Schools that Promote Opportunity for All

This project will make use of an unprecedented data resource that follows the population of individual children in Florida from birth through schooling and offers deep information on instructional policies and practices at the school level to study the policies and practices that are associated with promoting educational opportunity for all students, some students, or no students. I will combine two unique data sources – one, the richest matched health-education administrative database in the United States, and the other, the first attempt, to my knowledge, to survey the universe of schools in any state to obtain measures of educational policies and practices. I will study specific policies and practices, such as the performance incentives schools offer teachers, and specific aspects of these performance incentives; mechanisms through which schools schedule staff and students, and organize instruction and classroom time; different approaches to remediating the performance of low-performing teachers; and different approaches to improving the outcomes of low-performing students. I will study how these policies and practices correlate with the outcomes of students across the socio-economic and predicted performance spectrum. In sum, this data resource will allow me to measure the degree to which children of different socioeconomic backgrounds succeed in school to a degree heretofore impossible in the United States. I will use rich SES and health information to predict the most likely educational trajectories for each of the million-plus students, and then construct measures of the degree to which the students in each school perform relative to predicted trajectories – overall, and for every part of the initial advantage distribution. Armed with measures of a school’s overall success, and success with students of different backgrounds, I will identify the school policies and practices that correlate with particularly (un)successful schools, measured along these lines.