As researchers continue to examine the growing number of charter schools in the United States, they have focused attention on the significant heterogeneity of charter effects on student achievement. Our article contributes to this agenda by examining the achievement effects of virtual charter schools vis-à-vis brick-and-mortar charters and traditional public schools and whether characteristics of teachers and classrooms explain the observed impacts. We found that students who switched to virtual charter schools experienced large, negative effects on mathematics and English/language arts achievement that persisted over time and that these effects could not be explained by observed teacher or classroom characteristics.
This paper examines the impact of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program on student achievement for low-income students in upper elementary and middle school who used a voucher to transfer from public to private schools during the first four years of the program. We analyzed student-level longitudinal data from public and private schools taking the same statewide standardized assessment. Overall, voucher students experienced an average achievement loss of 0.15 SDs in mathematics during their first year of attending a private school compared with matched students who remained in a public school. This loss persisted regardless of the length of time spent in a private school. In English/Language Arts, we did not observe statistically meaningful effects. Although school vouchers aim to provide greater educational opportunities for students, the goal of improving the academic performance of low-income students who use a voucher to move to a private school has not yet been realized in Indiana. C 2018 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.
Early Warning Systems (EWSs) aggregate multiple sources of data to provide timely information to stakeholders about students in need of academic support. There is an increasing need to incorporate relevant data about student behaviours into the algorithms underlying EWSs to improve predictors of student success or failure. Many EWSs currently incorporate counts of course resource use, although these measures provide no information about which resources students are using. We use seven years of data from seven core STEM courses at a large university to investigate the associations between student use of categorized course resources (e.g., lecture or exam preparation resources) and their final course grade. Using logistic regression, we find that students who use exam preparation resources to a greater degree than their peers are more likely to receive a final grade of B or higher. In contrast, students who use more lecture-related resources than their peers are less likely to receive a final grade of B or higher. We discuss the implications of our results for developers deciding how to incorporate categories of course resource usage data into EWSs, for academic advisors using this information with students, and for instructors deciding which resources to include on their LMS site.
Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you.Abstract School choice researchers are often limited to comparing one type of choice with another (e.g., charter schools vs. traditional public schools). One area researchers have not examined is the effects of different school types within the same urban region. We fill this gap by analyzing longitudinal data for students (grades 3-8) in Indianapolis, using student fixed effects models to estimate the impacts of students switching from a traditional public school to a charter, magnet, Catholic, or other private school. We find that students experience no differences in their achievement gains after transferring from a traditional public school to a charter school. However, students switching to magnet schools experience modest annual losses of −0.09 standard deviation (SD) in mathematics and −0.11 SD in English Language Arts. Students switching to Catholic schools also experience annual losses of −0.18 SD in mathematics. These findings are robust to a series of alternative model specifications. Additionally, we find some variability in the mean school type impacts by students' race/ethnicity, English language learner status, and number of years enrolled in a choice school. We discuss our results in the context of the variability of choice school effects across an entire urban area, something future research needs to examine.
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