More Information

• Call for Papers
• Editorial Board

As immigrant students continue to enter U.S. schools in large numbers, policymakers, parents and school leaders have become intensely interested in their academic performance and educational attainment. While previous evidence has pointed to superior performance by foreign-born students in their elementary and middle school years, growing concern has centered around the education and life chance of immigrants who come to the United States in their high school years and pointed to a significant gap in the research literature. This paper takes a step toward filling the gap. We use data on a cohort of New York City public high school students to examine how the performance of immigrant students differs between students who enter in high school, middle school or elementary school, adjusting for the conventional student characteristics that may shape outcomes. We then compare these disparities to the disparities experienced by the native-born population in order to remove any differences in performance due merely to differences in mobility. Thus, we derive estimates of the "cost" in performance due to their entry in high school that has been purged of a range of possible confounding factors. Importantly, our difference-in-difference estimates suggests that, ceteris paribus, immigrant students do quite well and high school entrants even better than earlier entering immigrants.

Working Paper #08-02 (January)
New Directions in Measuring Racial Isolation in School
Dylan Conger

This article offers new directions in measuring racial isolation in schools. The most widely-used measurement approach is to examine the mean on the distribution of school percentage nonwhite across nonwhite students (the isolation rate) or the percentage of nonwhite students in schools with large shares of nonwhites (e.g. 90 percent or more) at a single point in time. Using data on New York City public school students, Conger discusses the complexity that is revealed when school officials and researchers consider the following three dimensions of racial isolation: that between classrooms, over time, and among nonwhite students.

Working Paper #08-03 (March)
Mission Matters: The Cost of Small High Schools Revisited
Leanna Stiefel, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Patrice Iatarola and Colin C. Chellman

With the financial support of several large foundations and the federal government, creating small schools has become a prominent high school reform strategy in many large American cities. While some research supports this strategy, little research assesses the relative costs of these smaller schools. We use data on over 200 New York City high schools, from 1996 through 2003, to estimate school cost functions relating per pupil expenditures to school size, controlling for school output and quality, student characteristics, and school organization. We find that the structure of costs differs across schools depending upon mission - comprehensive or themed. At their current levels of outputs, themed schools minimize per pupil costs at smaller enrollments than comprehensive schools, but these optimally-sized themed schools also cost more per pupil than optimally-sized comprehensive schools. We also find that both themed and comprehensive high schools at actual sizes are smaller than their optimal sizes.

Working Paper #08-04 (April)
Testing, Time Limits, and English Learners: Does Age of School Entry Affect How Quickly Students Can Learn English?
Dylan Conger

The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to begin testing new English Learners (EL) in English language arts within three years after they enter school and holds schools accountable for their performance on these exams. Yet very little empirical work has examined exactly how long it takes EL students to become proficient in English and how the time to proficiency varies for different types of students. Linguistic theorists suggest, for instance, that the age at which students begin learning a second language may substantially influence their probability of obtaining proficiency quickly. Using panel data on English Learners (EL) in New York City public schools, I examine how long it takes students to become minimally-proficient in English and how the time to and probability of proficiency differs for students by their age of school entry. Specifically, I follow four entry cohorts of ELs and use discrete-time survival analysis to model variations in the rate at which different age groups acquire proficiency. I find that approximately half of the students become proficient within three years after school entry but that age of entry lowers the speed with which children can become proficient. Age of entry differences are robust to controls for differences in other student characteristic and the schools they attend. The results suggest that federal, state, and local policies regarding the testing of EL students in academic English should consider more flexible time limits.  

Working Paper #08-05 (June)
Why and How Does Source Country Matter?  The Effects of Home Countries and Immigrant Communities on Foreign-Born Student Achievement
Dylan Conger, Amy Ellen Schwartz and Leanna Stiefel

Objective: This paper explores the effect of the economic conditions of source countries and the human capital characteristics of coethnic immigrant communities on foreign-born students' reading and math achievement.

Methods: We use data on New York City public school foreign-born students from 39 countries merged with Census data on the characteristics of the city's immigrants, and United Nations data on the economic conditions of countries. We estimate regressions of student achievement on home country and coethnic immigrant community characteristics, controlling for student and school attributes.