Responsible researcher: Eduarda Miller de Figueiredo
Original Article Title: Does School Integration Generate Peer Effects? Evidence from Boston's Metco Program
Authors: Joshua D. Angrist and Kevin Lang
Intervention Location: Boston
Sample Size: 6,000 students
Sector: Education
Variable of Main Interest: Educational achievement test scores
Type of Intervention: Sending students to schools in other districts
Methodology: Instrumental Variables
Summary
The literature has demonstrated that integration policies between different schools, through the transport of students from one district to another, have positive results due to increased integration between races and economic gains for black people. However, there was no study of the impacts of this type of program on students who “received” students from other districts. To complete this column, the authors of this article seek to provide an analysis of this type of program through regressions on student performance tests in the Metco program in Boston. Through OLS regressions and the use of instrumental variables, the authors found little evidence of social or statistically significant effects.
The social consequences of school integration have been debated since the year the article discussed here was developed - and continues to this day - in which policymakers and researchers debate the impact of students who are taken by bus to schools in other districts. schoolchildren, for racial balance purposes. According to Welch and Light (1987) and Rossel and Armor (1996), integration policies were partially successful because they increased the likelihood of white and black students studying together and there were economic gains for black students. with the end of segregation.
Due to the Metco program, black students were taken by bus to schools that only had white students, and vice versa. However, there were no studies that analyzed the impacts of this school integration on white students, who remained in schools to which black students were taken by bus.
Because of this, the study sought to provide an initial look at Metco's impact by analyzing average school-level test scores across the population in and around the districts receiving the program.
The Metco program sends students — mostly black — from the Boston district to schools in neighboring suburban districts, which are mostly white. Metco volunteers on behalf of the families of the students who are transported and the school districts that receive the students, as parents interested in placing their children in the program must join a waiting list.
In 1970, four years before the decision that mandated busing in the Boston district, 29 districts that received the program enrolled nearly 1,400 students. In the 2000-2001 school year, nearly 3,200 Metco students attended schools in 32 suburban districts.
Applicants are selected from the waiting list for Metco participation on a first-come, first-served basis. In which Bostan's parents cannot choose a suburban district, but they can decline a placement, which becomes more difficult as the student is in a higher grade.
The state provides funding to districts that accept Metco students, which currently amounts to around $2,800 per student, plus transportation costs. Brookline has about 6,000 public school students who attend eight neighborhood elementary schools in grades kindergarten through eighth grade and a single high school, in which students consistently perform well on national tests, have low dropout rates and high probability of attending school. Furthermore, 10% of Brookline students are black (which includes students in the program).
Under the contract with Metco, Brookline enrolls 300 students in the program each year, which is about 5% of total enrollment.
Scores from the fourth grade were analyzed because, in addition to being the only grade in which math and English knowledge is tested, there are many more elementary schools than medical schools in each district. Which, according to the authors, facilitated a conditional analysis of the effects of the district. Using performance data from the ITBS [1] for the 1994-2000 school years, from a sample of districts operating on or along Interstate 195 [2] .
Added to the model were binary variables for districts on or along Route 128 [3] , variables for the number of students tested, and binary variables for the type of school (elementary or intermediate).
The authors emphasize that preliminary results may be biased due to omitted variables and, therefore, they also make estimates using the instrumental variables (IV) method. The IV estimates exploit the fact that Metco students are enrolled in Brookline schools, in part based on a space constraint. Where class sizes are expected to be small, the Metco office is notified that space is available for students in the program. Knowing this, the authors modeled Metco's enrollment process by allocating one program student per classroom if the expected enrollment is less than 23 (considering classes of up to 25 students).
A significant racial gap was observed for Brookline residents, with Metco students scoring significantly lower than Brookline residents. However, black students in the program have scores very similar to black students at Brookline.
The differences in average performance between Brookline residents and Metco students are large enough that the presence of students participating in the program reduces average test scores at Brookline. Therefore, the presence of Metco students has a marked negative impact on average performance. Increasing the number of students in the program by ten percentage points at Brookline (about two per class) reduces average scores by almost 2.5 percentage points.
The authors point out that previous research suggests a strong positive correlation between individual performance and peer performance levels in the classroom (Lazear, 2001), which may indicate a peer effect. Thus, the effect of the Metco fraction on average scores is large enough that increases in the program fraction could induce a negative peer effect.
By estimating the effect of Metco students on the performance of non-Metco students, through a regression of the national average percentile rank of non-Metco students and another regression from microdata with controls for student characteristics, the first approach shows small positive effects, and in the second approach a negative effect, but both approaches are insignificant. Which suggests that the Metco ratio has no effect on non-Metco students.
Estimates using the instrumental variables method show almost zero effects of class size on achievement at Metco in Brookline.
Although Metco students have notably lower scores than Brookline students, the authors find little evidence of socially or statistically significant effects. In which most studies of peer effects and student mixing are confounded by omitted variables bias.
References
ANGRIST, Joshua D.; LANG, Kevin. Does school integration generate peer effects? Evidence from Boston's Metco Program. American Economic Review , vol. 94, no. 5, p. 1613-1634, 2004.
[1] Iowa Test of Basic Skills.
[2] Road surrounding Boston in its western part, known as the Boston Inner Belt Path.
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