The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools

By Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Josh Angrist, Parag A. Pathak. Social Science Research Network, 2011

419 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Talented students compete fiercely for seats at Boston and New York exam schools. These schools are characterized by high levels of peer achievement and a demanding curriculum tailored to each district's highest achievers. While exam school students do very well in school, the question of whether an exam school education adds value relative to a regular public education remains open. We estimate the causal effect of exam school attendance using a regression-discontinuity design, reporting both parametric and non- parametric estimates. The outcomes studied here include scores on state standardized achievement tests, PSAT and SAT participation and scores, and AP scores. Our estimates show little effect of exam school offers on most students' achievement. We use two-stage least squares to convert reduced form estimates of the effects of exam school offers into estimates of peer and tracking effects, arguing that these appear to be unimportant in this context. Finally, we explore the external validity of RD estimates, arguing that as best we can tell, there is little effect of an exam school education on achievement even for the highest-ability marginal applicants and for applicants to the right of admissions cutoffs. On the other hand, a Boston exam school education seems to have a modest effect on high school English scores for minority applicants. A small group of 9th grade applicants also appears to do better on SAT Reasoning. These localized gains notwithstanding, the intense competition for exam school seats does not appear to be justified by improved learning for a broad set of students.

Subfields: Demography, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2193d43f7e27e149982cf707c411d16f28d26a1

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Citations in the corpus

Can Tracking Raise the Test Scores of High-Ability Minority Students?. (2016, neutral): “Fryer and Torelli (2010) argue that high-achieving black students – particularly 10 Two recent, carefully designed studies of between school tracking (Abdulkadiroglu et al. 2014 and Dobbie and Fryer 2014) find negligible impacts from large changes in peer characteristics for students assigned to…”
Field of Study, Earnings, and Self-Selection* (2016, neutral): “…(Kaufmann et al., 2013), the effect of admission to higher quality primary and secondary schools (see e.g. Jackson, 2010; Duflo et al., 2011; Abdulkadiroglu et al., 2012; Pop-Eleches and Urquiola, 2013), and the consequences of affirmative action in engineering colleges in India (Bertrand…”
A Big Fish in a Small Pond: Ability Rank and Human Capital Investment (2017, neutral): “(2013), Burke & Sass (2013), Pop-Eleches & Urquiola (2013), Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2014), Feld & Zölitz (2014), Tincani (2015) and Tatsi (2015).”
Reputation and School Competition (2015, background): “Learning externalities can lead students to care about the ability of their peers, resulting in across-school sorting by ability.”
Wanna Get Away? Regression Discontinuity Estimation of Exam School Effects Away From the Cutoff (2015, methodology): “As in Abdulkadiroğlu, Angrist, and Pathak (2014), our econometric strategy begins by constructing analysis samples, referred to as sharp samples, which restore a deterministic link between exam school offers and running variables, so that offers are sharp around admissions cutoffs.”
The environment in raising early intelligence: A meta-analysis of the fadeout effect (2015, methodology): “This regression-discontinuity design shows little to no effect of gifted education in Western countries on SAT scores (Dobbie & Fryer, 2011; Abdulkadiroglu et al., 2011) or academic achievement (Bui et al.”
Elite Colleges and Upward Mobility to Top Jobs and Top Incomes (2019, positive): “These results are consistent with a broader literature arguing that elite education at the high school level (Dobbie and Fryer 2014, Abdulkadiroğlu et al. 2014, Angrist and Rokkanen 2015) has little effect on learning outcomes. If elite admission does not affect learning, then differential learning ”
Do Parents Value School Effectiveness? (2020, background): “A small group of selective high schools, including New York City’s exam schools, admit students in a parallel system outside the main round of the assignment process (Abdulkadiroğlu et al., 2014).”