How does your kindergarten classroom affect your earnings? Evidence from Project Star.

By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Nathaniel G. Hilger, Emmanuel Saez, D. Schanzenbach, Danny Yagan. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2010

1,615 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. We then document four sets of experimental impacts. First, students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes. Class size does not have a significant effect on earnings at age 27, but this effect is imprecisely estimated. Second, students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings. Third, an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings. Students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classrooms in grades K–3—as measured by classmates' end-of-class test scores—have higher earnings, college attendance rates, and other outcomes. Finally, the effects of class quality fade out on test scores in later grades, but gains in noncognitive measures persist.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f4f5c203ddcd268f91dbd213a6162da3463d92d

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Citations in the corpus

Improving Education in Developing Countries (2016, background): “In the United States, a number of interventions have had only short-lived impacts on test scores, but large effects on important adult outcomes (Chetty et al., 2011; Kemple & Willner, 2008; Ludwig & Miller, 2007).”
The Production of Human Capital in Developed Countries: Evidence from 196 Randomized Field Experiments (2016, neutral): “[49] Chetty, Raj, John Friedman, Nathaniel Hilger, Emmanuel Saez, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Danny Yagan.”
Debt and the Response to Household Income Shocks: Validation and Application of Linked Financial Account Data (2018, background): “0022-3808/2018/12604-0009$10.00 1504 debt and the response to household income shocks 1505 Chetty et al. (2011) andGuvenen et al. (2015) have unlocked unparalleled time-series data on household income from the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration, respectively, such sources…”
School Segregation, Educational Attainment and Crime Evidence from the end of busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg (2014, background): “…2014 http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from and neighborhood interventions on long-run outcomes such as college attendance and crime (Katz et al. 2001; Ludwig et al. 2005; Kling et al. 2007; Angrist et al. 2011; Deming 2011; Chetty et al. 2011; Deming et al. 2013; Dobbie and Fryer 2013;).”
Expanding Access to Administrative Data for Research in the United States (2010, background): “The Statistics of Income division of the US Treasury has also launched a promising tax data access program for statistical research purposes.”
Worker Absence and Productivity: Evidence from Teaching (2012, neutral): “34 The issue of “fade-out” has been raised for other educational interventions, although it may be caused by differences in future resources or belie improvements in other outcomes (see Currie and Thomas 1995; Garces, Thomas, and Currie 2002; Chetty et al. 2010).”
Inequality at Birth: Some Causes and Consequences (2011, neutral): “Figure 1 shows, as others have also shown (see Currie and Duncan Thomas 2001; Case and Paxson 2008, 2010; Flavio Cunha and Heckman 2008; Raj Chetty et al. 2010; Cunha, toll plazas in the three years before and after adoption.”
Gender Differences in Education (2012, methodology): “Whereas the results in Krueger (1999) suggest that the experiment also improved the test scores of students from poor families (students receiving free school meals), Chetty et al (2011) report that the long-term effects were stronger for high income students.”
School Governance, Teacher Incentives, and Pupil-Teacher Ratios: Experimental Evidence from Kenyan Primary Schools (2012, neutral): “Of course, the decay in test score effects does not necessarily imply a lack of long-term impacts (Chetty et al. 2010), though it very well may.”
Using Experiments to Correct for Selection in Observational Studies (2020, neutral): “For example, test scores are a widely used surrogate in labor economics, but researchers have identified other pathways through which childhood interventions affect long-term outcomes outside test scores, such as non-cognitive skills [Heckman et al., 2006, Chetty et al., 2011].”
Improving Educational Outcomes in Developing Countries: Lessons from Rigorous Evaluations (2014, background): “92 See, for example, Chetty et al. (2011) on classroom quality, Kemple and Willner (2008) on career academies or Ludwig and Miller (2007) on Head Start.”
The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Strikes: Evidence from Argentina (2017, background): “Given the large literature demonstrating that short-run program effects on student outcomes can be very different from long-run effects (e.g., Chetty et al. 2011; Deming et al. 2013; Lovenheim andWillén 2019), this is of great value to policy makers.”
The Long-Term Consequences of Teacher Discretion in Grading of High-Stakes Tests (2016, methodology): “…and Bergström, 2005; Björklund et al., 2006; Lavy, 2010; Deming et al., 2014; Edmark et al., 2014; Lavy, 2015); preschool programs (Garces et al., 2002); class size (Krueger and Whitmore, 2001; Chetty et al., 2011a; Fredriksson et al., 2012); and teacher value added (Chetty et al., 2011a, 2014).”