School Choice and College Attendance Evidence from Randomized Lotteries

David Deming DRAFT – DO NOT CIRCULATE September 2009 1 School Choice and College Attendance Evidence from Randomized Lotteries David Deming Justine Hastings Thomas Kane Douglas Staiger This is a preliminary draft. Please do not circulate or quote it without prior permission. Comments are welcome and appreciated. ABSTRACT In 2002, Charlotte Mecklenburg school district implemented an open enrollment policy that allocated slots at oversubscribed schools via random lottery. To assess the impact of gaining admission to a highly demanded high school, we match administrative data from the district to the National Student Clearinghouse, a national administrative database of postsecondary enrollment. We find strong evidence that high school lottery winners from neighborhoods assigned to the lowest-performing schools benefited greatly from choice. Girls are 12 percentage points more likely to attend a four-year college. Boys are 13 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school but are less likely to attend a four-year college. We present suggestive evidence that changes in relative rank within schools may explain these puzzling gender differences. In contrast with the results for students from low-performing home school zones, we find little evidence of gains for students whose home schools are of even average quality. David Deming DRAFT – DO NOT CIRCULATE September 2009 2 School choice is an increasingly important feature of the U.S. education policy landscape. Scarce public resources and the rising return to education have led to a focus on policies that can enhance schools’ productivity. Proponents of school choice espouse policies which decouple neighborhood residence and school attendance, breaking the monopoly power of local school districts and causing schools to compete for students (Hoxby, 2003.) Aside from competitive pressure, school choice could also enhance welfare by improving match quality between students and schools (Hoxby, 2003). Improvement in outcomes for student applicants is a necessary condition for choice to be efficiency-enhancing. Yet evidence on the benefits of public school choice, at least in the U.S. setting, is weak. The most broad-based form of school choice is known as open enrollment. Open enrollment allows public school students to attend magnet or other public schools that are outside of their neighborhood zone, subject to the availability of slots. A number of school districts have implemented some form of open enrollment in recent years. Cullen, Jacob and Levitt (2006) study one such program in Chicago public high schools. They use lottery-based random assignment to oversubscribed schools to investigate the causal impact of being offered admission to a non-home school, and find no evidence of benefits across a number of outcomes despite sizeable changes in measured peer quality (Cullen et al 2006). Voucher programs in Milwaukee (Witte 1997, Rouse 1998), New York City (Howell and Peterson, 2002) and Washington DC (Wolf et al, 2008) have found mixed impacts on student achievement. Some of the best evidence for the benefits of school choice comes from recent studies of lottery-based admission to charter schools. Hoxby and Rockoff (2004) and Hoxby and Murarka (2007) find modest effects of charter schools on student in Chicago and New York City respectively. Very recent results from Boston (Angrist et al, 2009) and the charter schools in the Harlem Children’s Zone (Dobbie and Fryer, 2009) have found very large yearly gains on standardized test scores, particularly in middle school math. Among studies of school choice that do find positive impacts, they are largely limited to test scores as an outcome. Usually this is by necessity, since few other indicators of progress for school-age children are available. Although past research has demonstrated the connection between test scores and wages (Murnane et al 1995; Krueger 2003), postsecondary outcomes such as educational attainment, earnings, and health are of direct interest. Furthermore, some of the best evidence concerning long-term benefits of social programs comes from interventions David Deming DRAFT – DO NOT CIRCULATE September 2009 3 where test score gains “faded out” over time (Anderson 2008; Belfield et al 2006; Deming 2009). Recent studies of school responses to high-stakes accountability policies have found evidence of “teaching to the test” (Jacob 2005), or purely non-productive test score gains through strategic assignment to test-taking (Figlio 2006, Jacob 2005) and teacher cheating (Jacob and Levitt 2003). This raises concerns that schools may be inefficiently multi-tasking by acting to maximize measured achievement at the expense of postsecondary outcomes of direct interest such as college attendance (Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1991). In this paper we study the impact of open enrollment in high schools in Charlotte Mecklenburg school district (CMS) on subsequent college attendance. In 2002, CMS implemented a district-wide school choice plan. Students were guaranteed admission to their neighborhood school but were allowed to choose and rank up to