Related UI Researchers

Publications on Education

Do charter schools draw good teachers from traditional, mainstream public schools? Using a 1997-2007 panel of all North Carolina public school teachers, I find nuanced patterns of teacher quality flowing into charter schools. High rates of inexperienced and uncertified teachers moved to charter schools, but among certified teachers changing schools, the on-paper qualifications of charter movers were better or no different than the qualifications of teachers moving to comparable mainstream schools. Also, charter movers were more effective in math and reading instruction, relative to other mobile teachers. Charter movers compared less favorably, however, to non-mobile teachers and colleagues within their sending schools. The distribution of classroom performance among future charter teachers, adjusted for sampling error, was significantly lower than the distribution for exclusively mainstream teachers.

A college education strongly affects whether or not children from poor or low-income families move up the economic ladder when they become adults. But they are less likely to enroll in either two- or four-year colleges, and less likely to complete a degree when they do, relative to those from middle- and upper-income families — even after accounting for differences in academic preparation. We review current federal efforts to help low-income students attend college, and recommend new policies that would improve their academic preparation, provide more effective guidance on selecting and paying for college, and improve retention and graduation rates.

On the horizon is a push to monitor outcomes for children and youth across the systems that serve them, including education, child welfare, and healthcare. With healthcare reforms and changes to the No Child Left Behind Act looming, and as state child welfare agencies strive to comply with federal requirements, ideas and insights about performance measurement are especially timely.

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we consider how parental education relates to four outcomes in the children's generation: education, lifetime earnings, health, and wealth. By focusing on parents' and children's ranks, we characterize relative mobility in terms of distributions of outcomes and can see patterns that even a relatively disaggregated analysis, like a quintile-based transition matrix, can obscure. Our results show relatively high intergenerational mobility except at extremes, where very low-ranked parents are much more likely to have very low-ranked children and very high-ranked parents are much more likely to have very high-ranked children.

One fifth of school children have at least one foreign-born parent. Soon, more than 30 percent of all students will come from homes where English is not the primary language. Linguistic diversity is not unique to New York City, Los Angeles, or other very large school districts in traditional gateway cities. The public schools of Rochester, New York, for example, serve students from 35 language groups. Students in Rochester, Minnesota, collectively speak 65 foreign languages. Children, families, and communities with international roots bring important strengths to schools, but they may be isolated from resources and networks that other Americans take for granted. Whether these families settle disproportionately in neighborhoods with other poor families or in new immigrant communities, already overwhelmed, underresourced, or ill-prepared schools may be unable to respond.