Best Selling Books by Ellen Schwartz

Twelve-year-old Starshine Shapiro is crazy for spiders, and the spider she loves most is the rare Fanged Vampire Spider (araneus vampiricus). When Starshine learns that her home province of British Columbia is lacking an official Provincial Arachnid, she vows to make sure the Fanged Vampire Spider receives this title. All she has to do is convince 3,000 people to sign her petition. Luckily, Starshine has lots of friends she can ask for help-especially her best friend, Julie Wong. But a huge fight between Starshine and Julie leaves Starshine wondering how she will ever get the help she needs to make araneus vampiricus the most famous spider in the province?

Starshine''s fascination with spiders is as keen as ever, and once again she uses her arachnological interest to get herself into and out of some unique situations. This time, Starshine is working on a research project for her friends at the American Association of Arachnology. Along the way, of course, she has many adventures, including a television audition, an encounter with a burglar, and her usual frustrations with her off-the-wall parents and precocious little sister.

"In 2009, an Italian town suffers an earthquake and Holocaust survivors, whom the town helped during WWII, return to aid in the recovery"--

We evaluate the effectiveness of small high school reform in the country''s largest school district, New York City. Using a rich administrative dataset for multiple cohorts of students and distance between student residence and school to instrument for endogenous school selection, we find substantial heterogeneity in school effects: newly created small schools have positive effects on graduation and some other education outcomes while older small schools do not. Importantly, we show that ignoring this source of treatment effect heterogeneity by assuming a common small school effect yields a misleading zero effect of small school attendance. The following are appended: (1) Regents Examinations; (2) Definition of variables; (3) First stage, likelihood of attending a small high school; (4) Relationship between minimum distance to small schools and average student characteristics, by residence zip code; and (5) Full OLS and IV regression results.

This paper examines the effect of exposure to violent crime on students'' standardized test performance among a sample of students in New York City public schools. To identify the effect of exposure to community violence on children''s test scores, we compare students exposed to an incident of violent crime on their own blockface in the week prior to the exam to students exposed in the week after the exam. The results show that such exposure to violent crime reduces performance on English Language Arts assessments, and no effect on Math scores. The effect of exposure to violent crime is most pronounced among African Americans, and reduces the passing rates of black students by approximately 3 percentage points. Two appendices contain supplementary tables.

There is increasing concern about risky behaviors and poor mental health among school-aged youth. A critical factor in youth well-being is school attendance. This study evaluates how school organization and structure affect health outcomes by examining the impacts of a popular urban high school reform -- “small schools” -- on youth risky behaviors and mental health, using data from New York City. To estimate a causal estimate of attending small versus large high schools, we use a two-sample-instrumental-variable approach with the distance between student residence and school as the instrument for school enrollment. We consider two types of small schools - “old small schools,” which opened prior to a system-wide 2003 reform aimed at increasing educational achievement and “new small schools,” which opened in the wake of that reform. We find that girls enrolled in older small schools are less likely to become pregnant, and boys are less likely to be diagnosed with mental health disorders than their counterparts in large schools. Both girls and boys enrolled in more recently opened small schools, however, are more likely to be diagnosed with violence-associated injuries and (for girls only) with mental health disorders. These disparate results suggest that improving a school''s organization and inputs together is likely more effective in addressing youth risky behaviors than simply reducing school size.

Housing and education share strong ties in the United States. This relationship is shaped, in large part, by mobility. Students move to new schools, homes and neighborhoods as a result of planned and unplanned family relocations. Taxpayers move from one school district to another in a nation where school quality is closely tied to the district in which a family resides. Teachers weigh factors such as location, pay, and long-term career opportunities as they decide where to work and when to move within or between school districts. Despite the strong relationship between housing and education, policies that recognize and support this relationship are relatively rare. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms by which housing and education are related. We focus particular attention on disadvantaged students in urban areas, as these students often face a unique set of challenges that set them apart from their more advantaged and/or non-urban counterparts. First, we explore the ways in which a child''s housing unit, his neighborhood, and the political economy of public schools might shape his educational outcome. We then turn to a discussion of the implications of these mechanisms for education and housing policy. Herein, we highlight recent efforts to strengthen the ties between education and housing policy and discuss how the lessons learned from these efforts might be brought to bear as policymakers consider new education and housing initiatives.

One of the more prominent features of the federal No Child Left Behind Act is the requirement that schools and districts track the performance of subgroups of students. While the law identifies several subgroups, including low-income and English-language learners, the low performance of black and Hispanic students should be of particular concern.

