Domina school2/28/2024 ![]() In this paper we draw upon the work of Sørenson (1970) to articulate and develop empirical measures of five distinct dimensions of school cross-classroom tracking systems: (1) the degree of course differentiation, (2) the extent to which sorting practices generate skills-homogeneous classrooms, (3) the rate at which students enroll in advanced courses, (4) the extent to which students move between tracks over time, and (5) the relation between track assignments across subject areas. While generations of scholars have debated “tracking” and its consequences, the literature fails to account for diversity of school-level sorting practices. Schools utilize an array of strategies to match curricula and instruction to students’ heterogeneous skills. The results suggest that carefully designed school assignment policies can improve school diversity without imposing academic or disciplinary costs on reassigned students. Exploratory analyses suggest that the effects of reassignment do not meaningfully vary by student characteristics or school choice decisions. We find that reassignment modestly boosts reassigned students’ math achievement, reduces reassigned students’ rate of suspension, and has no offsetting negative consequences on other outcomes. Although WCPSS’s controlled school choice policy provided opportunities for reassigned students to opt out of their newly reassigned schools, our analysis indicates that reassigned students typically attended their newly reassigned schools. Between 20, North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) reassigned approximately 25 percent of students with the goal of creating socioeconomically diverse schools. Using an event study design, we leverage data from an innovative socioeconomic school desegregation plan to estimate the effects of reassignment on reassigned students’ achievement, attendance, and exposure to exclusionary discipline. While opponents of such efforts articulate concerns about the consequences of reassignments for students’ educational experiences, little evidence exists regarding these effects, particularly in contemporary policy contexts. Many public school diversity efforts rely on reassigning students from one school to another. Finally, we demonstrate that white or Asian families enroll in their default school at lower rates as the share of Black students increases. We further show that a majority of families enrolled in their district-assigned default school, with Black and Hispanic families more likely than white or Asian families to attend this option. We find that families were offered choice sets containing schools varying racial compositions, but that the racial makeup of schools in families’ choice set systematically varied by schooling type and student race/ethnicity. ![]() We first investigate the schooling choice sets that WCPSS constructed for families and then examine families’ schooling selections. We conduct this exploration within the empirical context of enrollment decisions among families in the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), which used a controlled school choice system to help achieve diversity aims. We build on this work by exploring, both theoretically and empirically, how policy can structure the choices individuals face at each step. Contemporary scholarship on complex decision-making describes a two-step process-1) Editing and 2) Selection- and has emphasized the individual decision-maker’s agency in both steps. This paper conceptualizes segregation as a phenomenon that emerges from the intersection of public policy and individual decision-making. The effects on peer composition that we observe are large enough to plausibly explain the majority of the effects of eighth-grade algebra on student test scores. We then demonstrate that eighth-grade algebra placement positively affects the achievement level of students’ classmates, as well as the years of experience and value added of students’ math teachers. Our regression discontinuity analyses replicate key findings from prior studies, indicating that placement in eighth-grade algebra boosts student achievement in math and English language arts. We use detailed data from Oregon that contain information on the teachers and peers to whom students are exposed in order to investigate these explanations. ![]() Explanations for this apparent contradiction often emphasize the potential role of teacher and peer effects, which could create positive effects for individual students placed into early algebra that would not translate to larger-scale policies. Although existing research suggests that students benefit on a range of outcomes when they enroll in early algebra classes, policy efforts that accelerate algebra enrollment for large numbers of students often have negative effects.
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