Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Academic Remediation on Violence

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The pandemic has caused an increase in gun violence across the country, in rural and urban areas alike. While the focus has been on immediate causes like the pandemic's effect on mental health, economic conditions, other disruptions to social services, and the criminal justice system, much less attention has been devoted to the potential long-term effects on gun violence and other forms of violence due to the pandemic's effects on US education. Test score data show both the widespread prevalence and enormous magnitude of learning losses for children at all ages all across the country. These massive learning losses are concerning because of the strong correlation between education and violence (Lochner, 2020). Through a partnership between the University of Chicago and the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), we seek to produce evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) about whether education causally reduces violence, and whether public policy can avert the increases in violence we expect from pandemic-induced learning loss at large scale. One of the most effective strategies for accelerating student learning is high- dosage tutoring, or HDT, which bolsters test scores by 0.2 to 0.4 standard deviations (see Nickow et al., 2020, Guryan et al., 2021). We seek to use government administrative data to measure violence-related outcomes for two retrospective RCTs of HDT carried out under ideal conditions in 2013-15 (like an efficacy trial), as well as a prospective RCT of an even larger-scale implementation in CPS right now (more like an effectiveness trial). The two retrospective RCTs enrolled 5,343 high school students, with test score gains of 0.18 and 0.40 SD (Guryan et al., 2021). While not the main focus of those RCTs, we did see suggestive indications of potential violence-reducing effects. The prospective RCT tests the even larger-scale HDT CPS seeks to deliver through its own in-house version of Saga tutoring, called CPS Tutor Corps, with 6,000 participants expected. We seek to link data on the retrospective and prospective RCT samples to data from several administrative data sources on violence-related outcomes like arrests and victimizations, and overall ER visits. The two retrospective (`efficacy') RCTs will let us measure impacts on violence involvement in both the short- and longer runs and understand whether gains in educational achievement can reduce it; in the prospective `effectiveness trial' of HDT, we will examine health outcomes in the short to learn of whether government efforts to scale-up HDT can help reduce violence-exposure disparities due to education disparities. Finally, we will focus on the mechanisms driving the impact on violence. We seek funding to complete the realization of the ongoing RCT in Chicago and to support the efforts of obtaining access to the relevant data on violence-related outcomes and linking it to the two studies.