Chicago School Research Research Articles

Posner Meets Hayek: The Elements of an Austrian Law & Economics Research Program

Abstract To date, Friedrich Hayek is the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics who also holds a law degree. The role of law is central to Hayek’s work and prominent in the research program of the Austrian School of Economics generally. Although Hayek’s contributions to jurisprudence are manifest, as are the influence of his economics ideas, his influence on the field of law and economics has remained modest. This lecture, delivered as the Keynote Lecture at the 2023 Asian Law & Economics Association Annual Meeting, provides an introduction to the fundamentals of an Austrian Law & Economics research program in contrast to the mainstream, Chicago-school research program that has dominated the field since its early history. Compared to the neoclassical approach, Austrian thinking provides a more insightful approach to many of the key concepts generally associated with the economic analysis of law: the nature and success of the common law as a system of law, the importance of stability and simple rules in the law, and the strong preference for private ordering via contract, personal autonomy, and voluntary exchange exhibited in the common law. I identify and briefly describe six key distinguishing characteristics of the Austrian school that distinguishes it from neoclassical law and economics: (1) Methodological individualism, (2) Utility and Costs are subjective, (3) the division of knowledge, (4) spontaneous order, (5) competition as a discovery procedure, and (6) the nature of economic equilibrium. I will also highlight some of the ways in which examining law and economics through an Austrian framework provides valuable insights about law and economics.

Patterns of Socialization among New Latino Immigrants in Comparative Historical Perspective

Education is a bridge enabling children of low-skilled immigrants to access higher tiered professions in a segmented labor force in order to experience socio-economic gains and social mobility. Historically, Catholic immigrants (Irish, Polish, Italian and German) have been served by the parish school which provided a basis for household integration and economic advancement in American society. This paper explores the relationship between the parish school as an agent of socialization and children of new Catholic Latino immigrants. Comparative historical analysis of old and new patterns of immigration serves to demonstrate how the mediating role of the parish school has changed. Qualitative analysis contributes to a theory of institutionally generated social capital which is operationalized by measures of communitarian socialization. Using data from the Consortium of Chicago School Research, I use ordered logit regression to measure the effect of high school socialization patterns on student’s pro-social outcomes. I find that contrary to national data, Catholic high schools in Chicago are enrolling higher percentages of Latinos, a majority of whom are children of immigrants. A school climate characterized by affective support and inspirational ideology are significantly related to pro-social outcomes, while intergenerational closure is not. These findings are important because the parish school has a legacy of contributing to conditions necessary for children of immigrants to experience upward mobility.

Leading with data: Using an impact-driven research consortium model for the advancement of social emotional learning in schools.

Weissberg, Durlak, Domitrovich, and Gullotta (2015) note that social and emotional learning (SEL) is increasingly recognized as a critical component of academic and life success. In many schools around the nation, SEL is becoming (or has become) part of a comprehensive strategy to strengthen students' academic performance, improve school and classroom climate, and lessen conduct problems. A recent benefit-cost analysis by Belfield et al. (2015) of six prominent SEL programs showed a positive return on the original investments in these programs at a ratio of about 11 to 1. SEL supports the development of skills in emotion regulation, social awareness, conflict resolution, and responsible decision making, all of which are essential to students' success within and outside the classroom. These so called noncognitive skills are associated not only with proximal gains in students' academic performance and reductions in conduct problems but also with their later choices related to education and employment, as discussed by the economist, James Heckman and his team (Heckman, Stixrud, & Urzua, 2006). Furthermore, according to a report by Nagaoka, Heath, Farrington, and Cureton Turner (2015) for the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, evidence shows that not attending to fundamental SEL skills and competencies within and outside the context of formal schooling can actually undermine children's long-term development and keep them from succeeding in adult roles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Neighborhood Violence, Peer Effects, and Academic Achievement in Chicago

Research shows that exposure to local neighborhood violence is associated with students’ behavior and engagement in the classroom. Given the social nature of schooling, these symptoms not only affect individual students but have the potential to spill over and influence their classmates’ learning, as well. In this study, I use detailed administrative data from five complete cohorts of students in the Chicago Public Schools (2002 to 2010), crime data from the Chicago Police Department, and school-level surveys conducted by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research to assess the strength of this peer effect. The estimated negative relationship between peer exposure to neighborhood violent crime and individual achievement is substantial and remains after adjusting for other peer characteristics and student fixed effects. Surveys suggest these results are related to trust, discipline, and safety concerns in cohorts with larger proportions of students from violent neighborhoods.

Small Schools and the Issue of Race

Bank Street College of Education, in conjunction with the Consortium on Chicago School Research did a study of small schools in Chicago. This paper examines one element of the findings in depth - the interaction of race and school size. Powell argues that small schools are by their very nature an anti-racist intervention.