This paper examines the relationship between the timing of SNAP benefit payments and participation in school lunch and breakfast using the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS). An event study approach examines participation over the five-day window before and after the SNAP payment. We find that school lunch participation decreases 17 to 23 percentage points immediately after the SNAP payment among 11-18 year olds while breakfast drops 19 to 36 percentage points. The decline begins the day prior to payment. We find no effects for 5-10 year olds. Models examining participation over the full SNAP month using individual fixed effects yield similar findings. Among teenagers, participation in school lunch and breakfast decline in the first two weeks of the SNAP month, increasing afterwards. Non-school meals show the opposite pattern. Overall, results indicate SNAP households rely more on school lunch and breakfast toward the end of the SNAP month. Adolescents substitute away from school meals to non-subsidized meal options earlier in the SNAP benefit cycle.

The majority of existing research on mobility indicates that students do worse in the year of a school move. This research, however, has been unsuccessful in isolating the causal effects of mobility and often fails to distinguish the heterogeneous impacts of moves, conflating structural moves (mandated by a school''s terminal grade) and non-structural moves (induced by residential mobility or by access to a better school) for example. Moreover, there is little evidence on the effects beyond the first year of a move. In this paper, we obtain credibly causal estimates of the impact of mobility on performance in both the short and long run, addressing heterogeneity in the impacts of mobility and the endogeneity of moving. We do so using richly detailed longitudinal data for five cohorts of New York City public school students making standard academic progress from grades 1-8. We estimate the impact of moving to a new school in a model with student fixed effects and two alternative sets of instrumental variables--the grade span of a student''s first grade school and foreclosure/building sale--to isolate the causal effect of mobility that is likely planned and mobility that is likely due to unanticipated shocks, respectively. We find negative short-term as well as long-term effects of the structural moves built into the school system. Non-structural moves, however, have a positive effect on academic performance if they are made to join a new school at the beginning of that school''s grade span and, thus, more likely made for strategic reasons. Robustness checks indicate results are not sensitive to inclusion of school quality measures, pre-move trends in mobility, or alternative samples. In the conclusions, we discuss the importance of findings on the heterogeneous impact of school moves to the literature and to policy makers.

In this paper we provide the first rigorous evidence of the impact of a partnership between public middle schools and informal science institutions (ISIs), such as museums and zoos, on student outcomes. This study focuses on Urban Advantage (UA), a program in New York City (NYC) that explicitly draws upon the expertise and resources of the city''s ISIs, bringing these institutions together with NYC public schools to improve science education through intensive professional development, access to ISIs for teachers and students, and other science resources. We conclude that attending a UA school in eighth grade increases middle school science achievement, and there is some evidence that it may also increase the likelihood of passing standardized science exams in high school. [Major public support for Urban Advantage is provided by the Speaker and the City Council of New York and the New York City Department of Education.].

Developed in 1999, the Cornerstone Literacy Initiative is a school-based reform initiative for low performing, high-poverty elementary schools. The reform aims to improve student literacy by providing intensive professional development to teachers over the course of the four-year implementation period. The goal is to change instructional practice, school leadership, and school culture using literacy as the vehicle. This paper draws on lessons from Cornerstone''s experiences over the past eight years. It describes the Cornerstone reform model and the population it serves and explores the ways in which the Cornerstone model has shifted to accommodate lessons from its work. To provide a national context for the Cornerstone Initiative, the report considers the evolution of literacy instruction in the United States and the literature about comprehensive school reform. The report concludes by describing how Cornerstone''s experience contributes to what we know about improving literacy, student performance and school reform.

This paper examines the impact of the adoption of a universal free breakfast policy on student breakfast participation, attendance, and academic achievement. We examine a 2003 New York City policy change that made school breakfast free for all students regardless of income while increasing the price of lunch for those who pay full price. Using a difference-in-difference estimation strategy, we derive plausibly causal estimates of the policy''s impact by exploiting within and between group variation in school meal pricing before and after the policy change. We conduct school-level analyses of the policy''s impact on breakfast participation, and student-level analyses to explore the impact on attendance and test scores. Our estimates suggest that universal free breakfast increased breakfast participation both for students who experienced a decrease in the price of breakfast and for free-lunch eligible students who experienced no price change. The latter suggests that universal provision may alter behavior through mechanisms other than price, perhaps through a decrease in stigma, highlighting the potential merits of universal provision over and above targeted services. Our analysis also suggests that the policy change had a small positive effect on attendance for black and Asian students.

This report continues to track the implementation and impact among schools participating in the Cornerstone National Literacy Initiative reform, now in its sixth year of operation. The results confirm previous findings that Cornerstone schools become better at implementing the reform with time. As acceptance of and enthusiasm for the reform increases, changes in teaching practices become more institutionalized, and the skills of both teachers and students improve. While there is variation at each site, analysis of test score outcomes indicates that given time, Cornerstone schools will see improvement in student achievement. Cornerstone is successful at improving the achievement of students overall in some districts and at raising the performance of students who are typically considered most at-risk in other districts. Regression results indicate that it may take, at the very least, two to three years of implementation to begin to see even a small impact on test scores.

