Highlights of 2011 - Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern ...

Education Policy
IPR economist Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach points to how higher quality kindergarten classrooms, which include smaller class
sizes and more effective teachers, can lead to better adult outcomes, including higher earnings.
RESEARCH TOPICS:
• School finance, accountability, and vouchers
• Education interventions and program evaluations
• Teacher and principal characteristics
• Transitions from high school to college
• Gaps in academic achievement
Kindergarten Teachers and Future Pay
Does it matter who your teacher is in kindergarten? In an innovative
study, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an IPR economist,
and her colleagues at Harvard and the University of California,
Berkeley test whether kindergarten classroom quality
and student test scores affect adult outcomes. They use 1980s
data from the Tennessee Project STAR experiment, which randomly
assigned nearly 12,000 children to kindergarten classes
of varying sizes. The researchers then use tax data to link the
students’ kindergarten class experience and test scores to adult
outcomes, such as wages and education. Though the students’
test-score boost from small class sizes and high-quality teachers
tends to diminish later in elementary school, a substantial impact
is found for a variety of adult outcomes. In particular, students
randomly assigned to a higher quality kindergarten classroom
earned more at age 30 and were more likely to own a home,
be married, and have retirement savings than their kindergarten
schoolmates assigned to a worse class. Showing that early classroom
environments have a long-term impact not captured by
standardized test scores, the researchers also point to the
potential hazard of relying on such scores to evaluate longterm
student achievement. Published in The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, the study was covered by The New York Times.
Gains from Early Intervention
In a working paper with Susan Dynarski and Joshua Hyman of
the University of Michigan, Schanzenbach examines the effects
of reducing elementary school class sizes on college enrollment
and getting a degree. Using Project STAR data, they find being
randomly assigned to attend a smaller class in kindergarten
through third grade increases the probability of attending
college. Assignment to a small class increases the probability
of attending college by 2.7 percentage points, with effects
more than twice as large among African Americans. Among
those with the lowest ex ante probability of attending college,
the effect is 11 percentage points. In addition, small classes in
the early grades improve the likelihood of earning a college
degree and majoring in a more technical and high-earning
field, such as a STEM field (science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics), business, or economics. The paper points to
the relationship between short- and long-term effects of an
education intervention. More specifically, it documents shortand
long-term effects of early education interventions. The
actual long-run impacts were larger than what short-run test
score gains alone would have predicted. This implies that costbenefit
analyses based on short-run impacts might misestimate
the true long-run effectiveness of interventions.
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