Psychometric Reevaluation of Parental Press for Academic Achievement and Postsecondary Planning Scale

Objective: Psychometric details of the Parental Press for Academic Achievement and Postsecondary Planning Scale (PPS), developed by Chicago Consortium of Chicago School Research, are scarce. The purpose of this study was to reexamine the properties of this 7-item measure. Method: The study utilized cross-sectional, self-reported data from 100 low-income, first-generation undergraduate students at a university in the southern United States. Results: Factor analysis on the PPS revealed two dimensions with all items loaded, accounting for 81.44% of the variance. Reliability of the PPS was sound, that is, average interitem correlation was .62 and Cronbach’s α and split-half coefficients were .918 and .923, respectively. Convergent validity was suggested via significant correlations between the PPS and its theoretically similar constructs, that is, valuation of high school ( r = .32) and parental support for college ( r = .82). Conclusion: The PPS appears to be psychometrically appropriate for appraising students’ perceptions of parental support for academic success and postsecondary education.

Los cinco apoyos esenciales para el mejoramiento de los aprendizajes en la escuela: movilizando los resultados

In 2010, the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) released a book that established the importance of five organizational domains in improving student outcomes in public elementary schools. These “five essential supports” highlighted the combined importance of school leadership, professional capacity, parent-community ties, a student-centered learning environment, and instructional guidance. Schools strong on clusters of these supports were 10 times more likely to improve learning of reading and mathematics, compared to schools weak in these supports. Building on the original research, designers and researchers created a set of survey-based diagnostic tools that allow educators to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their own school in the five essential supports. Based on these results, principals, teachers, and parents can craft an evidence-based narrative and diagnosis about their school and develop action plans to strengthen these organizational practices. This paper details the underlying research, the creation of the diagnostic tools, and the use of the diagnostics to support school improvement.

Research into practice: Postsecondary success in the Chicago Public Schools

In this chapter, the authors describe nearly a decade of research examining postsecondary outcomes of students in the Chicago Public Schools conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR). These analyses include both long-term trends in college going and findings on the dimensions of students' postsecondary transition experiences that shape those outcomes. The authors describe the evolution of research at CCSR, which emphasizes a specific type of partnership between researchers, district officials, and practitioners that builds the capacity of practitioners and district officials to think critically about big problems and utilize data to inform decision-making and evaluation. In addition to describing these findings, the authors discuss the development and operation of the Network for College Success, a research-based, integrated and intensive support for school improvement to principals, their instructional leadership teams, grade level teams, and counselors. The authors describe how NCS builds the capacity of school leaders to work together and to use data to improve practice in the postsecondary transition. Finally, the authors discuss ongoing challenges and new directions for ongoing and future research.

The Social Ecology of Red-Light Districts

Research on modern red-light districts (RLDs) is deficient in some key respects. Centered largely on street prostitution zones and nations where prostitution is illegal, this literature gives insufficient attention to settings where RLDs consist of a cluster of indoor venues that are legal and regulated by the authorities. Using classic Chicago School research on vice districts as a point of departure, this article examines the physical structure and social organization of red-light zones in two Belgian cities: Antwerp and Brussels. The comparative analysis identifies major differences in the social ecology of the two settings. Differences are explained by the distinctive ways in which each municipal government manages its respective RLD, which are related to the contrasting social backgrounds and political capital of the population residing in the vicinity of each district. Policy implications are briefly discussed.

School Violent Crime and Academic Achievement in Chicago

Educational outcomes vary dramatically across schools in the United States. Many under-performing schools, especially in Chicago, also deal with high levels of violent crime on school grounds. Exposure to this type of frequent violence may be an important factor shaping already disadvantaged students' educational experiences. However, estimating the effect of school violence on learning is difficult due to potential selection bias and the confounding of other school-level problems. Using detailed crime data from the Chicago Police Department, complete administrative records from the Chicago Public Schools, and school climate surveys conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research (2002-10), this study exploits variation in violent crime rates within schools over time to estimate its effect on academic achievement. School and neighborhood fixed-effects models show that violent crime rates have a negative effect on test scores, but not on grades. This effect is more likely related to direct reductions in learning, through cognitive stress and classroom disruptions, than changes in perceived safety, general school climate, or discipline practices.

