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Steven W. Hemelt
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Education Finance and Policy (2024) 19 (2): 252–282.
Published: 02 April 2024
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The prevalence of school-based health care has increased markedly over the past decade. We study a modern mode of school-based health care, telemedicine, that offers the potential to reach places and populations with historically low access to such care. School-based telemedicine clinics (SBTCs) provide students with access to health care during the regular school day through private videoconferencing with a health care provider. We exploit variation over time in SBTC openings across schools in three rural districts in North Carolina. We find that school-level SBTC access reduces the likelihood that a student is chronically absent by 2.5 percentage points (29 percent) and reduces the number of days absent by about 0.8 days (10 percent). Relatedly, access to an SBTC increases the likelihood of math and reading test-taking by between 1.8 and 2.0 percentage points (about 2 percent). Heterogeneity analyses suggest that these effects are driven by male students. Finally, we see suggestive evidence that SBTC access reduces violent or weapons-related disciplinary infractions among students but has little influence on other forms of misbehavior.
Includes: Supplementary data
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Education Finance and Policy (2020) 15 (1): 45–74.
Published: 01 January 2020
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In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education granted states the opportunity to apply for waivers from the core requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. In exchange, many states implemented systems of differentiated accountability that included a focus on schools with the largest achievement gaps between subgroups of students. We use administrative data from Michigan in a series of regression-discontinuity analyses to study the effects of these school reforms on schools and students. We find some evidence that targeting schools for such reforms led to small, short-run reductions in the within-school math achievement gap. However, these reductions were driven by stagnant performance of lower-achieving students alongside declines in the performance of their higher-achieving peers. These findings serve as a cautionary tale for the capacity of the accountability provisions embedded in the recent reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the Every Student Succeeds Act, to meaningfully improve student and school outcomes.
Includes: Supplementary data
Journal Articles
Raising the Bar for College Admission: North Carolina's Increase in Minimum Math Course Requirements
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Education Finance and Policy (2019) 14 (3): 492–521.
Published: 01 July 2019
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We explore the effects of a statewide policy change that increased the number of high school math courses required for admission to four-year public universities in North Carolina. Using data on cohorts of eighth-grade students from 1999 to 2006, we exploit variation by district over time in the math course-taking environment encountered by students. Purely as a result of a student's year of birth and location, students faced different probabilities of encountering a sequence of math courses sufficient to qualify for admission. Within an instrumental variables setup, we examine effects of this policy shift. We find that students took more math courses in high school following the state's announcement, with relatively larger increases for students in the middle and bottom quintiles of their eighth-grade math test scores. Our results suggest this increased math course-taking led to higher high school graduation rates. It also led to increases in enrollment rates at universities in the University of North Carolina system, with the largest increases being in the quintiles of student achievement from which universities were already drawing the bulk of their enrollees. Finally, we find scant evidence of boosts in post-enrollment college performance due to increased math course-taking in high school.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Education Finance and Policy (2008) 3 (3): 316–338.
Published: 01 July 2008
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Do students perform better on statewide assessments in years in which they have more school days to prepare? We explore this question using data on math and reading assessments taken by students in the third, fifth, and eighth grades since 1994 in Maryland. Our identification strategy is rooted in the fact that tests are administered on the same day(s) statewide in late winter or early spring, so any unscheduled closings due to snow reduce instruction time and are not made up until after the exams are over. We estimate that in academic years with an average number of unscheduled closures (five), the number of third graders performing satisfactorily on state reading and math assessments within a school is nearly 3 percent lower than in years with no school closings. The impacts of closure are smaller for students in fifth and eighth grades. Combining our estimates with actual patterns of unscheduled closings in the last three years, we find that more than half of schools failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in third-grade math or reading, required under No Child Left Behind, would have met AYP if schools had been open on all scheduled days.