Working Papers:
When Resources Meet Relationships: The Returns to Personalized Supports for Low-Income Students
Non-Technical Summary | Slides | Short Paper (October 2023)
Abstract
Children from low-income families face persistent educational and economic disadvantages. This paper studies Communities In Schools (CIS), a program that places coordinators in high-poverty schools to connect struggling students with personalized support. CIS is the largest program of its kind in the US, reaching 2 million students each year—nearly three times the size of Head Start—and, unlike most programs of this scale, is funded largely by private philanthropy and local governments. Using the staggered rollout of CIS, we find that the program boosts test scores for struggling students, and that these improvements persist, ultimately increasing high-school completion and adult earnings. These long-run effects can be closely forecast from changes in short-run outcomes, with non-cognitive measures playing a central role. CIS emphasizes personalization as a core feature of its model, and our results are consistent with this claim: coordinators tailor services to distinct student needs, yet students with different needs still see similarly large long-run gains. CIS delivers returns that compare favorably to other major education interventions, such as class-size reductions.
Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class
Conditionally Accepted at American Economic Review
Non-Technical Summary | County Level Marriage Patterns
Abstract
Americans rarely marry outside of their race or class group. We distinguish between two possible explanations: a lack of exposure to other groups versus a preference to marry within group. We develop an instrument for neighborhood exposure to opposite-sex members of other race and class groups using variation in sex ratios among nearby birth cohorts in childhood neighborhoods. We then test whether increased exposure results in more interracial (white-Black) and interclass (top-to-bottom parent income quartile) marriages. Increased exposure to opposite-sex members of other class groups generates a substantial increase in interclass marriage, but increased exposure to other race groups has no detectable effect on interracial marriage. We use these results to estimate a spatial model of the marriage market and quantify the impact of reducing residential segregation in general equilibrium. For small changes in exposure, the model implies effects in line with recent estimates from policy experiments. We then use the model to assess the overall contribution of segregation and find that residential segregation has large effects on interclass, but not interracial, marriage.
Every Day Counts: Absenteeism and the Returns to Education
in High-Poverty Schools
Abstract
Why do students in high-poverty schools perform worse academically and in the labor market than their peers in low-poverty schools? We show that a key difference is how regularly students attend school. To estimate the effect of improving school-wide attendance, we construct a leave-out instrument based on neighboring schools, using transitory shocks to absences caused by factors like respiratory illnesses. We establish the validity of the instrument by showing that only shocks that occur before outcomes are measured have an impact on those outcomes. In high-poverty schools, we find that reducing absences from the 75th to the 25th percentile of the distribution would increase high school graduation rates by 2.3 percentage points and raise average earnings at age 25 by $3,600. Our results suggest that absenteeism may account for up to one-third of the achievement gap between high- and low-poverty schools. In the second part of our analysis, we further demonstrate that policies focused on improving attendance in high-poverty schools can reduce these outcome disparities. Nationwide adoption of “Communities in Schools,” the country’s largest student support program, could reduce the achievement gap by 20%, largely through its impact on attendance.
Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author and do not represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has ensured appropriate access and use of confidential data and has reviewed these results for disclosure avoidance protection (Project 7519874: Segregation and Marriage CBDRB-FY23-CES014-009, Student Supports CBDRB-FY23-CES014-028)