Replication data for: What Can We Learn from Charter School Lotteries?

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Julia Chabrier; Sarah Cohodes; Philip Oreopoulos

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Project Citation:

Chabrier, Julia, Cohodes, Sarah, and Oreopoulos, Philip. Replication data for: What Can We Learn from Charter School Lotteries? Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2016. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2019-10-12. https://doi.org/10.3886/E113977V1

Project Description

Summary: We take a closer look at what can be learned about charter schools by pooling data from lottery-based impact estimates of the effect of charter school attendance at 113 schools. On average, each year enrolled at one of these schools increases math scores by 0.08 standard deviations and English/language arts scores by 0.04 standard deviations relative to attending a counterfactual public school. There is wide variation in impact estimates. To glean what drives this variation, we link these effects to school practices, inputs, and characteristics of fallback schools. In line with the earlier literature, we find that schools that adopt an intensive "No Excuses" attitude towards students are correlated with large positive effects on academic performance, with traditional inputs like class size playing no role in explaining charter school effects. However, we highlight that No Excuses schools are also located among the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. After accounting for performance levels at fallback schools, the relationship between the remaining variation in school performance and the entire No Excuses package of practices weakens. No Excuses schools are effective at raising performance in neighborhoods with very poor performing schools, but the available data have less to say on whether the No Excuses approach could help in nonurban settings or whether other practices would similarly raise achievement in areas with low-performing schools. We find that intensive tutoring is the only No Excuses characteristic that remains significant (even for nonurban schools) once the performance levels of fallback schools are taken into account.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: charter schools; school lotteries

JEL Classification:
      H75 State and Local Government: Health; Education; Welfare; Public Pensions
      I21 Analysis of Education
      I28 Education: Government Policy

Geographic Coverage: USA

Time Period(s): 2001 – 2015

Universe: Charter schools with lotteries and good record keeping who shared their data with researchers

Data Type(s): administrative records data; experimental data; aggregate data

Collection Notes: See Appendix Table 1 for the list of charter school lotteries that contributed to the analysis. In some cases we gathered the published school -level estimates, in others we contacted the authors of the studies to get access to the data.

Methodology

Data Source: See Appendix Table 1 for the list of charter school lotteries that contributed to the analysis. In some cases we gathered the published school -level estimates, in others we contacted the authors of the studies to get access to the data.

Unit(s) of Observation: students, schools,

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Published Versions

V1 [2019-10-12]

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