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North Carolina

How Did It Get This Way? Disentangling the Sources of Teacher Quality Gaps Across Two States

We use longitudinal data from North Carolina and Washington to study the extent to which four processes—teacher attrition from each state workforce, teacher mobility within districts, teacher mobility across districts, and teacher hiring—contribute to “teacher quality gaps” (TQGs) between advantaged and disadvantaged schools.

The Hidden Costs of Teacher Turnover

High teacher turnover imposes numerous burdens on the schools and districts from which teachers depart. Some of these burdens are explicit and take the form of recruiting, hiring and training costs. Others are more hidden and take the form of changes to the composition and quality of the teaching staff. This study focuses on the latter. We ask how schools respond to spells of high teacher turnover, and assess organizational and human capital effects.

The Undoing of Desegregation: School Segregation in the Era of School Choice and Color-Blind Jurisprudence

The decades-long resistance to federally imposed school desegregation entered a new phase at the turn of the new century, when federal courts adopted a color-blind approach in judging local school districts’ assignment plans. Using data from one of the first states to come under this dictum, we examine the ways in which households and policymakers took actions that reduced the amount of interracial contact in K-12 schools across counties in North Carolina between 1998 and 2016.

Building Bridges to Life after High School: Contemporary Career Academies and Student Outcomes (Update)

Career academies serve an increasingly wide range of students. This paper examines the contemporary profile of students entering career academies in a large, diverse school district and estimates causal effects of participation in one of the district’s well-regarded academies on a range of high school and college outcomes. Exploiting the lottery-based admissions process of this technology-focused academy, we find that academy enrollment increases the likelihood of high school graduation by about 8 percentage points and boosts rates of college enrollment for males but not females. Analysis of intermediate outcomes suggests that effects on attendance and industry-relevant certification at least partially mediate the overall high school graduation effect.

Steven Hemelt

 

Dr. Steven Hemelt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hemelt is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), an Affiliated Researcher with the Education Policy Initiative (EPI) at the University of Michigan, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC).

Accountability Pressure and Non-Achievement Student Behaviors

In this paper we examine how failing to make adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and the accountability pressure that ensues, affects various non-achievement student behaviors. Using administrative data from North Carolina and leveraging a discontinuity in the determination of school failure, we examine the causal impact of accountability pressure both on student behaviors that are incentivized by NCLB and on those that are not. We find evidence that, as NCLB intends, pressure encourages students to show up at school and to do so on time.

Impact of North Carolina’s Early Childhood Initiatives on Special Education Placements in Third Grade

This study examines the community-wide effects of investments in two early childhood initiatives in North Carolina (Smart Start and More at Four) on the likelihood of a student being placed into special education. We take advantage of variation across North Carolina counties and years in the timing of the introduction and funding levels of the two programs to identify their effects on third-grade outcomes. We find that both programs significantly reduce the likelihood of special education placement in the third grade, resulting in considerable cost savings to the state.

Returns to Teacher Experience: Student Achievement and Motivation in Middle School

We use rich longitudinally matched administrative data on students and teachers in North Carolina to examine the patterns of differential effectiveness by teachers’ years of experience. The paper contributes to the literature by focusing on middle school teachers and by extending the analysis to student outcomes beyond test scores.

Developmental Education in North Carolina Community Colleges

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on remediation in community colleges by using policy variation across North Carolina’s community colleges to examine how remediation affects various outcomes for traditional-age college students. We find that being required to take a remedial course (as we define it in this paper) either in math or in English significantly reduces a student’s probability of success in college and also the probability that a student ever passes a college-level math or English course.