Education

The road to the American dream has a four-year pit stop on a college quadrangle. This fall, more than 18 million collegians, including 4 million freshmen, will test that axiom amid an agitated economy and rising concerns about college affordability. Meanwhile, several million new would-be workers - college and high school grads and dropouts - are fighting for good jobs.

Between 2007 and 2008, real incomes fell and poverty rose in the United States, Institute Fellow Harry Holzer testified before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. Even if the recession ends this year, rising unemployment will mean that real income keeps falling while poverty increases for a few more years — and almost certainly by much more than occurred between 2007 and 2008. It will likely take several years beyond 2010 before real income and poverty fully recover from the effects of the downturn.

This series examines youth vulnerability and risk-taking behaviors on several outcomes for young adults, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort. Notable results suggest youth follow one of four patterns in connecting to the labor market and school in the transition to adulthood: consistently-connected, later-connected, initially-connected, or never-connected. Second generation Latinos make a fairly smooth transition to young adulthood, but are less likely to engage in post-secondary schooling than whites. Youth from low-income families, distressed neighborhoods, and youth with poor mental health engage in relatively higher levels of adolescent risk behaviors and have relatively lower earnings and levels of connectedness in early adulthood.

The fact sheets examine the transition to adulthood for two groups of youth using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort. Low-income African Americans are compared to low-income white youth, and youth from low-income "high-work" families are compared to low-income youth from moderate-work and nonworking (i.e., low-work) families. Low-income African American youth are vulnerable to lower employment and earnings despite comparable levels of high school education and lower risk-taking behaviors. Low-income youth from high-work families show stronger connections to school or work compared to youth from low-work families, but have comparable employment and earnings during the transition to adulthood.

When given the opportunity, many teachers choose to leave schools serving poor, low-performing, and minority students. While substantial research has documented this phenomenon, far less effort has gone into understanding what features of the working conditions in these schools drive this relatively high turnover rate. This paper explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover decisions by other teachers within the same school. Teachers’ perceptions of the school administration have by far the greatest influence on teacher-retention decisions. This effect of administration is consistent for first-year teachers and the full sample of teachers and is confirmed by a survey of teachers who have recently left teaching in New York City.

Low-income African American youth engage in fewer risky behaviors than low-income white youth, a new Urban Institute analysis of federal data reveals. This research on young blacks is part of a collection of eight brief studies on vulnerable youth, risky behavior, and the transition to adulthood.

Using data from North Carolina, this paper examines the frequency, incidence, and consequences of teacher absences in public schools, as well as the impact of an absence disincentive policy. The incidence of teacher absences is regressive: when schools are ranked by the fraction of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, schools in the poorest quartile averaged almost one extra sick day per teacher than schools in the highest income quartile, and schools with persistently high rates of teacher absence were much more likely to serve low-income than high-income students. The authors find that absences are associated with lower student achievement in elementary grades and that the demand for discretionary absences is price-elastic. Estimates suggest that a policy intervention which simultaneously raised teacher base salaries and broadened financial penalties for absences could both raise teachers' expected income and lower districts' expected costs.

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states have been required to set minimum proficiency standards that virtually all students must meet by 2014. Using longitudinal, student-level test score data from seven states between 2002-03 and 2005-06 this paper addresses the following research questions: (1) Has NCLB increased achievement among lower-performing students? ; (2) Have these gains come at the expense of students who are already proficient or far below the proficiency target? Identification is achieved by exploiting the fact that in the early years of NCLB, not all grades counted for purposes of determining AYP. Thus the estimate of the NCLB effect is based on a comparison of outcomes in high-stakes vs. low-stakes years. The authors find consistent evidence of an achievement trade-off in the hypothesized direction, though the effects on any given student are not large. They find mixed evidence that students far below the proficient level have been harmed by NCLB; in fact at higher grade levels they appear to have benefitted. Effects of NCLB on efficiency, while positive, appear to be modest.

Schools that have not made adequate yearly progress in increasing student academic achievement are required, under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), to offer children in low-income families the opportunity to receive supplemental educational services (SES). In research conducted in Milwaukee Public Schools, the authors explore whether parents and students are aware of their eligibility and options for extra tutoring under NCLB, and who among eligible students registers for SES. Using the best information available to school districts, the authors estimate the effects of SES in increasing students’ reading and math achievement. They find no average impacts of SES attendance on student achievement gains and use qualitative research to explore possible explanations for the lack of observed effects.

The relatively poor academic achievement of black and Hispanic students has been a national concern since the passage of the Elementary Secondary and Education Act (ESEA) in 1963. Frustrated with relatively slow progress in closing these educational gaps, the most recent reauthorization of the ESEA, the No Children Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) attempts to employ rigorous accountability standards to speed progress. At about the same time, Florida implemented a change in its A+ Plan for Education that focused on the educational gains of “low-performing” students. This paper examines whether either of these accountability systems improved the academic outcomes of black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students in Florida. Schools labeled as failing or near-failing in Florida’s system tend to boost performance of students in these subgroups, while schools presented with incentives under NCLB to improve subgroup performance appear to be much less likely to do so. However, Hispanics appear to benefit from the NCLB sub-grouping requirements if they attend schools with low accountability pressure under Florida’s grading system.