School choice may lead to improve­ments in school pro­duc­tiv­i­ty if par­ents’ choic­es reward effec­tive schools and pun­ish inef­fec­tive ones. This mech­a­nism requires par­ents to choose schools based on causal effec­tive­ness rather than peer char­ac­ter­is­tics. We study rela­tion­ships among par­ent pref­er­ences, peer qual­i­ty, and causal effects on out­comes for appli­cants to New York City’s cen­tral­ized high […]

In a flipped class­room, an increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar ped­a­gog­i­cal mod­el, stu­dents view a video lec­ture at home and work on exer­cis­es with the instruc­tor dur­ing class time. Advocates of the flipped class­room claim the prac­tice not only improves stu­dent achieve­ment, but also ame­lio­rates the achieve­ment gap. We con­duct a ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­al at West Point and find that the flipped class­room pro­duced short term gains in Math and no effect in Economics, but that the flipped mod­el broad­ened the achieve­ment gap: effects are dri­ven by white, male, and high­er achiev­ing stu­dents. We find no long term aver­age effects on stu­dent learn­ing, but the widened achieve­ment gap per­sists. Our find­ings demon­strate fea­si­bil­i­ty for the flipped class­room to induce short term gains in stu­dent learn­ing; how­ev­er, the exac­er­ba­tion of the achieve­ment gap, the effect fade-out, and the null effects in Economics sug­gest that edu­ca­tors should exer­cise cau­tion when con­sid­er­ing the mod­el.

The edu­ca­tion­al mis­match hypoth­e­sis asserts that stu­dents are hurt by affir­ma­tive action poli­cies that place them in selec­tive schools for which they wouldn’t oth­er­wise qual­i­fy. We eval­u­ate mis­match in Chicago’s selec­tive pub­lic exam schools, which admit stu­dents using neigh­bor­hood based diver­si­ty cri­te­ria as well as test scores. Regression dis­con­ti­nu­ity esti­mates for appli­cants favored by affir­ma­tive […]