Many large urban school districts match students to schools using algorithms that incorporate an element of random assignment. We introduce two simple empirical strategies to harness this randomization for measuring the causal effects of individual schools. In applications to data from Denver and New York City, we find that our models yield highly reliable school effectiveness […]
Can Successful Schools Replicate? Scaling Up Boston’s Charter School Sector
Can schools that boost student outcomes reproduce their success at new campuses? We study a policy reform that allowed effective charter schools in Boston, Massachusetts to replicate their school models at new locations. Estimates based on randomized admission lotteries show that replication charter schools generate large achievement gains on par with those produced by their parent campuses. The average effectiveness of Boston’s charter middle school sector increased after the reform despite a doubling of charter market share. An exploration of mechanisms shows that Boston charter schools reduce the returns to teacher experience and compress the distribution of teacher effectiveness, suggesting the highly standardized practices in place at charter schools may facilitate replicability.
Research Design Meets Market Design: Using Centralized Assignment for Impact Evaluation
Special Education and English Language Learner Students in Boston Charter Schools
Special education and English Language Learners experience large achievement gaps and account for a disproportionate amount of school spending. Whether and how well charter schools serve special needs students remains a central controversy in the charter school debate. I use admissions lotteries from nearly every charter school in Boston to estimate the effects of charter enrollment on special needs students’ classification and achievement. Charter schools remove special needs classifications and move special education students into more inclusive classrooms at a rate over two times higher than traditional public schools. Despite this reduction in special needs services, charters increase special needs students’ test scores, likelihood of meeting a high school graduation requirement, and likelihood of earning a state merit scholarship. Charters benefit even the most disadvantaged special needs students: those with the lowest test scores and those who receive the most services at the time of lottery. Non-experimental evidence suggests that the classification removal explains at most 26 percent of the achievement gains for special needs students and has no detrimental effect. The results show that special needs students can achieve gains without the traditional set of special needs services in the charter environment.