives create categorical inequalities between prize winners and others even as they reorient behavior toward the goals they reward.
                Cover page: 'Membership Has Its Privileges': Status Incentives and Categorical Inequality in Education
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2014)

                Background/context

                Across the United States, secondary school curricula are intensifying as a growing proportion of students enroll in high-level academic math courses. In many districts, this intensification process occurs as early as eighth grade, where schools are effectively constraining their mathematics curricula by restricting course offerings and placing more students into Algebra I. This paper provides a quantitative single-case research study of policy-driven curricular intensification in one California school district.

                Research questions

                (1a) What effect did 8th eighth grade curricular intensification have on mathematics course enrollment patterns in Towering Pines Unified schools? (2b) How did the distribution of prior achievement in Towering Pines math classrooms change as the district constrained the curriculum by universalizing 8th eighth grade Algebra? (3c) Did 8th eighth grade curricular intensification improve students' mathematics achievement?

                Setting

                Towering Pines is an immigrant enclave in the inner-ring suburbs of a major metropolitan area. The district's 10 middle schools together enroll approximately 4,000 eighth graders each year. The districts' students are ethnically diverse and largely economically disadvantaged. The study draws upon administrative data describing 8th eighth graders in the district in the 2004-20-05 through 2007-20-08 school years.

                Intervention/program/practice

                During the study period, Towering Pines dramatically intensified middle school students' math curricula: In the 2004-20-05 school year 32% of the district's 8th eighth graders enrolled in Algebra or a higher- level mathematics course; by the 2007-20-08 school year that proportion had increased to 84%.

                Research design

                We use an interrupted time-series design, comparing students' 8th eighth grade math course enrollments, 10th grade math course enrollments, and 10th grade math test scores across the four cohorts, controlling for demographics and prior achievement.

                Findings/results

                We find that students' odds of taking higher level mathematics courses increased as this district implemented the state's Algebra mandate. However, even as the district implemented a constrained curriculum strategy, mathematics achievement growth between 6th sixth and 10th grade slowed and the achievement advantages associated with 8th eighth grade Algebra declined.

                Conclusions/recommendations

                Our analyses suggest that curricular intensification increased the inclusiveness and decreased the selectivity of the mathematics tracking regime in Towering Pines middle schools. However, the findings suggest that this constrained curriculum strategy may have may have unintended negative consequences for student achievement.
                  Cover page: Algebra for All: California's Eighth-Grade Algebra Initiative as Constrained Curricula
                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2013)
                  We use quantile treatment effects estimation to examine the consequences of a school voucher experiment across the distribution of student achievement. In 1997, the School Choice Scholarship Foundation granted $1,400 private school vouchers to a randomly-selected group of low-income New York City elementary school students. Prior research indicates that this program had no average effect on student achievement. If vouchers boost achievement at one part of the distribution and hurt achievement at another, zero or small mean effects may obscure theoretically important but offsetting program effects. Drawing upon prior research related to Catholic schools and school choice, we derive three hypotheses regarding the program’s distributional consequences. Our analyses suggest that the program had no significant effect at any point in the skill distribution.
                    Cover page: Distributional Effects of a School Voucher Program: Evidence from New York City
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