The benefits of a charter school extend well beyond higher test scores and academic performance. Students at the Promise Academy in Harlem fared better than their peers in and outside the classroom, with lower rates of incarceration and teen pregnancy, new research shows.
Harvard’s Roland G. Fryer, Jr. and Princeton’s Will Dobbie tracked more than 400 sixth-grade students who won spots at the Promise Academy, a turbo-charged charter school in Harlem, through lotteries in 2005 and 2006.
For their paper, “The Medium-Term Impacts of High-Achieving Charter Schools on Non-Test Score Outcomes,” the economists tapped data from the Harlem Children’s Zone, the New York City Department of Education and the National Student Clearinghouse. They also followed the students throughout high school and compared survey results with non-lottery winners. They found strikingly improved “human capital” and diminished “risky behaviors” among lottery winners — but note that this particular school, and its supportive environment, may not be representative of other high-performing charter schools.
The Promise Academy, in New York City, offers a particularly intensive program for at-risk neighborhood students. The school is located in the Harlem Children’s Zone, a 97-block area that offers a host of programs to promote social well-being and advancement to low-income families. More than 8,000 youth and 5,000 adults benefit from HCZ programs each year.
Students at the Promise Academy have longer school days and school years than their counterparts elsewhere. They also have access to after-school tutoring and weekend classes for remedial help in math and English. Teachers at the school are evaluated and receive incentives to improve performance. The authors note that the school employs “extensive data-driven monitoring to track student progress and differentiate instruction, with students who have not met the required benchmarks receiving small-group tutoring.”
That focus appears to be yielding results: surveys completed by the students — who were paid between $40 and $200 to participate — show that teenage girls who won the school lottery were 12.1 percentage points less likely to be pregnant; boys who won the lottery to Promise Academy were 4.3 percentage points less likely to be in prison or jail than counterparts who didn’t land spots in the school. Lottery winners scored higher on math and reading exams; they also were more likely to take and pass exams in courses such as chemistry and geometry. They also were 14.1 percentage points more likely to enroll in college.
Other survey questions revealed little difference between Promise Academy students and those not at the school in areas such as mental health, obesity, or drug and alcohol use.
Here’s more promising news on education: coaching and preparing high-school students for college increases both applications and enrollment in higher education.
In, “Evaluation of the College Possible Program: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial,” Christopher Avery of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government looked at more than 200 students, 134 of whom were randomly chosen to participate in a free two-year program to guide them toward college. All told, initial enrollment at four-year colleges climbed 15 percentage points for participants in the college-counseling effort.
The program studied was College Possible, a nonprofit for low-income juniors and seniors around Minneapolis and St. Paul. Participants in College Possible receive two years of after-school attention, including counseling on applying for college admission and financial aid as well as help preparing for the SAT and achievement tests. Participants have an average family household income of $25,000 and most of them would be the first in their families to attend college.
The students Mr. Avery followed have been out of high school for a year; he plans to continue following them to gather more data on their longer-term education attainment.
Jobs Weigh on Housing
A new paper looks at the effect that one recovering market — jobs — has on another — housing. The results aren’t encouraging. When unemployment gets worse in a given area, its housing market suffers, as reflected in both home prices and sales. These effects are magnified somewhat in smaller cities than in big ones.
Researchers Li Gan of Texas A&M University and Qinghua Zhang of Peking University examined city-level data from Texas for the years 1990, 2000 and 2010. They found that when the unemployment rate rose by three percentage points, home prices fell 7.74% and the volume of sales fell by 9.98%.