Impact Of School Characteristics Research Articles

School staff's views on causes of early school leaving in regular secondary and adult education: Identifying the role of individual, job‐related and school climate characteristics

AbstractUnderstanding early school leaving (ESL) remains a key issue on political and academic agendas. Most research focuses on the experiences of young people who intend to leave or have left school early without a qualification from secondary education. In addition, most studies focus on regular secondary schools. We aim to add to this literature by studying how school staff in regular secondary and adult education schools explain ESL, and to understand how both groups' views differ. We also study whether school climate has an effect on the explanations of ESL given by staff. We analysed survey data collected in Flanders (northern part of Belgium) among 780 staff members using exploratory factor analysis and multilevel modelling. Findings indicate that staff in adult education have moderate views on the causes of ESL compared to staff in regular education. Staff in adult education have a strong focus on student‐focused explanations for ESL, rather than on contextual or systemic explanations. Future research could delve deeper into the impact of school characteristics, conduct more cross‐comparative research and/or include more views on diversity. Policymakers could prioritise the follow‐up of ESL, including feedback mechanisms to inform school staff on reasons why individual students decided to leave school early.

The role of school characteristics in pre-legalization cannabis use change among Canadian youth: implications for policy and harm reduction.

Reducing youth cannabis use in Canada is a public health priority with schools of interest as a potential modifier of behavior and as a venue for prevention programming. This work aimed to provide a basis for future policy and programming by evaluating pre-legalization cannabis use change patterns in schools and the impact of school characteristics on these patterns. Average rates of cannabis use behavior change (initiation, escalation, reduction, cessation) were collected from 88 high schools located in Ontario and Alberta, Canada participating in the COMPASS prospective cohort study. There was little variability in cannabis use behaviors between schools with intra-class correlation coefficients lowest for cessation (0.02) and escalation (0.02) followed by initiation (0.03) and reduction (0.05). Modest differences were found based on school province, urbanicity and student-peer use. Cannabis ease of access rates had no significant effect. Fewer than half the schools reported offering school drug use prevention programs; these were not significantly associated with student cannabis use behaviors. In conclusion, current school-based cannabis prevention efforts do not appear sufficiently effective. Comprehensive implementation of universal prevention programs may reduce cannabis harms. Some factors (urbanicity, peer use rates) may indicate which schools to prioritize.

On the Development of Risk Preferences: Experimental Evidence

Using a field experiment eliciting the risk preferences of 490 9th and 11th grade students from a variety of school environments, we examine various factors influencing the development of these risk preferences. In addition to factors previously considered by economists (gender, ethnicity, height, and parental education) we also evaluate cognitive (proxied by math literacy) and emotional (proxied by patience and planning ability) development theories. There is substantially stronger support for the variables typically considered by economists; consistent with prior work we find that girls are more risk averse while tall and nonwhites individuals are more risk tolerant. Next, the impact of school characteristics on the development of risk preferences is examined. Two effects emerge: a peer effect and a quality effect. For the peer effect, individuals who are in a school with a higher percentage of students on free or reduced lunches are significantly more risk averse than those with a lower percentage of students from low-income families. For the quality effect, individuals in schools that have smaller class sizes and a higher percentage of educators with advanced degrees have more moderate levels of risk aversion. Further, school characteristics only influence the 11th graders in the sample-lending some support to a causal argument.

Student achievement conditioned upon school selection: Religious and secular secondary school quality in Bangladesh

In this paper we present new evidence on the impact of school characteristics on secondary student achievement using a rich dataset from rural Bangladesh. We deal with a potentially important selectivity issue in the South Asian context: the non-random sorting of children into madrasas (Islamic faith schools). We do so by employing a combination of fixed effects and instrumental variable estimation techniques. Our empirical results do not reveal any difference in test scores between religious and secular schools when selection into secondary school is taken into account. However, we document significant learning deficit by gender and primary school type: girls and graduates of primary madrasas have significantly lower test scores even after controlling for school and classroom-specific unobservable correlates of learning.

