| Nora Gordon
Harvard University
Tracking Title I: From revenues to inputs to outcomes
FINAL REPORT:
In my dissertation, I consider the economics of three specific policies: (1) how local and state revenue respond to federal Title I revenue for compensatory education; (2) how English immersion for limited English proficient students affects student achievement; and (3) how state-induced changes in the scale of schools and districts affect enrollment, promotion, and graduation.
In Chapter 1, I examine how state and local education revenue respond to changes in federal Title I grants for compensatory education. I find that education revenue efforts at the state and local levels are initially unaffected so that instructional spending changes dollar for dollar to reflect changes in Title I revenue. After several years, however, local school districts and the municipal and county governments that help them have offset changes in Title I, so that the federal spending has only small and statistically insignificant effects on schools.
In Chapter 2, which is joint with Caroline Hoxby, we examine achievement effects of CaliforniaÕs 1998 switch from bilingual education to English immersion as the default curricular method for language minorities. Existing analyses have compared schools that complied with the reform to schools that actively sought exemption from the requirement. We address this selection problem by using the degree to which schools should be affected by the change if complying with the mandate to instrument for actual reductions in bilingual enrollments. Our results suggest that the policy change caused a reallocation of resources within schools, resulting in moderate achievement losses for limited English proficient students and moderate achievement gains for native English speakers.
Chapter 3 examines the impact of a 1947 Illinois law encouraging the formation of larger school districts and the elimination of one-room schools. As a Òcontrol group,Ó I use Iowa, where similar changes did not occur until 1953. I find that elementary enrollments and promotions may have been negatively affected by consolidation, suggesting that parents and students valued local control and geographic proximity. High school enrollments and graduation were positively affected by consolidation, suggesting that net benefits from improvements in high school quality were positive and greater than at the elementary level.
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