Milton Friedmanʼs Contributions in Historical Contexts:

The year 2012 marks the centennial anniversary of Milton Friedmanʼs birthday and the 50th an-niversary of the publication of Capitalism and Freedom （1962）. This paper examines the his-torical significance of his contributions, by mainly reviewing the growing recent research on his economics. Friedman has been popularly described as the Chicago school, monetarist, market fundamentalist, and neo-liberal; I argue that it is necessary to examine these convention-al labels from a historical perspective. Friedman witnessed several and sometimes overlapping historical eras, and the paper focuses on the his-torical contexts of the following: economic sci-ence in the latter half of the twentieth century, the National Bureau of Economic Research tra-dition, the Chicago school research tradition, money and business cycle theories, the role and responsibility of public intellectuals, and the neo-liberalism movement. This paper arrives on the following conclusion. Friedmanʼs ideas drew upon the economics of mathematical and empir-ical nature, seen in the latter twentieth century, yet his approach deviated from the more domi-nant Cowles or MIT approaches, as he regarded economics as an applied and empirical policy science. His works shared common characteris-tics with the NBER tradition, and he changed the nature of the post-War Chicago school by importing the NBER tradition. His monetary and business cycle analysis is a mixture of old Chi-cago monetary tradition and the NBER tradition. His active role as a public intellectual was met with success and controversies, as did his in-volvement with the neo-liberal movement. Al-though Friedman should be primarily studied from a historical perspective, one cannot avoid reviewing his contributions only because he ex-erted a great influence on the history of econom-ics. This becomes more acute especially in the wake of the current economic and financial cri-sis. The paper primarily examines three ques-tions: whether Friedmanʼs ideas contributed to the current crisis, what Friedman would have done if he were alive, and what could be done to improve on Friedmanʼs contributions. The paper concludes that historians of economics would and should continue arguing about and with Friedman. JEL classification numbers: B20, B22, B31.

The Most Important Research on Urban School Reform in the Past Decade?

For scholars and policy makers focused on reforming urban schools, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago may represent the most important research over the past decade of debate. This book by Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton is especially noteworthy because it is urban students whom we educators have most frequently failed in the past. Our failure is even more important because more than 50% of students of color live in urban areas (U.S. Census Bureau, 2006), and students of color are nationally the fastest growing demographic group (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009). As a nation, we are not succeeding with an expanding student population on whom our future economic and social well-being depend (Darling-Hammond, 2010). Organizing Schools for Improvement addresses the facilitation of academic success in one urban context. This study, conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) at the University of Chicago, began at the time of the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988, which instituted a decentralization policy in Chicago public schools and created the context for the research. The reform turned much of the control of Chicago schools over to local school councils. Simultaneously, CCSR raised considerable funds to have skilled researchers collect and analyze extensive, longitudinal data, beginning at the start of the schools' responses to the Reform Act and continuing throughout the 1990s. In this review, we discuss the framework and methodol-

Getting Young People to Do the Right Thing

A COLLEAGUE at ECS, whose earliest years were spent a U.S. Air Force base in Germany, recalls that the first book he ever heard read to him as a child is Der Strummelpeter, a collection of German morality tales for children. In this book, boys who suck their thumbs have the offending digit unceremoniously dispatched by the tailor's scissors. Children who don't finish their dinner starve to death. And many, many other amusing anecdotes. You get the picture. point is, it's amazing the lengths to which people will go to get their children to do the right thing. And in the world of education policy, though we're not typically reading Der Strummelpeter to high school kids, policy makers over the last 30 years or so have been adopting one approach after another in an attempt to keep young people from making one of the biggest mistakes of their lives--dropping out of school. As many readers know, the efforts of the past have unfortunately been largely cookie-cutter policies and programs that have met with limited success. Recently, however, awakened by the more accurate graduation data that result from better methods of tracking who's leaving school (part of the larger recent push for general high school reform), researchers, policy makers, and even Oprah have taken a second look at the factors that lead students to drop out and are undertaking efforts that might be more likely to keep kids from making a decision with potentially dire consequences. One of my favorite reports to have come out this year is a white paper this topic by Craig Jerald for Achieve, Inc., and Jobs for the Future. Titled Identifying Potential Dropouts: Key Lessons for Building an Early Warning Data System, it synthesizes recent research and separates the myths from the facts about what contributes to young people's decision to say so long to the schoolhouse. Jerald's study notes that, contrary to what many believe, student demographics don't necessarily dictate who will stay in school and who will leave. Academic performance and engagement in school carry a great deal of weight in student decisions whether or not to drop Especially in urban districts, where high proportions of students have demographic risk factors, Jerald points out, very low academic performance and educational engagement can help discriminate the ones most likely to be the path to dropping out. Though risk factors themselves can't tell us who will tough it out through high school and who will leave, research points to one risk factor that appears to play a significant role in determining who graduates from high school. The On-Track Indicator as a Predictor of High School Graduation, another favorite study of mine, suggests that dropout prevention efforts should recognize the importance of the freshman year of high school. This 2005 paper from the Consortium Chicago School Research relates the findings of a study of high school completion rates among Chicago Public School students. researchers found that students who were on at the end of grade 9--by the researchers' definition, those who had earned enough credits to go to grade 10 and had failed no more than one semester in a core subject--were substantially less likely to drop out than their peers who did not meet one (or both) of the on-track criteria. Interestingly, the researchers also found that many students who came to high school with low test scores were track in grade 9 and finished high school in four years and that some students with good test scores in the middle grades did not make a successful transition transition to high school and ended up off track. Thus performance before high school is not a solid indicator of who's going to be walking across the stage to accept a sheepskin four years later. A 2006 report goes straight to the source. The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts is made up of the findings from focus groups of recent dropouts the reasons they dropped out and what would have made them stay in school. …

