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This paper describes state, institutional, and other community-based programs deemed exemplary (on the basis of design imperatives) for successful interventions to promote meaningful access of minority group youth to postsecondary education. The imperatives include early intervention, comprehensive and integrated intervention, intervention sustained for ongoing feedback and tracking, coordination with other education and training programs, and broad and long-term strategies providing a continuum of age-appropriate services. Following a general introduction, chapter 2, on state programs, describes programs developed by Arizona, Ohio, California, Texas, New York, Wisconsin, Washington, and Mississippi. Chapter 3 describes association and institutional programs including: "Syracuse Challenge," which provides support services to students from sixth grade on; "Middle College High School," an alternative high school housed in a New York City community college; "Career Beginnings," which uses a "case management" approach beginning in the high school junior year; "Mathematics, Engineer, Sciences Achievement," a program that encourages California minority students in grades 3-12 in these areas; and the "Hispanic Student Success Program" in San Antonio (Texas). Chapter 4 describes community-based programs like the "I Have a Dream" program, which began as a pledge by philanthropist of Eugene Lang to provide college tuition to Harlem sixth graders and later turned into a national foundation. Chapter 5 outlines federal programs, particularly the "Special Programs for Students from Disadvantaged Backgrounds" effort. Chapter 6 draws conclusions and suggests recommendations. (Includes 16 endnotes.) (JB)

This document, which is intended for staff of state occupational information coordinating committees (SOICCs) and career information delivery systems (CIDS), examines the pros and cons of career information hotlines and their use in selected states. "Foreword--Career Information on Call" (Juliette N. Lester) provides a brief overview of selected states' efforts to provide career information and lists benefits of CIDS hotlines. The hotlines can reach a broad spectrum of the public; offer users a degree of privacy and anonymity; help callers clarify their information needs; and are a cost-effective way of serving large and diverse populations. "Career Counseling by Telephone in Rhode Island" (Mildred T. Nichols) describes a model for using paraprofessional counselors to provide home-based adults (primarily women) with career counseling and information by telephone. "Fourteen Years and 42,000 Calls: Virginia's VIEW" (Carl McDaniels, Mary Anne Knoblock, Gale A. Watts, Mary Landon-Moore) details a comprehensive, multimedia state CIDS. "Starting a Career Information Hotline? Experiences and Insights from the Texas SOICC" (Caesar Andreas) discusses a career information hotline that focuses primarily on secondary school students, teachers, and counselors throughout Texas. A list of SOICC contacts for career information is appended. (Contains 15 references.) (MN)

The U.S. spends twice as much as the average industrialized country on higher education, but continues to slide relative to other nations in the percentage of young adults with an associate degree or higher. Despite recent reductions in state aid to higher education, state taxpayers continue to be the largest single source of unrestricted funds that colleges need to hire faculty and provide core student services. This means that governors and other state policymakers continue to have significant leverage over the priorities and direction of their public higher education systems. Governors are in a key position to use finance as a lever to promote higher education productivity through their budgeting authority, their annual budget addresses, and other finance-related powers. This paper presents three primary strategies governors can employ to restructure college costs and graduate many more students from high quality programs within existing resources.

Research shows that having a highly educated workforce is critical to states and territories' economic competitiveness and to the well-being of their citizens. A growing number of state policymakers are concerned that the nation as a whole and their states are falling behind in the race to accumulate the educational capital needed to ensure that their states will be world-class, not second class. While everyone is talking about the critical need to develop a more competitive workforce, relatively few states have taken major steps to actually move the agenda forward. More specifically, few states have publicly identified their goals for increasing college completion. This paper presents strategies that governors can adopt to increase their states' educational attainment.

Selective college admissions are fundamentally a question of tradeoffs: Given capacity, admitting one student means rejecting another. Research to date has generally estimated average effects of college selectivity, and has been unable to distinguish between the effects on students gaining access and on those losing access under alternative admissions policies. We use the introduction of the Top Ten Percent rule and administrative data from the State of Texas to estimate the effect of access to a selective college on student graduation and earnings outcomes. We estimate separate effects on two groups of students. The first--highly ranked students at schools which previously sent few students to the flagship university--gain access due to the policy; the second--students outside the top tier at traditional "feeder" high schools--tend to lose access. We find that students in the first group see increases in college enrollment and graduation with some evidence of positive earnings gains 7-9 years after college. In contrast, students in the second group attend less selective colleges but do not see declines in overall college enrollment, graduation, or earnings. The Top Ten Percent rule, introduced for equity reasons, thus also seems to have improved efficiency. [Funding was provided by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence Scheme, FAIR project No 262675.]

This paper reports results from a resume-based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives such as public community colleges being much cheaper. We sent almost 9,000 fictitious resumes of young applicants who recently completed their schooling to online job postings in six occupational categories and tracked employer callback rates. We find no evidence that employers prefer applicants with resumes listing a for-profit college relative to those whose resumes list either a community college or no college at all. Appended to the paper are; (1) Supplementary Tables and (2) Experiment Details.