Problem: Policymakers and community development practitioners view increasing subsidized owner-occupied housing as a mechanism to improve urban neighborhoods, but little research studies the impact of such investments on community amenities. Purpose: We examine the impact of subsidized owner-occupied housing on the quality of local schools and compare them to the impacts of city investments in rental units. Methods: Using data from the New York City Department of Education (DOE) and the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), we estimate three main sets of regressions, exploring student characteristics, school resources, and school outcomes. Results and conclusions: The completion of subsidized owner-occupied housing is associated with a decrease in schools'' percentage of free-lunch eligible students, an increase in schools'' percentage of White students, and, controlling for these compositional changes, an increase in scores on standardized reading and math exams. By contrast, our results suggest that investments in rental housing have little, if any, effect. Takeaway for practice: Policies promoting the construction of subsidized owner-occupied housing have solidified in local governments around the country. Our research provides reassurance to policymakers and planners who are concerned about the spillover effects of subsidized, citywide investments beyond the households being directly served. It suggests that benefits from investments in owner occupancy may extend beyond the individual level, with an increase in subsidized owner-occupancy bringing about improvements in neighborhood school quality.

Immigration and migration to New York City (NYC) collectively create a dynamic population of students. In this brief the authors use a decade of detailed, longitudinal data on NYC''s 1st-8th graders to explore both the "stock" of students enrolled and the "flow" of new entrants in each academic year. Together, these paint a portrait of how newly entering immigrant students shape the ever evolving diversity of NYC public schools. New York City''s elementary and middle schools receive between 20,000-30,000 new students in grades 2-8 every year. These students come from all over the world, speak over 175 different languages, and differ from the stock of students previously enrolled. Although the composition of new students varies annually, the variation manifests itself in both predictable and surprising ways. The research consistently shows that roughly half the new entrants in any year are native-born and that the flow of native-born students differs from the flow of foreign-born students, particularly in language skills and exposure to English at home. In the early grades, new entrants are disproportionately native-born, but as students age, the flow becomes increasingly foreign-born. Therefore, disentangling these groups and being more precise about "which" immigrants or "which" new students are examined is important in determining policy interventions. Four questions are addressed in this brief: (1) How many new students are there? (2) How have immigrants changed in the past decade? (3) Do new immigrant students lag behind native-born entrants on standardized exams? and (4) With whom do the new entrants go to school and are their schools different? This brief is intended to provide insight into this important group of newly entering students and to shed light on the variation in this population between nativity groups, over time, and across grades. Two supplemental tables are appended: (1) Total enrollment in NYC public schools; and (2) Foreign-born population in NYC.

New York City (NYC) is home to the largest school district in the U.S., with over one million students and more than 1,600 schools. While it is only one of approximately seven hundred school districts in New York State (NYS), the city educates about one-third of the state''s students. In recent work examining school finance during Mayor Bloomberg''s first two terms, Stiefel and Schwartz (2011) compared NYC''s funding sources with those for the rest of the state in entirety. The NYS statistics presented in that chapter were, therefore, averages for all other school districts in the state--including the fiscally-stressed "Big Four" (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers), rural districts with their own, unique challenges, and relatively wealthy suburban districts. This brief builds upon that research--describing the changes in revenues for the city, other large urban districts, wealthy downstate counties surrounding NYC, and the rest of the state. This analysis uses revenue data from the New York State Education Department''s (NYSED) annual fiscal profiles to compare the educational resources available to NYC relative to other districts in New York State and probe the differences in greater detail. Specifically, the authors examine the change in total revenue, total state revenue, local revenue, and total expenditures excluding debt service and transportation expenses for New York City, the other Big Four, two wealthy downstate counties (Westchester and Nassau), and the remaining schools districts in New York State. An appendix contains supplemental tables.

The impact of public infrastructure investment on the productive performance of firms has been an important focus of the recent literature on productivity growth. The size of this impact has important implications for policymakers'' decisions to invest in public capital, and productivity analysts'' evaluation of productivity growth fluctuations and declines. However, detailed evaluation of the infrastructure impact is difficult using existing studies which rely on restricted models of firms'' technology and behavior. In this paper we construct a more complete production theory model of firms'' production and input decisions. We then apply our framework to state-level data on the output production and input (capital, nonproduction and production labor and energy) use of manufacturing firms to evaluate the contribution of infrastructure to firms'' costs and productivity growth. We find that infrastructure investment does provide a significant direct benefit to manufacturing firms and thus augments productivity growth. We also show, however, that this evidence should be interpreted taking into account the social cost of such capital (which is not reflected in firms'' costs), and the indirect impact resulting from scale effects.

