Estimating Causal Impacts of School Counselors With Regression Discontinuity Designs

School counselors play a crucial role in U.S. high schools, helping students traverse the challenges of high school and providing insight into the many options available to them following graduation. School counselors supplement teachers by relieving them of guidance duties--a skill set that teachers may not have developed fully through their training or may not have the capacity to implement effectively given their competing demands. The responsibilities of high school teachers are well defined and relatively consistent across schools: They are generally responsible for transferring subject-specific knowledge to their students and enhancing students' abilities to think critically. By contrast, the role of the high school counselor varies greatly across schools and even within schools (Bridgeland & Bruce, 2011; Paisley & McMahon, 2001). Due diligence by the counselor requires a nimbleness and an ability to work with students on an extremely wide range of issues running the gamut from college and financial aid application completion to course work directives to the resolution of behavioral and personal problems. The typical American high school, by many accounts, is not equipped to provide students with the many and diverse resources that simply cannot be offered by teachers alone. Recent budget cuts have led to mass layoffs of counselors across many districts, particularly in California (Po, 2012). When financial resources are strained and districts are cornered into dismissing staff, the choice of which staff to terminate is challenging. One is compelled to wonder: What is the motivation for honing in on counselors as more dispensable than other staff? Perhaps the lack of causal empirical evidence on the impact of counselors on student outcomes is to blame. Given the laserlike focus on teachers in the educational research arena, the dearth of rigorous empirical studies on the extent to which school counselors influence student outcomes is not surprising. In this article, we use an empirical approach to estimate the impact of an additional counselor on student outcomes, and we provide an example of how this approach might be used with 4-year college-going as an outcome of interest. Many states (e.g., Alabama, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, Vermont) specify that a high school must increase the size of the counseling staff when the school enrollment exceeds an established threshold. This means that similar high schools may have dramatically different student-to-counselor ratios depending on whether their enrollment just exceeds or just falls short of the threshold beyond which an additional school counselor must be added. Such laws provide ideal settings for studies geared toward drawing causal inferences through a regression discontinuity design. We demonstrate how to use this empirical technique with counselor staffing and 4-year college-going data from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Background The recent wave of research on teacher evaluation and accountability is tremendously important and long overdue (Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2006; Glazerman et al., 2010; Goldhaber, 2007; Goldhaber & Brewer, 1997; Jacob & Lefgren, 2008; Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005). However, the disproportionate focus on teachers in the school accountability and school quality research creates the illusion that teachers are solely responsible for the success or failure of American schools and the students within them. With growing evidence of the impact of teacher quality on a variety of student outcomes, the importance of a strong teaching force is clearly a powerful driver of student success (Darling Hammond, 2000; Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine, 1996). But teachers alone cannot shoulder the entire burden of ensuring that students reach their full potential, nor can they take sole responsibility for preparing students for life after high school. …