Publications Tagged ‘schools’
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Working Paper
Can Homeownership Transform Communities? Evidence on the Impact of Subsidized, Owner-Occupied Housing Investments on the Quality of Local Schools PDF
While recent evidence demonstrates that subsidized investments in owneroccupied housing can lead to increases in property values (Schwartz et al. 2006), the impact of such housing on other community amenities is largely unexamined. Yet, the response of local services to public investments is crucial for policy-makers and community development practitioners who view increasing subsidized homeownership as a mechanism to improve urban neighborhoods. Drawing on evidence from New York City, we examine the impact of subsidized housing on the quality of local schools by studying exogenous variation in city investments in owner and rental units. Specifically, we explore whether – and in what ways – publicly financed investments in owner- or renter-occupied housing made in the late 1980s and 1990s by the City of New York affected the characteristics and performance of local public schools. Our results suggest that the completion of subsidized, owner-occupied housing is associated with a decrease in schools’ percentage of free lunch eligible students, an increase in schools’ percentage of white students, and controlling for these compositional changes, a positive change in pass rates on standardized reading and math exams.
Ingrid Gould Ellen, Colin Chellman, Brian J. McCabe, Amy Ellen Schwartz, & Leanna Stiefel. October 2009.
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Article
Dynamics of School Demographic Change: Immigrant Students and New York City LINK
The authors use a rich data set on New York City public elementary schools to explore how changes in immigrant representation have played out at the school level, providing a set of stylistic facts about the magnitude and nature of demographic changes in urban schools.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Dylan Conger, and Katherine O'Regan. Education and Urban Society. December 2008.
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Chapter
Do Economically Integrated Neighborhoods Have Economically Integrated Schools? LINK
The goal of this book, the first in a series, is to bring policymakers, practitioners, and scholars up to speed on the state of knowledge on various aspects of urban and regional policy. The authors take a fresh look at several different issues (e.g., economic development, education, land use) and conceptualize how each should be thought of. Once the contributors have presented the essence of what is known, as well as the likely implications, they identify the knowledge gaps that need to be filled for the successful formulation and implementation of urban and regional policy.
Ingrid Gould Ellen, Amy Ellen Schwartz, and Leanna Stiefel. Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects (Urban Institute Press). December 2008.
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Policy Brief
Public Housing and Public Schools: How Do Students Living in NYC Public Housing Fare in School? PDF
This report examines the school performance of children living in NYCHA housing and finds that children living in NYCHA housing perform less well on standardized math and reading tests than other students, even after controlling for the characteristics of the individual students and the schools they attend.
Amy Armstrong, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Brian McCabe, Amy Ellen Schwartz. November 2008.
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Article
Disentangling the Racial Test Score Gap in a Large Urban School District: The Contribution of School LINK
We examine the size and distribution of the gap in test scores across races within New York City public schools and the factors that explain these gaps. While gaps are partially explained by differences in student characteristics, such as poverty, differences in schools attended are also important. At the same time, substantial within-school gaps remain and are only partly explained by differences in academic preparation across students from different race groups. Controlling for differences in classrooms attended explains little of the remaining gap, suggesting little role for within-school inequities in resources. There is some evidence that school characteristics matter. Race gaps are negatively correlated with school size—implying small schools may be helpful. In addition, the trade-off between the size and experience of the teaching staff in urban schools may carry unintended consequences for within-school race gaps.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Leanna Stiefel. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. December 2007.
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Article
School Finance Court Cases and Disparate Racial Impact LINK
Although analyses of state school finance systems rarely focus on the distribution of funds to students of different races, the advent of racial discrimination as an issue in school finance court cases may change that situation. In this article, we describe the background, analyses, and results of plaintiffs’ testimony regarding racial discrimination in Campaign for Fiscal Equity Inc. v. State of New York. Plaintiffs employed multiple regression and public finance literature to show that New York State’s school finance system had a disparate racial impact on New York City students. We review the legal basis for disparate racial impact claims, with particular emphasis on the role of quantitative statistical work, and then describe the model we developed and estimated for the court case. Finally, we discuss the defendants’rebuttal, the Court’s decision, and conclude with observations about the role of analysis in judicial decision making in school finance.
Schwartz, Amy Ellen, Leanna Stiefel, Robert Berne, and Colin Chellman. Education and Urban Society, 37(2), pp 151-173. January 2005.
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Article
What’s Happened to the Price of College? Quality Adjusted Net Price Indices for 4 Year College LINK
In this paper we estimate hedonic models of the (consumer) price of college to construct quality-adjusted net price indexes for U.S. four-year colleges, where the net price of college is defined as tuition and fees minus financial aid. For academic years 1990–91 to 1994–95, we find adjusting for financial aid leads to a 22 percent decline in the estimated price index for all four year colleges, while quality adjusting the results leads to a further, albeit smaller, decline. Nevertheless, public comprehensive colleges, perhaps an important gateway to college for students from low-income backgrounds, experienced the largest net price increases.
Schwartz, Amy Ellen and Benjamin P. Scafidi. Journal of Human Resources, 39(3), pp. 723-745. May 2004.
