Coursework: ITP Seminar

Dr. Shanette Porter
Director of Research and Senior Fellow
Mindset Scholars Network

"Can We Identify Effective Schools? The Role of School Climate"
Recent research suggests that high schools and educators effect long-run educational attainment by fostering both socioemotional development and achievement on standardized test scores. Motivated by the prior research, this work classifies Chicago high schools’ effectiveness based on their value added to an index of 9th graders’ socioemotional development and standardized test scores and examines whether organizational features predict the effectiveness index. We show that teacher and student survey reports of the five aspects of school climate in the 5Essentials framework – leadership quality, teacher collaboration, family involvement, supportiveness, and instructional rigor – collectively explain over 40 percent of the variation in the summary index of school effectiveness. School climate factors remain significantly associated with school effectiveness conditional on school demographics, characteristics, and type. Consistent with prior research, we find evidence that supportiveness, teacher collaboration, and instructional rigor may play particularly important roles in shaping adolescents’ outcomes. This is the first research to document that school climate is a strong predictor of schools’ causal effects on students’ long-run outcomes, which has important implications given recent policy on school climate (e.g., ESSA).

Dr. Jayanti Owens
Department of Sociology
Brown University

"Double Jeopardy: Individual Biases, Racialized Organizations, and the Production of Racial Disparities in School Discipline"

Black and Latinx students face significantly higher rates of school suspension and expulsion than White students. This disparity is largest among boys. Disparities persist net of racial differences in misbehavior, suggesting possible differential treatment/support or biased perceptions of the same behaviors. To understand persistent disparities, scholars typically examine either individuals’ social psychological processes or schools’ organizational contexts – but rarely do both together. This study bridges the social psychology of individual bias with scholarship on racialized organizations in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the production of racial inequality in school discipline. I combine an original video experiment involving 1,053 US teachers with administrative data on school-level organizational context. I find that, compared to White boys, Black and Latinx boys face a double jeopardy. They experience (1) within-school teacher bias, when a given Black or Latinx boy is perceived more negatively than a White boy would be for identical misbehavior within poor minority schools, and; (2) between-school organizational bias, where poor minority schools additionally perceive identical misbehavior more negatively than advantaged White schools. Biased perceptions then justify harsher sanctioning, producing racial disparities at the organizational and individual levels. Findings reveal how social psychological and organizational forces can mutually reinforce racial disparities in school discipline. 

Dr. Felix Elwert
Department of Sociology
UW-Madison

Part 1 of 4: A short course on directed acyclic graphs (DAGS) and causal mediation. 
NOTE: Please plan to attend all 4 sessions.

Dr. Felix Elwert
Department of Sociology
UW-Madison

Part 2 of 4: A short course on directed acyclic graphs (DAGS) and causal mediation. 
NOTE: Please plan to attend all 4 sessions.

Dr. Felix Elwert
Department of Sociology
UW-Madison

Part 3 of 4: A short course on directed acyclic graphs (DAGS) and causal mediation. 
NOTE: Please plan to attend all 4 sessions.

Dr. Felix Elwert
Department of Sociology
UW-Madison

Part 4 of 4: A short course on directed acyclic graphs (DAGS) and causal mediation. 
NOTE: Please plan to attend all 4 sessions.

Dr. Amanda Gaulke
Department of Economics
Kansas State University

Dr. Chris Reynolds
Senior Financial Economist
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

"Student Loan Repayment Prioritization"

Student loan debt in the United States exceeds $1.6 trillion (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2019)). Various government programs have been implemented to try to reduce default, but they have had limited success. For example, income-based repayment plans; the United States General Accounting Office 2012 report stated that 70% of those who defaulted on their student loans would have qualified for an income-based repayment plan. Previous work has shown that options and framing matter for picking a repayment plan and for eventual student loan default (for example, Cox, Kreisman and Dynarksi (2018) and Abraham, Filiz-Ozbay, Ozbay and Turner (2018)). However, an alternative explanation as to why borrowers are defaulting on their student loans is that they prioritize repayment of other debts more. This paper contributes to the literature by documenting variation in student loan prioritization among student loan holders. If people are not paying because they are not prioritizing student loans—as opposed to because of severe economic shocks—switching repayment plans would not necessarily improve student loan repayment outcomes.  We use the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's Equifax Consumer Credit Panel dataset to document heterogeneity in debt prioritization among student loan holders. We find a substantial portion of consumers who only default on student loans, even as they continue to pay down other forms of debt. This group demonstrably prioritizes continued repayment of their student loans behind the repayment of other loan types. We examine the “payment hierarchy” of debt non-payment among those who default on multiple types of debt. This payment hierarchy is defined by ranking debt types by the order in which consumers default on them. Among borrowers with multiple types of debt entering default, we find that student loans are the most “protected” debt type—that is, on average, their student loans will default last among all loan types held.