The Effect of Measured School Inputs on Academic Achievement: Evidence from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s Birth Cohorts

The study presented here uses data from the NORC General Social Surveys to explore the effects of measurable school characteristics on student achievement. What separates this study from many others is the use of aggregate data on older cohorts, usually associated with research on the influence of school inputs on earnings. We fmd substantively large effects, similar in size to those found in many earnings-focused studies. Our results point to the impor- tance of aggregation in modeling the relationship between school inputs and student outcomes, bringing into question causal interpretations of the results of studies using aggregate data to assess school input effects. S CHOOLS differ markedly in quality and their ability to promote student achievement. Yet, simple measures of school inputs, such as student-teacher ratios, generally have not been found to capture school quality differences that influence student outcomes. The 1966 Coleman Report, the result of an extensive nationally representative study of schools, showed little school quality effect on student test scores once family background characteristics were ac- counted for. These results were bolstered by Hanushek's (1986) summary of research on the impact of school charac- teristics on achievement in which he found no measurable characteristic of schools that consistently contributed to stu- dent achievement. A recent meta-analysis of the same stud- ies that Hanushek used indicated positive relationships be- tween some school inputs and student outputs, undetected with Hanushek's simpler summary methods (Hedges, Laine, and Greenwald (1994)). Yet, even meta-analyses and studies at the level of micro data in general that have found signifi- cant effects of school inputs on achievement have tended not to find substantively large and consistent effects (Childs and Shakeshaft (1986), Glass and Smith (1979)). In light of this history, the corresponding literature on the impact of school characteristics on later earnings seems surprising. A series of studies using aggregate school input data at the state or district level have concluded that school inputs can substantially increase returns to education, as well as educa- tional attainment (e.g., Akin and Garfinkel (1977), Card and Krueger (1992), Johnson and Stafford (1973), Link and Ratledge (1975), and Rizzuto and Watchel (1980). Card and Krueger (forthcoming) provide a review.) What accounts for the discrepancies between these two literatures? A number of alternatives have been suggested (Betts (1996), Burtless (1996)). First, the two literatures ex- amine different outcomes. Measured school quality may in- crease the impact of schools on earnings, even if it does not increase their impact on academic achievement (Card and Krueger (1992)).' Second, studies that use earnings as the dependent variable and find positive effects may have insuf- ficient controls for family background. This potential prob- lem is particularly relevant in light of findings that there is generally a positive raw correlation between spending and academic achievement but that this relationship usually dis- appears after family background characteristics are taken into consideration (Hanushek (1986)). Third, studies that focus on earnings have either ignored the potential effects of local labor markets (Johnson and Stafford (1973)) or, as in the case of the work by Card and Krueger (1992), have identified effects by comparing the earnings of individuals who grew up in different locations, but currently work in the same area. The first of these procedures is potentially problematic since the returns to skills learned in school may vary by location. The latter circumvents this problem, but may be biased since migrants are self-selected (Heckman, Layne-Farrar and Todd (1995)). Alternatively, the conflict between the findings of positive school quality effects on earnings but not on academic achievement may be due to differences in the nature of the data used. The data in the two literatures have consistently differed in two ways. First, income analyses have tended to use historical information on school characteristics, while achievement analyses have tended to use contemporaneous data. This difference arises because more reliable data on achievement is available for recent cohorts, while income information is mote stable for older cohorts. Second, earn- ings focused research almost exclusively has used aggregate measures of school inputs, matching workers with the aver- age inputs in the school district or state in which they grew up.2 Studies using achievement as the outcome measure, on the other hand, have tended to use micro level data, matching students to the precise school or classroom they attended. In the study presented here, we use aggregate historical data on school inputs to predict the scholastic achievement of people in the same three cohorts used by Card and Krueger (1992) in their assessment of the effects of school quality on income returns to education-those born in the 1920s, the 1930s and the 1940s. By doing this we will be better able to distinguish among some of the possible causes of

Student Achievement and Schooling Choice in Low-Income Countries: Evidence from Ghana

In this paper we present new evidence on the impact of school characteristics on student achievement using an unusually rich data set from Ghana. We deal with two potentially important selectivity issues in the developing country context: the sorting of higher ability children into better schools, and the high incidence of both delayed school enrollment and early leaving. Our empirical results do not reveal any strong selectivity bias. We also highlight the indirect effects of improving school quality on student achievement through increased grade attainment. A cost-benefit analysis, taking into account these indirect effects, shows that repairing classrooms (a policy option ignored in most education production function studies) is a cost-effective investment in Ghana, relative to providing more instructional materials and improving teacher quality.