The purpose of this report is threefold: First to develop measures of alternative types of student mobility; second to document the magnitudes of each type of mobility in aggregate and by student income, race/ethnicity, and immigrant status; and third to analyze how mobility of different types affects student academic performance. Although mobility is an oft discussed phenomenon, inadequate attention has been paid to the alternative ways that it can be defined, how the alternatives differ and which alternatives appear to be of sufficient size to be of consequence to policy and practice. Previous research on mobility often focuses on the impact of changing schools on an individual''s academic achievement. As an example, Hanushek, Kain and Rivkin (2004) find that switching schools is harmful to student growth in performance in the year following a switch, even when switching is required because students reach the top grade offered at their school. Other researchers find that academic performance is lower among students who have changed schools in previous years, whatever the reason, (Alexander et al, 1996; Rumberger and Larson, 1998; Swanson and Schneider, 1999). Relatively little attention has been paid in the existing quantitative analyses to distinguishing between different types of mobility i.e., midyear vs. between year; annual vs. cumulative. By providing district level statistics on alternative types of student mobility, this report may help policymakers decide which types of student mobility are important for districts to report regularly. Defining alternative measures may help both policymakers and researchers identify the types of mobility that are the most harmful to student performance and effectively design and target interventions. The main findings of this study are that there is considerable mobility into grades 2 through 8 from outside the New York City school district, across schools, across years for students staying in the district, and some mobility even across schools within academic years. Furthermore, over time, between 6% and 7% enter into each grade of a cohort, and students move several times over their schooling history in the city district. In addition, the entrants and frequent movers have characteristics that are generally associated with harder to educate children. Finally, student mobility has a consistently negative effect, ceteris paribus, on 8th grade reading scores, although the statistical significance of the effect is sensitive to the specification used in the analysis. The report is organized as follows. In the second section, we describe the sources of data. In this section, as throughout the report, we present more detailed information in a separate box in the text. The third section introduces alternative measures of student performance, the fourth section presents magnitudes of annual mobility, and the fifth section does a cumulative mobility analysis. The sixth section analyzes moves in terms of the characteristics of new schools and moves coincident with significant moves in student residence, as measured by zip code changes. The seventh section analyzes the effects of alternative measures of mobility on student performance for New York City (NYC) elementary and middle school (hereafter primary schools) students and the last section concludes.

Few communities welcome federally subsidized housing, with one of the most commonly voiced fears being reductions in property values. Yet there is little empirical evidence that subsidized housing depresses neighborhood property values. This paper estimates and compares the neighborhood impacts of a broad range of federally subsidized, rental housing programs, using rich data for New York City and a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We find that federally subsidized developments have not typically led to reductions in property values and have in fact led to increases in many cases. Impacts are highly sensitive to scale, though patterns vary across programs.

Schools are not static entities--reforms are enacted, curriculums change, new principals and teachers arrive and others leave, and, importantly, students exit and enter the school system. These students may be graduating or reaching a terminal grade, beginning school, entering from local private or parochial schools, moving from another district, or emigrating from another country. This brief focuses on the latter group: the immigrant students in New York City (NYC) public elementary and middle schools over the past decade. As the largest and most diverse school system in the country, it is particularly important that education professionals in NYC have a comprehensive understanding of their students and how they are changing. This report presents a statistical portrait of the demographic characteristics and educational experiences of immigrant students in NYC''s elementary and middle school grades (1st-8th grades) during the 2008-09 academic year. It documents the size and diversity of the immigrant population; compares differences between the native-born and immigrant students across a series of socioeconomic, demographic, and academic performance variables; examines differences within the immigrant population related to time in the U.S. and differences in region of origin; and notes similarities and differences between the foreign-born student population in 2009 compared to 2000. Two appendices are included: (1) Differences in School Performance of Region Groups within Poverty, Racial/Ethnic, and English Proficiency Groups [Tables]; and (2) Countries Included in Regional Groupings.

High school reform is currently at the top of the education policy making agenda after years of stagnant achievement and persistent racial and income test score gaps. Although a number of reforms offer some promise of improving U.S. high schools, small schools have emerged as the favored reform model, especially in urban areas, garnering substantial financial investments from both the private and public sectors. In the decade following 1993, the number of high schools in New York City nearly doubled, as new "small" schools opened and large high schools were reorganized into smaller learning communities. The promise of small schools to improve academic engagement, school culture, and, ultimately, student performance has drawn many supporters. However, educators, policy makers, and researchers have raised concerns about the unintended consequences of these new small schools and the possibility that students "left behind" in large, established high schools are incurring negative impacts.