The Impact of Year-Round Schooling on Achievement: Evidence from Mandatory School Calendar Conversions.

Co-Authored with Katy Rouse (Elon University). Forthcoming in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

In 2007, 22 Wake County, NC traditional-calendar schools were switched to year-round calendars, spreading the 180 instructional days evenly across the year. This paper presents a human capital model to illustrate the conditions under which these calendars might affect achievement. We then exploit the natural experiment to evaluate the impact of year-round schooling on student achievement using a multi-level fixed effects model. Results suggest that year-round schooling has essentially no impact on academic achievement of the average student. Moreover, when the data are broken out by race, we find no evidence that any racial subgroup benefits from year-round schooling. (JEL H75, I21, I28, J24)

How do Students Respond to Labor Market and Education Incentives? An Analysis of Homework Time

Published in Journal of Labor Research. 32(3), September 2011, pp.199-209. DOI: 10.1007/s12122-011-9113-x The final publication is available at springerlink.com,

This study examines the extent to which high school students respond to education and labor market incentives when making decisions about homework. Student and state fixed effects estimators are used to control for unobserved individual
and geographic heterogeneity and selection. I find that students’ choices about homework respond to unemployment rates and changes in the minimum wage, but not to changes in the price of higher education. These responses are not constant throughout the population: female students, low income students, and low achieving students in particular increase their homework time in response to a higher minimum wage, while male students are more responsive to changes in the unemployment rate.

School Crowding, Year-Round Schooling, and Mobile Classroom Use: Evidence from North Carolina

Co-authored by Katy Rouse, Elon University. Forthcoming in Economics of Education Review.

This study uses a panel dataset from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center to evaluate the impact of school crowding on student achievement. We also estimate the effects of two education policy initiatives that are often used to address crowding: multi-track year-round calendars and mobile classrooms. We estimate a multi-level fixed effects model that allows us to identify effects that are not confounded by other school, family, and individual heterogeneity. Results suggest that severely crowded schools have a negative impact on reading achievement and have no discernable impact on math achievement. Both mobile classrooms and year-round calendars are found to have a small negative impact on achievement in the absence of crowding, but a positive impact in crowded schools, though these policies are only able to partially offset the negative impact of crowding.

Review of: Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the Church's Social Witness. by Jordan Ballor

Appeared in Calvin Theological Journal, April 2011

The Impact of Homework Time on Academic Achievement

Working Paper

This study takes advantage of nationally representative panel data on student behavior and academic performance to test two possible policy reforms.  First, I examine a policy that increases the amount of homework that students complete.  Second, I examine the impact of increasing the amount of homework assigned.  Previous studies have not been able to consistently estimate the impact of homework because of important omitted variables and measurement error, which strongly bias the estimated impact of homework time.  This paper, however, uses an instrumental variables approach with student fixed effects to account for both time-varying and time-invariant unobserved characteristics and inputs.  This approach produces estimates of the impact of homework time on academic achievement that are much larger than those of previous studies.  Additionally, these findings suggest that assigning additional homework primarily improves the achievement of low performing students and students in low performing schools.  Thus, assigning more homework could help close the gap in achievement between high and low performing students.

Homework and Academic Achievement in Elementary School

Working Paper, Co-authored with David Busscher

In the literature on the impact of homework there is little empirical support for assigning homework to elementary school students.  Nevertheless, the practice has become more common, despite popular resistance among many parents and popular media.  We examine the effects of both assigning homework and time spent on homework on mathematics and reading achievement using nationally representative longitudinal data on elementary school students.  In order to control for important unobserved characteristics and inputs we use empirical specifications that include student fixed effects.  We find that this approach consistently indicates that homework has a positive impact on academic achievement, and that less sophisticated empirical approaches will produce misleading results.  Additionally, we find that the impact of homework is not uniform across the population, but that some minority groups and low income students get more benefit from homework, indicating that increasing homework assigned could be a valuable policy for decreasing the black-white as well as the high and low-income achievement gap.