Title: Discontinuous by design : unpacking the impact of educational policies that employ discontinuity-based assignment procedures:
Authors: Dougherty, Shaun M.; Harvard University.
Year: 2013
Subjects: Education and state United States.; Educational evaluation United States.; Academic achievement United States; Education Aims and objectives United States; Educational accountability United States.
Abstract: School districts and state agencies use rule-based decision-making practices more frequently than in the past. One consequence of this trend is that when cutoffs on continuous, objective criteria are applied in order to assign participants to the consequences of different educational-policy decisions, analyses of the resulting outcome data from such natural experiments can be used to produce estimates of the causal effects of such programs. In this thesis, I report on three such natural experiments with discontinuity designs whose findings capitalize on these uses of cutoff scores, chosen exogenously, on continuous decision-making criteria, to assign students or schools to particular outcomes. In each case, I investigate whether the application of these policies impacted subsequent educational outcomes for the student participants who were subject to the policies. In the first paper, I exploited the conditions for a natural experiment that occur when regional vocational and technical high schools in Massachusetts received more applicants for admission than they could accommodate. These schools then offered places to students whose admissions scores exceeded an exogenously defined criterion level. I find that students who just made the cutoff, and attended these schools, had higher probabilities of graduating from high school in four years, were less likely to be retained in grade in high school, and attended more days of school in 9 th grade than students with arguably similar levels of skills who just failed to meet the admissions criterion.