three other schools in the district, including magnet schools. Nearly half of all rising ninth graders chose a non-guaranteed school. Where demand for school slots exceeded supply, allocation was determined by random lottery. Furthermore, the great majority of students who were offered admission chose to enroll, leading to a large one-year change in student assignments in the district. Since the youngest students in this sample were rising 9th graders in 2002, we are able to observe college-going for a minimum of two years after lottery participants were scheduled to graduate from high school. These are critical times in students’ lives. Over 90 percent of eventual bachelor’s degree recipients enter college within the first two years of graduating from high school (College Board, 2007). To analyze the effect of being offered admission to a non-guaranteed school, we match a long (1995-2008) and detailed panel of administrative data from CMS, including the lottery numbers and admission status of all applicants, to a national database of postsecondary enrollment called the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC). The match is done directly using personal identifying information. As a result, attrition from the college attendance data is limited only to colleges that are not covered by the NSC. As we discuss later, this is a very small fraction of four-year and public two-year colleges nationwide, and an even smaller fraction of colleges in North Carolina and the surrounding states. The central finding of this paper is that students with the lowest performing guaranteed (or “home”) schools benefit greatly from choice. We define “low performing” schools by their average test scores and rates of college attendance, but also by value added measures and David Deming DRAFT – DO NOT CIRCULATE September 2009 4 estimates of parental demand from the choice lottery. Students from neighborhoods that are assigned to one of the four lowest-performing schools stay in school longer, graduate at higher rates, and are more likely to attend college. In contrast, we find no consistent evidence of gains for students whose home school is of even average quality. In a pattern that is consistent with many previous studies, the effects of school choice are markedly different by gender (Kling et al 2007; Hastings et al 2006; Schanzenbach 2005; Angrist et al 2009). Females from low-performing schools who win the lottery to attend their first-choice school are about 12 percentage points more likely to attend a 4 year college. Although these students are still completing their schooling, the effects on persistence in college for females are proportionally even larger than for the enrollment margin. Male lottery winners are about 13 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school. In contrast we find no increase in college enrollment for males, and some evidence that lottery winners are actually less likely to persist in 4 year colleges. We present some evidence on changes in class rank for male lottery winners that may provide a possible explanation for this puzzling result. In general, our findings are corroborated by impacts on test scores and grades, course- taking patterns and disciplinary incidents. Lottery winners from low-performing neighborhood school zones had higher grade point averages and took more math and science classes. Evidence on high school test scores is compromised by selection into test-taking across years and subjects, but we find some suggestive evidence of gains in Algebra I and Chemistry for males. Lottery winners of both genders were less likely to be absent and suspended from school in the two school years following the lottery. In all cases, effects were large for children from low- performing school zones and small or near zero for all others. Changes in average peer characteristics also match these patterns – lottery winners from the lowest-performing schools had peers with significantly higher test scores and graduation and college enrollment rates, but this was much less true for lottery winners from other schools. One unavoidable limitation of lottery-based studies is that they rely on oversubscription. Any school with excess demand for enrollment is likely to be of above-average quality. Parents of students that apply to these schools are likely to place a high value on education and be more motivated than the average parent. Similarly, parents of lottery losers might be more motivated to find a good alternative for their child. In that case, only relative scarcity of school quality will produce a meaningful difference between lottery winners and losers. David Deming DRAFT – DO NOT CIRCULATE September 2009 5 There are several features of the CMS choice plan that make it ideal for studying the impact of school choice for students with lower-quality neighborhood schools. From 1968 until 2001, CMS operated under a desegregation court order. As a result, school boundaries were redrawn dramatically in the year of the choice plan, and nearly half of rising 9th graders were assigned to a different school than what they would have attended had they been one year older.

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