Successful implementation of evidence-based educational practices at scale is of great importance but has presented significant challenges. In this article, the authors address the following questions: How does the level of on-site technical assistance affect student outcomes? Do teachers’ fidelity of treatment implementation and their perceptions of school climate mediate effects on student performance? Using a randomized control trial at scale, the authors examine Kindergarten Peer Assisted Learning Strategies, which previously has been shown to be effective in increasing student reading achievement. Analyzing data from 2 years and three sites, the analyses show that the level of on-site technical support has significant effects on reading achievement gains, are robust across multiple sites, and are mediated by fidelity of implementation within teachers’ classrooms.
In this study, we propose and test a mechanism for the effect of neighborhood of residence on school outcomes: absenteeism that results from exposure to danger on the way to school. We first determine the most efficient route to school using public transportation for 4,200 first-time freshmen in Baltimore City public high schools. Then, we link the specific streets along the most efficient route to incident-level crime data from the Baltimore Police Department. We find that students whose estimated routes require walking along streets with higher violent-crime rates have higher rates of absenteeism throughout the year. We also show that absenteeism is not associated with exposure to dangerous streets while riding on public transit and exposure to property crime. These conclusions hold with and without adjustments for student demographic characteristics, prior school attendance, violent crime around homes and schools, and unobserved differences related to school preference and neighborhood selection.
Transportation is one of many potential obstacles that students might face as they attempt to attend school, but there are few opportunities to identify the unique contribution of transportation to school attendance. We apply models of commuting stress developed for adult commuters to students in an open enrollment school district to examine whether commuting difficulty plays a part in school absence. By comparing residentially stable students with themselves as they transition from eighth to ninth grade, we identify how changes in estimated school transportation are related to changes in attendance. We find that all students miss more days in high school than they did in middle school and that changing transit demands are associated with an increase in absences.
There has been a long-standing concern among education researchers and policy makers that public school choice may lead to increased racial isolation. Improving on aggregate comparisons, I examine the sorting of students into charter schools by tracking individual students from their charter school of enrollment back to the school they were enrolled in immediately prior to the switch to a charter school, allowing for a direct comparison of school racial demographics between the two sectors. I find evidence that the process of charter school choice in Indianapolis leads to higher degrees of racial isolation and less diversity within schools than is present in the underlying process of student school transfers in the public school district from which a majority of these students came.
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