Search

Anecdotal evidence points to the importance of school principals, but the limited existing research has neither provided consistent results nor indicated any set of essential characteristics of effective principals. This paper exploits extensive student-level panel data across six states to investigate both variations in principal performance and the relationship between effectiveness and key certification factors. While principal effectiveness varies widely across states, there is little indication that regulation of the background and training of principals yields consistently effective performance. Having prior teaching or management experience is not related to our estimates of principal value-added.

Using detailed administrative data for public schools, we document racial and ethnic segregation at the classroom level in North Carolina, a state that has experienced a sharp increase in Hispanic enrollment. We decompose classroom-level segregation in counties into within-school and between-school components. We find that the within-school component accounted for a sizable share of total segregation in middle schools and high schools. Recognizing its importance could temper the praise for school assignment policies that reduce racial disparities between schools but allow large disparities within them. More generally, we observe between the two components a complementary relationship, with one component tending to be large when the other one is small. Comparing the degree of segregation for the state's two largest racial/ethnic minority groups, we find that White/Hispanic segregation was more severe than White/Black segregation, particularly within schools. Analyzed as separate administrative units, schools with large shares of Black students tended to have more White/Black segregation across classrooms than schools with smaller shares. Finally, we examine enrollment patterns by course and show that school segregation brings with it differences by race and ethnicity in the courses that students take, with White students more likely to be enrolled in advanced classes.

An increasing emphasis on principals as key to school improvement has contributed to efforts to elevate principal effectiveness that have taken various forms across the US. The primacy of the state as the focal point of educational reform elevates the value of understanding commonalities and differences among states in characteristics of principals, the distribution of principals among schools and ultimately the policies associated with more effective school leadership, particularly for disadvantaged children. This paper describes major state policies, the distribution of elementary school principals among schools along a several dimensions, and pathways to the principalship to illustrate similarities and differences among six states in the tenure and experience distributions and how these vary by student demographic characteristics and district size. Measurement of principal effectiveness and its relationship with principal characteristics and state policies would be ideal, but complications introduced by the dynamics of principal influences and confounding effects of other factors inhibit this effort. Nonetheless, school value added to achievement provides information on differences in principal effectiveness, and we report within-school variation value added across principal regimes and the associations between value added and principal characteristics. The analysis reveals many similarities and some differences among the states, some of which are related to differences in governance structures. Perhaps the most striking differences relate to the pathways to the principalship including the fraction of principals with experiences as assistant principals and teachers.

We document patterns and trends in school segregation in North Carolina between 1998 and 2016, a period of rapid immigration in this racially diverse state. As in other states of the South, the period of court orders enforcing racial balance has given way not only to tacit acceptance of residentially based school segregation but also to policies that offer parents alternatives to traditional public schools. Most prominent among these alternatives in North Carolina are charter schools, which have expanded rapidly with the state's blessing. Following the prevailing practice of social scientists, we measure segregation by the degree of imbalance across schools, using counties and metropolitan areas as basic geographical units. We differentiate students according to their racial/ethnic group and also to their family income. We take into account all students including those in private schools, charter schools and traditional public schools. For the state as a whole, we find that white/nonwhite segregation increased over the period. Most of the increase was in urban areas. We also find that low-income students became more segregated from other students. Segregation measured either way increased sharply in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, which significantly changed its student assignment policy following a federal court order. Compared to metropolitan areas in other parts of the U.S., urban areas in the state have modest levels of segregation, because most districts are county-wide and thus large and diverse. We decompose metropolitan segregation, separating the portions due to private schools, charter schools, racial disparities between school districts, and racial disparities within districts. Charter schools and within-district disparities accounted for the increase in average segregation in metropolitan areas over the period. More generally, areas where school segregation increased the most tend to be large, growing, and marked by big increases in the share of students who are Hispanic.

This paper examines what parents value as they make choices among available charter schools, with primary attention to the racial mix of a school's students. We estimate conditional logit models of the charter school choices made by all parents in North Carolina who switched their child from a traditional public school to a charter school in 2014/15. Our findings that parents care about the school's racial mix of students and that such preferences differ by the race and income of the choosers highlight the pressures that lead charter schools to be racially imbalanced. Our models also include other factors that parents may value such as the distance to the charter, the school's academic performance, the services provided by the charter, such as subsidized lunch and transportation, and the school's mission and approach.