Research finds that small high schools deliver better outcomes than large high schools for urban students. An important outstanding question is whether this better performance is gained at the expense of losses elsewhere: Does small school reform lift the whole district? We explore New York...

We evaluate the effectiveness of small school reform as systemic reform in the nation’s largest school district, New York City. Using rich administrative data for four cohorts of students, we examine the extent to which graduation and testing outcomes improved for all students, not only those...

We evaluate the effectiveness of small high school reform in the country’s largest school district, New York City. Using a rich administrative data-set for multiple cohorts of students and distance between student residence and school to instrument for endogenous school selection, we find...

We evaluate the effectiveness of small high school reform in the country’s largest school district, New York City. Using a rich administrative dataset for multiple cohorts of students, we estimate a model of school outcomes using instrumental variables with multiple types of endogenous school...

[...]Nonetheless, not all the news is bad. As we describe in detail,our work on New York City’s public schools—which includesextensive research on immigrant children—and our separate work on school reform offer several reasons for optimism.First, immigrant students, who might be viewed as...

This article was presented at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in April 2005, "Urban Dynamics in New York City." The goal of the conference was threefold: to examine the historical transformations of the engine-of-growth industries in New York and distill the main...

In this paper, we review policy levers that could potentially help close the achievement gap between African-American and white high school students, and draw on the literature to glean recommendations for superintendents, principals and education policy makers. We address, in turn: Policies to...

The purpose of this report is threefold: First to develop measures of alternative types of student mobility; second to document the magnitudes of each type of mobility in aggregate and by student income, race/ethnicity, and immigrant status; and third to analyze how mobility of different types...

One of the more prominent features of the federal No Child Left Behind Act is the requirement that schools and districts track the performance of subgroups of students. While the law identifies several subgroups, including low-income and English-language learners, the low performance of black...

Objective: This paper explores the effect of the economic conditions of source countries and the human capital characteristics of coethnic immigrant communities on foreign-born students' reading and math achievement. Methods: We use data on New York City public school foreign-born students from...