Are Measured School Effects Just Sorting?

Submitted by Urban Insight on Wed, 07/25/2012 - 14:58
Author

David I. Levine and Gary Painter

Year Published
2003
Abstract
Youths who share a school and neighborhood often have similar
academic achievement, but some studies find all or most of this apparent
effect is due to sorting, not to the neighborhood itself. We present a
collage of evidence from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey
(NELS) indicating that a significant fraction of the apparent correlation is
causal, rather than solely due to sorting.
We first show that the importance of school effects is robust to very
rich measures of family background. We then use the fact that the
characteristics of the high school that students will attend are an
additional indicator of family background. This measure can be used as
an instrument to identify family background separately from neighborhood
and junior high school effects. Even after this correction, the point
estimate of school effects on student achievement remains large and
statistically significant. Finally, we use regression and seminonparametric matching methods to show that the test scores of youths
who change schools begin to converge with those of their new classmates.
Research Category

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