PROJECT 3:Unequal Effects? The Distributional Consequences of Edul. Interventions

过去二十年是美国教育政策的试验期，旨在实现提高成绩和缩小弱势学生与其他学生之间的成绩差距的双重目标。几乎所有的评估都集中在评估这些政策对学生成绩的平均影响上；一些人还研究了这些平均影响在由种族和家庭社会经济地位等特征定义的学生分组中是如何变化的。正如项目1 - 2中详细论述的那样，发展理论表明，学生环境与干预项目设计之间的良好匹配和不匹配将产生异质的项目影响，并且理解这种异质性的本质对于优化项目设计至关重要。项目1 - 11提出儿童/政策拟合假设的测试与相互作用模型，允许根据基线特征定义的人口子群体的不同方案影响。当前项目的开发和实施

The last two decades have been a period of experimentation in education policy in the United States, aimed at achieving the twin goals of boosting achievement and closing achievement gaps between disadvantaged and other students. Nearly all evaluations have focused on estimating the average impacts of these policies on student outcomes; some have also examined how these average impacts vary across subgroups of students defined by such characteristics as ethnicity and family socioeconomic status. As argued at length in Projects l-ll, developmental theory suggests that good and bad matches between student circumstances and intervention program design will produce heterogeneous program impacts, and that understanding the nature of this heterogeneity is essential for optimizing program design. Projects l-ll propose tests of child/policy fit hypotheses with interaction models allowing for differential program impacts across population subgroups that are defined by baseline characteristics. The current project develops and implements complementary approaches to testing child/policy fit hypotheses: quantile treatment effect estimation and other distributional estimators. It applies these techniques to data from four different education settings that range from pre-kindergarten to high school. In the case ofthe Head Start Impact Study and a voucher program to enable poor children to attend private schools in New York City, we test hypotheses suggesting ways in which modest overall effects mask systematic impact differences for children with different academic skills and behavioral characteristics. A third analysis will test hypotheses regarding the effects of policies encouraging middle schoolers to enroll in Algebra on the distribution of student motivation and achievement. Our final tests are of the distribution of impacts on effort and achievement of high-stakes exit exams as well as low-stakes (to students) accountability tests. The fifth year of our project would involve outreach activities designed to promote the use of these techniques more broadly in education evaluations.