This paper estimates the timing of identifying students with disabilities when students are race matched to their teachers. Early identification is vital for students that need additional resources to ensure a proper education. Delaying proper education for even a year may have drastic consequences on the trajectory of a student’s future. I utilize a Cox proportional hazard model to estimate the timing of identifying students with disabilities based on whether the student is race matched to their teacher or not.

Proponents of school choice argue that deregulating public education would allow for new firms to enter the market, generating competitive pressure on existing schools to increase educational quality. Although there exists a large school choice literature evaluating whether competitive pressure, created by more schooling options, leads to achievement gains, little attention has been paid to the direct effect of introducing new schools to the marketplace on student outcomes. This study provides some of the first evidence concerning the effects of school openings in a deregulated market. Specifically, we study school openings in Michigan where students can participate in interdistrict, intradistrict, and charter school choice. Furthermore, no caps exist for the number of charter schools or the number of students who can attend a school outside of their resident district, and universities and colleges can authorize charter schools anywhere in the state. In fact, there have been over 500 school openings in the past decade, a third of which have been charter schools. Thus, this setting provides the ideal situation to evaluate whether market induced changes in the supply of schools increase achievement. In accordance with prior literature concerning newly built schools, our preliminary results suggest that students who attend newly opened schools experience a decrease in achievement in the first year the school is open with increases in test scores in future years. These results may imply that new schools, whether or not they are located in new buildings, may need extra support in the first year from their district or management organization in order to offset the initial negative effects of school openings.

This paper estimates the impact of race matched faculty (i.e., any teacher outside of a particular student’s classroom) on student test scores. Using administrative panel data between school years 2008-09 through 2017-18 from Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), I estimate that Latino students see positive impacts of race matched faculty. By basing this study in LAUSD, which has a large proportion of Latino students and teachers, I can fill a gap within the literature by examining the effects of race match and faculty race match on Latino students. My findings indicate that matching Latino students to racially congruent teachers and faculty can improve math test scores by 0.020 standard deviations and ELA test score by 0.008 standard deviations. Increasing the supply of Latino teachers may provide as a crucial catalyst in decreasing the achievement gaps found between Latino and white students.

Students with disabilities make up approximately 14% of the K-12 student population, and over 60 percent of these students spend 80% or more of their time in school in the general education classroom setting. While the intention behind mainstreaming is to enable students with disabilities (SWDs) to learn in the least restrictive environment, it is nonetheless important to understand the quality of education they receive in these environments. In particular, general education teachers (GETs) typically enter the field with limited preparation to work with students with disabilities. Only seven states require all teachers to complete coursework for working with SWDs, and only two require clinical experiences working with these students. Thus, general education teachers are likely to receive minimal coverage of special education teaching methods in their coursework and have few practice opportunities focused on SWDs. To test the relative effectiveness of GETs with SWDs, we leverage Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) administrative data from SY 2007-2008 through SY 2017-2018 and disaggregate overall measures of teacher effectiveness into measures focusing specifically on SWDs and non-SWDs. Specifically, we generate two different sets of value-added measures (VAMs) for each teacher (n = 6,200): a SWD VAM and a non-SWD VAM. We find that a sizeable amount of the top performing teachers for non-SWDs are not necessarily the most effective teachers for SWDs (as measured by VAMs). This result holds across both math and ELA courses. Students with disabilities also have a higher (lower) probability of being taught by teachers within the lowest (highest) quintile of SWD and non-SWD VAMs within schools. These preliminary results suggest that teachers may need additional training to become successful helping SWDs to learn. Moreover, these findings raise concerns about the equitable distribution of high-quality teachers to students with disabilities, suggesting that school and district leaders may need to proactively consider the placement of SWDs with teachers who are more adept at teaching this critical population of students.