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Many observational studies of causal effects occur in settings with clustered treatment assignment. In studies of this type, treatment is applied to entire clusters of units. For example, an educational intervention might be administered to all the students in a school. We develop a matching algorithm for multilevel data based on a network flow algorithm. Earlier work on multilevel matching relied on integer programming, which allows for balance targeting on specific covariates but can be slow with larger data sets. Although we cannot directly specify minimal levels of balance for individual covariates, our algorithm is fast and scales easily to larger data sets. We apply this algorithm to assess a school-based intervention through which students in treated schools were exposed to a new reading program during summer school. In one variant of the algorithm, where we match both schools and students, we change the causal estimand through optimal subset matching to better maintain common support. In a second variant, we relax the common support assumption to preserve the causal estimand by only matching on schools. We find that the summer intervention does not appear to increase reading test scores. In a sensitivity analysis, however, we determine that an unobserved confounder could easily mask a larger treatment effect. * For comments and suggestions, we thank Luke Miratrix and Winston Lin.

In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment system that the Wake County Public School System employed throughout the 2000s to provide evidence on this issue. Although our results show that Wake County Public School System’s socioeconomic-based assignment policy had negligible effects on average levels of segregation across the district, it substantially reduced racial segregation for students who would have attended majority-minority schools under a residence-based assignment policy. The policy also exposed these students to peers with different racial/ethnic backgrounds, higher mean achievement levels, and more advantaged neighborhood contexts. We explore how residential context and details of the policy interacted to produce this pattern of effects and close the article by discussing the implications of our results for research and policy.

Clustered observational studies (COSs) are a critical analytic tool for educational effectiveness research. We present a design framework for the development and critique of COSs. The framework is built on the counterfactual model for causal inference and promotes the concept of designing COSs that emulate the targeted randomized trial that would have been conducted were it feasible. We emphasize the key role of understanding the assignment mechanism to study design. We review methods for statistical adjustment and highlight a recently developed form of matching designed specifically for COSs. We review how regression models can be profitably combined with matching and note best practices for estimates of statistical uncertainty. Finally, we review how sensitivity analyses can determine whether conclusions are sensitive to bias from potential unobserved confounders. We demonstrate concepts with an evaluation of a summer school reading intervention in a large U.S. school district.

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This article explores the origins of youth engagement in school, community and democracy. Specifically, it considers the role of psychosocial or non-cognitive abilities, like grit or perseverance. Using a novel original large-scale longitudinal survey of students linked to school administrative records and a variety of modeling techniques – including sibling, twin and individual fixed effects – the study finds that psychosocial abilities are a strong predictor of youth civic engagement. Gritty students miss less class time and are more engaged in their schools, are more politically efficacious, are more likely to intend to vote when they become eligible, and volunteer more. Our work highlights the value of psychosocial attributes in the political socialization of young people.

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