Data and Code for: Race and the Mismeasure of School Quality

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Joshua Angrist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER; Peter Hull, Brown University and NBER; Parag A. Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER; Christopher R. Walters, University of California, Berkeley and NBER

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
personal			02/01/2023 04:22:PM
plus			02/01/2023 04:27:PM

Project Description

Summary: In large urban districts, schools enrolling more white students tend to have higher performance ratings. We use an instrumental variables strategy leveraging centralized school assignment to explore the drivers of this relationship. Estimates from Denver and New York City suggest the correlation between widely-reported school performance ratings and white enrollment shares reflects selection bias rather than causal school value-added. In fact, value-added in these two cities is essentially unrelated to white enrollment shares. A simple regression adjustment is shown to yield school ratings that are uncorrelated with race, while predicting value-added as well or better than the corresponding unadjusted measures.

Scope of Project

JEL Classification:
      C26 Single Equation Models: Single Variables: Instrumental Variables (IV) Estimation
      I21 Analysis of Education
      I24 Education and Inequality

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Published Versions

V1 [2024-02-15]

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