A Performance Test for Districts and States

BEEN THERE. Done that. This popular rejoinder is a message to the new President from the editor of the award-winning, iconoclastic monthly publication Catalyst, which has been following school reforms in Chicago for more than a decade. Editor Linda Lenz points out that the core reforms proposed by President Bush were in Chicago's Petri dish a long time ago. The Windy City has tried annual testing from kindergarten through eighth grade. It has mandated improvement plans, and it has placed penalties on low-performing schools that failed to improve. Practically speaking, Lenz says, parents can transfer their children to any school in the system that will accept them. Chicago's schools no longer merit the verbal abuse dumped on them by former Secretary of Education William Bennett, who labeled them the worst schools in the country. Yet they certainly haven't improved very much, despite the considerable spin from the district's top officials. Given the number of years Chicago has been working on its problems and the amount of punishment inflicted on its failing students, the results have been quite minimal. Data from standardized tests might identify schools that need help, but they don't say much about the level of learning that takes place in them. True to what researchers have been trying to point out to anyone who would listen, the longer students take the same tests, the better they do. Texas, California, Florida, and other states may certainly claim that the test scores show that their students are learning more. However, introduce a new test in any of those states, and Sisyphus' rock crashes back to the bottom of the hill. And the climb must start all over again. That's one reason why teachers, administrators, and parents can't depend on test results to tell them if all students are getting an equal chance to learn. So far, though, tests and penalties represent the paths of least resistance for policy makers. When the current standards and assessment movement first began to get organized, there was a third component to the effort - opportunity-to-learn standards. However, state policy makers feared both the cost of implementing such standards and the potential litigation if they promised to provide appropriate opportunities for all students to learn and then didn't deliver. If policy makers at all levels are serious about improving student learning, then it's time for them to acknowledge that students must have full opportunities to learn. Research in Chicago and elsewhere, for example, makes it explicit that teachers' instructional behaviors have more to do with student achievement than any other factor. The Consortium on Chicago School Research, in a series of reports for the local Annenberg Challenge, found that children do better on basic skills tests when their instruction and curricula really challenge them to think. Moreover, it turns out that the teachers who can teach this way have been the beneficiaries of good, intensive professional development. The revelation that poor, minority children thrive with the kinds of teaching usually reserved for gifted children should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. A 10-year-old study for the U.S. Department of Education came to the same conclusions. Need more? Lauren Resnick, in research on the public schools in Pittsburgh, found that well-informed practice can overcome the achievement gap between white students and minorities. In schools that did a good job with comprehensive reforms - aligning curriculum, instruction, assessments, and professional development to high-quality content - minority students outperformed white students who were in schools with poorly implemented reforms. Like their students, teachers also need opportunities for high-quality learning. And they rarely get it. Unlike the business community, schools are rightly reluctant to pull teachers away from their work in order to get professional development during the school day. …

Social Support and Achievement for Young Adolescents in Chicago: The Role of School Academic Press

This study explores whether the social support that young adolescents may draw on for their academic activities is related to how much they learn in mathematics and reading over the course of a year. Data came from 1997survey reports collected by the Consortium for Chicago School Research from 30,000 sixth and eighth graders in 304 Chicago public elementary schools about the support these students receive from their teachers, their parents, their peers, and their neighborhoods and from annual standardized tests conducted by the Chicago Public Schools. Using hierarchical linear modeling methods, we found that, on average, social support is positively but modestly related to learning. However, both learning and the relationship between social support and learning are contingent on the academic press of the school students attend. Findings are discussed within the context of school reform policies focusing on increasing social support.

Prostitution as a Reckless Enterprise

Walter C. Reckless's Vice in Chicago (1933) examined the consequences of the closing of Chicago brothels in 1913 and the transformation of prostitution from an encapsulated enterprise into a more laissez-faire pursuit. The contents of the monograph, one of the array of pathbreaking urban studies that marked Chicago School research under Robert E. Park, are reviewed both in terms of what they tell us about prostitution then and what significance they hold in regard to the behavior today.

Charting reform in Chicago schools: Pluralistic policy research

AbstractThe Consortium on Chicago School Research is a unique research enterprise that is attempting to achieve a productive blend of rigorous social science and vital democratic activities. So far, it has facilitated the development of a research agenda on Chicago school reform and completed surveys of teachers and principals.