Selective Enrollment Public Schools and District-Level Achievement Outcomes from 3rd to 8th Grade

Véronique Irwin

doi:10.15195/v7.a5

Abstract

Fierce local debates throughout the United States surround the equity of admitting students to public schools using academic criteria. Although research has evaluated the central assumption of these debates—that Selective Enrollment Public (SEP) schools enhance the welfare of students who attend them—none has addressed the district-level outcomes associated with these schools. This is important because the selectivity and scope of SEP schools produce tiered school systems (SEP districts). This district-level process, in turn, calls for an analysis of district-level achievement outcomes. To address this gap, I compile an original list of SEP schools using an innovative web scraping procedure. I combine these data with newly available district-level measures of third to eighth grade achievement from the Stanford Education Data Archive. Analyses follow a difference-in-differences design, using grade level as the longitudinal dimension. This approach facilitates a falsification test, using future treated districts, to reject spurious causation. I find evidence of overall slower growth in mean math achievement in SEP districts and for white, black, and Latinx racial/ethnic groups separately. SEP districts also see an increase in the white–Latinx math achievement gap. This work highlights the importance of considering SEP schools as part of a differentiated school system.

Highlights

Fierce local debates throughout the United States surround the equity of admitting students to public schools using academic criteria
This article asks: Do traditional public districts with Selective Enrollment Public (SEP) schools (i.e., SEP districts) produce different (1) overall levels of achievement growth or (2) inequality of achievement than non-SEP districts? And, given the documented concerns around equity in access, (3) do these effects differ for students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds? By focusing on district-level outcomes, this article moves beyond a micro-level understanding of the effects of between-school student differentiation on the individual students and families who actively participate in school choice, in order to evaluate the meso-level impact of district organization on achievement outcomes
I use an innovative web scraping technique to produce an original data set of SEP schools and the SEP districts that house them throughout the United States

Summary

Introduction

Fierce local debates throughout the United States surround the equity of admitting students to public schools using academic criteria. These districts begin the “treatment” of high-scope selective differentiation for the first time during the grade range for which SEDA, discussed below, provides achievement data.11 Across these schools, the population of SEP school students is percent white, percent black, 16 percent Latinx, and 14 percent Asian.

Results

Conclusion