Publications on Elementary/Secondary Schools

Over the last decade, the District of Columbia implemented bold steps to improve its public schools while also experiencing population growth, property value increases, and strong city fiscal health. But its child population (0-17 years old) remained essentially the same and a dwindling share of the city's children was attending the public schools. This policy report summarizes analysis from the Quality Schools and Healthy Neighborhoods: Research Report that describes the relationships between education, housing, and neighborhood development in the District, as well as provides policy recommendations for how to make the District of Columbia a more family-friendly city.

Over the last decade, the District of Columbia implemented bold steps to improve its public schools while also experiencing population growth, property value increases, and strong city fiscal health. But its child population (0-17 years old) remained essentially the same and a dwindling share of the city’s children was attending the public schools. This research report describes in-depth the relationships between education, housing, and neighborhood development in the District of Columbia, and it is the basis for the subsequent policy research report, Quality Schools, Healthy Neighborhoods, and the Future of DC, which outlines recommended policies to make the District a more family-friendly city.

Using a unique longitudinal dataset from Florida, we analyze the impact of classroom peers on individual student performance. Focusing on the influence of peers' fixed characteristics on individual test score gains, we control simultaneously for student and teacher fixed effects. We find some sizable, significant peer effects within nonlinear models, but not with linear specifications. We find peer effects depend on a student's own ability and on the ability of the peers under consideration. Peer effects tend to be smaller when teacher fixed effects are included, a result that suggests co-movement of peer and teacher quality within a student over time.

This two-guide set for evaluators and others interested in evaluation grew out of a National Science Foundation funded effort to improve cross project evaluations. Guide 1, Designing a Cross-Project Evaluation, focuses on evaluation design including identification and operationalization of program goals, building of logic models, and selection of indicators and appropriate measures for these indicators. Guide 2, Collecting and Using Data in Cross-Project Evaluation, lays out multiple issues involved in data collection, strengths and weaknesses of different data collection formats, and methods for ensuring data quality, confidentiality, and the protection of human subjects.

Education policy is important to the discussion of mobility because it serves both as an end and a means to an end in eliminating inequalities. In addition to fostering mobility among those directly benefited by it, the children of beneficiaries may indirectly benefit as well. Thus, properly targeted education programs may enhance outcomes in both present and future generations. This review summarizes the complex and well-developed literature on the interplay between education and inter- and intragenerational economic mobility. (Review 2 of 11.)