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Article
The Impact of School Reform on Student Performance LINK
This paper evaluates the impact of the New York Networks for School Renewal Project, a whole school reform initiated by the Annenberg Foundation as part of a nationwide reform strategy. It uses data on students in randomly chosen control schools to estimate impacts on student achievement, using an intent-to-treat design. After controlling for student demographic, mobility, and school characteristics, the authors find positive impacts for students attending reform schools in the fourth Grade, mixed evidence for fifth Grade, and slight to no evidence for sixth Grade. On average, there is a small positive impact. The paper illustrates how relatively inexpensive administrative data can be used to evaluate education reforms.
Schwartz, Amy Ellen, Leanna Stiefel, and Dae Yeop Kim. Journal of Human Resources, 39(2), pp. 500-522. February 2004.
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Article
Immigrants and the Distribution of Resources within an Urban School District LINK
In New York City, where almost 14% of elementary school pupils are foreign-born and roughly half of these are “recent immigrants,” the impact of immigrant students on school resources may be important. While immigrant advocates worry about inequitable treatment of immigrant students, others worry that immigrants drain resources from native-born students. In this article, we explore the variation in school resources and the relationship to the representation of immigrant students. To what extent are variations in school resources explained by the presence of immigrants per se rather than by differences in student educational needs, such as poverty or language skills, or differences in other characteristics, such as race?
Schwartz, Amy Ellen and Leanna Stiefel. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 26(4), pp. 303 - 327. December 2003.
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Article
Immigrant Children and Urban Schools: Evidence from NYC on Segregation and its Consequences LINK
For several decades, social scientists have tracked the fiscal health of American central cities with some degree of concern. Suburbanization, spawned by technological innovations, consumer preferences, and at least to some extent by government policy, has selectively pulled affluent households out of urban jurisdictions. The leaders of these jurisdictions are left with the prospect of satisfying more concentrated demands for services with a dwindling tax base, realizing that further increasing the burden they place on residents will simply drive more of them away. In the process, cities have become concentrated centers of poverty, joblessness, crime, and other social pathologies.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Katherine O’Regan, and Amy Ellen Schwartz. Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs. December 2001.
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Article
Race-Based Neighborhood Projection: A Proposed Framework for Understanding New Data LINK
This paper outlines the race-based, neighbourhood projection hypothesis which holds that, in choosing neighbourhoods, households care less about present racial composition than they do about expectations about future neighbourhood conditions, such as school quality, property values and crime. Race remains relevant, however, since households tend to associate a growing minority presence with structural decline. Using a unique data-set that links households to their neighbourhoods, this paper estimates both exit and entry models and then constructs a simple simulation model that predicts the course of racial change in different communities. Doing so, the paper concludes that the empirical evidence is more consistent with the race-based projection hypothesis than with other common explanations for neighbourhood racial transition.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould. Urban Studies, 37(9), pp. 1513-1533. July 2000.
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Working Paper
Differences in Neighborhood Conditions Among Immigrants and Native-Born Children in New York City PDF
In this paper we use a specially created data set for New York City to evaluate whether the context of children’s neighborhoods varies by their immigrant status, and, if so, whether the relationship between neighborhood context and immigrant status varies by children’s race and ethnicity. Overall, when compared to native-born children, immigrant children live in neighborhoods with higher rates of teenage fertility, and higher percentages of students in local schools scoring below grade level in math and of persons receiving AFDC, but lower rates of juvenile detention. However, further comparisons revealed that race/ethnicity is by far a more potent predictor of where children live than is immigrant status per se. Specifically, we find evidence of a hierarchy of access to advantageous neighborhoods, whereby native- and foreign-born white children have access to the most-advantaged neighborhoods while native-born black children consistently live in the least-advantaged neighborhoods, as measured by our four indicators. In between these extremes, the relative ranking of foreign-born black and native- and foreign-born Hispanic children varies, depending on the measure of the neighborhood context.
Rosenbaum, Emily, Samantha Friedman and Michael H. Schill. July 1999.
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Article
Blaine’s Wake: School Choice, the First Amendment, and State Constitutional Law LINK
Focuses on the issue of school choice, while giving an explanation on the awkward position in which the United States federalism has placed on the ideal of religious freedom. Details on the history of the Blaine Amendment; Role of the court in determining the status of school choice in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Vermont; Review of the federal case law related to school choice.
Viteritti, Joseph P. Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 21(3), pp. 657. June 1998.
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Chapter
Education Finance LINK
The Handbook of Public Finance provides a definitive source, reference, and text for the field of public finance. In 18 chapters it surveys the state of the art - the tradition and breadth of the field but also its current status and recent developments.
Schwartz, Amy Ellen, Leanna Stiefel, and Ross Rubenstein. The Handbook of Public Finance (Marcel Dekker Publishers). January 1998.
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Article
Public Characteristics and Expenditures on Public Services: An Empirical Analysis LINK
This article investigates the provision of police and education services using a new method of indexing quantities of local public services that isolates movements in shadow prices and quantities in expenditure data. Demand equations for two public characteristics (the crime safety rate and high school reading test pass rates) and two categories of expenditures (education and police services) are simultaneously estimated for New Jersey municipalities. The relationship between public services and public characteristics is estimated, and both the “own” and the “cross “-effects of public services are found to be empirically significant. Increases in expenditures between 1982 and 1983 are found to largely reflect increases in quantities of education services and in prices of police services.
Schwartz, Amy Ellen. Public Finance Review, 25(2), pp. 163-181. February 1997.