Selective Enrollment Public Schools and District-Level (Ine)quality of Achievement from 3rd to 8th Grade

• In Event: 3429 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 26. School Choice

Abstract

Selective enrollment public (SEP) schools are district-funded and -managed K-12 schools that admit their entire student body using an academic ‘merit’-based admissions process. These schools offer unique analytic leverage to evaluate effects of student sorting at the district level because they combine the practice of rigid academic differentiation (Pfeffer 2008) with a locally defined education system, a combination that does not truly exist in other American models of school choice, such as private schools, charters, magnets, open enrollment, or within-school tracking. This is important because both theories of school choice and peer effects, for example, imply impacts of student sorting that extend beyond the walls of choice schools themselves. Thus, this paper offers two major contributions: first, by testing whether the presence of SEP schools is associated with average achievement levels and (in)equality of achievement at the district level, and second, by using an innovative web-scraping technique to compile an original list of SEP schools with which to answer this question. Achievement outcomes are measured using the mean and standard deviation of district-level achievement in grades three through eight from the Stanford Education Data Archive. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find evidence for an overall decrease in district-wide achievement associated with SEP offerings over the treatment period, while implications for achievers at the 85th and 15th percentile vary across racial groups as a result of relative increases inequality in SEP districts for white and Asian students, only. Together, these findings may be consistent with a phenomenon of resource drain or a ‘shining light’ model of peer effects, but provide little evidence that SEPs are (currently) a successful school choice policy, or for the popular notion that school choice should have broadly positive impacts throughout a school system.

Author

• Veronique Irwin, Berkeley