Ethnic Studies Increases Longer-Run Academic Engagement and Attainment

• In Event: Ethnic Studies Access, Impacts, and Empowerment in a Time of Political Opposition and Erasure

Abstract

Objective/Purpose: The growing adoption and design features of ethnic studies courses (Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2019) in U.S. school districts, particularly in California, have become politically contentious topics. A recent empirical study (Dee and Penner, 2017) presented quasi-experimental evidence that a 9th-grade ethnic studies course targeted to lower-achieving students in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) significantly improved several near-term predictors of on-track progression through high school. In this pre-registered study (Bonilla et al., 2019), we answer two research questions: (1) Do students who enrolled in SFUSD’s pilot Ethnic Studies (ES) course as 9th graders have higher graduation rates than non-enrollees? (2) Do outcomes differ for other measures of high school persistence, engagement (i.e., enrollment, credit completion, attendance) and postsecondary enrollment?
Significance: Understanding the longer-term causal effects of enrolling in ES on key student outcomes is critical for educational policy and practice, particularly given the current political climate and calls for a focus on anti-racist education.
Theoretical Framework: The SFUSD ES course focuses on themes of social justice, anti-racism, stereotypes and contemporary social movements. The conceptual foundations for ES courses are closely related to the influential literature in education research on “culturally relevant pedagogy” (CRP) (Ladson-Billings, 1995). ES can also be understood within other social-scientific traditions including social-psychology (Cohen et al., 2006; Yeager and Walton, 2011), sociology (Cooley, 1902; Du Bois, 1903), economics (Ackerloff and Kranton, 2002) and community psychology (Watts et al. 2003; Watts et al., 2011; Zimmerman, 2000). These supporting theories highlight the theoretical basis for a well-designed and implemented ES course to seed transformative change. Specifically, these frameworks also indicate how ES can increase the engagement of marginalized students by promoting belongingness, affirmation, and high expectations and attenuate an otherwise alienating schooling environment.
Methods and Data: In this pre-registered, regression-discontinuity (RD) study, we present new evidence on the longer-run effects of taking an ethnic-studies course using the student-level sample analyzed by Dee and Penner (2017). We utilize longitudinal data from District administrative files, state records of high school graduation and dropout, and college matriculation from the National Student Clearinghouse. We focus on five unique cohorts of grade-9 students (N=1405) because their schools used a discontinuous assignment rule, automatically assigning 9th graders to the ES course if their grade-8 GPA was below 2.0. The RD specification we estimate compares the conditional outcomes of students with a grade-8 GPA just below 2.0 (i.e., Intent to Treat =1) to students whose grade-8 GPA placed them just above this threshold (i.e., Intent to Treat=0).
Results: Our key confirmatory finding is that assignment to this course significantly increased the probability of high-school graduation among students near the grade-GPA threshold (i.e., 2.0 GPA in grade 8) used for assigning students to the course. Our exploratory analyses also indicate that assignment increased measures of engagement throughout high school (e.g., attendance) as well as the probability of postsecondary matriculation.

Authors

• Sade Bonilla, University of Pennsylvania

• Emily K. Penner, University of California - Irvine