Discontinuous by design
Subtitle: unpacking the impact of educational policies that employ discontinuity-based assignment procedures
By: Shaun M. Dougherty
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 202
Subjects: Education and state; Educational evaluation; Academic achievement; Education; Aims and objectives; Educational accountability
Description: 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.

In the second paper, I investigated the impact of a "double dose" of literacy instruction on students' subsequent literacy. I capitalize on the district's use of an exogenously-determined cutoff in Iowa Test scores in 5th grade to assign students to an additional literacy course in middle school. My findings suggest that an additional semester of exposure to this intervention generated differ effects on students' state standardized reading test scores by race. White, Latina, and Asian students experienced large positive effects (>.1 SD), while Black students experienced even larger negative effects of the intervention (>-.2 SD), when compared to arguable similar students who were not thus assigned. In the third and final paper, I analyze a student-by-test item-level dataset on all students in New York City in order to investigate how accountability pressure impacts test scores. I find support for the hypothesis that the higher average performance observed among students in schools that faced accountability pressure differed by grade in school and was driven in part by the better performance of students on easily-identifiable subscores of the test.
Notes: Vita.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2013.

Includes bibliographical references.

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