This study describes the teacher pay for performance plans designed and implemented by the public schools participating in the Governor's Educator Excellence Grant (GEEG) program in Texas. GEEG is a federally funded, incentive pay program that awarded non-competitive grants, ranging from $60,000 to $220,000 each year for three years, to 99 Texas public schools. Schools participating in GEEG took advantage of the considerable discretion granted to them by the Texas Education Agency to design incentive plans exhibiting an array of differences on several key plan variables. This study explores the following research questions: (1) How did schools propose to distribute awards to teachers and how were those awards actually distributed in practice? (2) What is the relationship between teacher characteristics and the dollar amounts awarded to teachers in the GEEG plans? (3) What are the determinants of GEEG plan characteristics and the distribution of awards? (Contains 4 figures, 5 tables and 38 endnotes.) [This paper was prepared for "Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12]Education" in Nashville, Tennessee on February 28, 2008.]

This study examines why 51 schools declined an invitation to participate in a state-funded educator incentive initiative, the Texas Educator Excellence Grant (TEEG) program. Using data from an ongoing evaluation of the TEEG program conducted by the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) under contract with Texas Education Agency, this article examines reservations that school leaders expressed about participating in the program. Findings suggest that schools' decisions were less about outright opposition to performance incentive policies in education and more about the interplay between a school's organizational context and particular features of the TEEG program. Specific concerns included that: (1) guidelines for distributing awards to school personnel were inequitable; (2) performance incentives might be detrimental to a school's culture; (3) the school selection process did not recognize other teachers' or schools' contribution to students' academic success; and (4) time demands and technical expertise needed to implement the program outweighed perceived benefits. Many school leaders described these concerns as being even more problematic in small districts and schools. Future efforts to implement similar programs should consider the appropriate balance between state guidelines and local flexibility, clearly communicate program guidelines and regulations, offer technical assistance, and allow sufficient time for schools to plan their educator incentive programs. Interview Protocol is appended. (Contains 2 tables and 11 footnotes.)

In light of the recent bans on affirmative action in higher education, this paper provides new evidence on the effects of alternative admissions policies on the persistence and college completion of minority students. I find that the change from affirmative action to the Top 10% Plan in Texas decreased both retention and graduation rates of lower-ranked minority students. Results show that both fall-to-fall freshmen retention and six-year college graduation of second-decile minority students decreased, respectively, by 2.4 and 3.3 percentage points. The effect of the change in admissions policy was slightly larger for minority students in the third and lower deciles: fall-to-fall freshmen retention and six-year college graduation decreased, respectively, by 4.9 and 4.2 percentage points. Moreover, I find no evidence in support of the minority "mismatch" hypothesis. These results suggest that most of the increase in the graduation gap between minorities and non-minorities in Texas, a staggering 90 percent, was driven by the elimination of affirmative action in the 1990s. (Contains 9 tables, 1 figure, and 21 footnotes.)

One of the continuing areas of controversy surrounding higher education is affirmative action. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear "Fisher v. Texas," and their ruling may well influence universities' diversity initiatives, especially if they overturn "Grutter v. Bollinger" and rule that diversity is no longer a "compelling state interest." But what lies behind a compelling state's interest? One issue that continues to require more information is estimating and understanding the gains for those attending colleges and universities with greater diversity. Most existing studies are either based on evidence from one institution, which has issues of both selectivity and limited "treatments," or focus on selective institutions, which also face issues of selection bias from college choice behaviors. In this research we use Wave 3 of Add Health, collected in 2001-02 of those then attending college. Add Health collected the IPEDS number of each college and matched these to the racial/ethnic composition of the student body. We convert these data into an index of diversity and then ask whether attending a college/university with a more diverse student body influences a variety of outcomes at Wave 4 (2007-08), including years of schooling completed, earnings, family income, composition of friends, and probability of voting. Our results provide evidence of a positive link between attending a college with greater diversity and higher earnings and family income, but not with more schooling or the probability of voting. An appendix contains two data tables: (1) Listing Carnegie Categories and Average Unweighted ELF [ethnolinguistic fractionalization] for Each Category; and (2) Results on Income and Earnings for Those Who Attended a 4-Year Institution, Controlling for Quality of the Institution.

Our education system is in desperate need of innovation. Despite radical advances in nearly every other sector, public school students continue to attend school in the same buildings and according to the same schedule as students did more than a hundred years ago, and performance is either stagnant or worsening. One of the most important innovations in the past half-century is the emergence of charter schools, which, when first introduced in 1991, came with two distinct promises: to serve as an escape hatch for students in failing schools, and to create and incubate new educational practices. We examine charter schools across the quality spectrum in order to learn which practices separate high-achieving from low-achieving schools. An expansive data collection and analysis project in New York City charter schools yielded an index of five educational practices that explains nearly half of the difference between high- and low-performing schools. We then draw on preliminary evidence from demonstration projects in Houston and Denver and find the effects on student achievement to be strikingly similar to those of many high-performing charter schools and networks. The magnitude of the problems in our education system is enormous, but this preliminary evidence points to a path forward to save the 3 million students in our nation's worst-performing schools, for a price of about $6 billion, or less than $2,000 per student. (Contains 1 table, 2 boxes, 3 figures and 5 endnotes.)

Charter schools have become a very popular instrument for reforming public schools, because they expand choices, facilitate local innovation, and provide incentives for the regular public schools while remaining under public control. Despite their conceptual appeal, evaluating their performance has been hindered by the selective nature of their student populations. This paper investigates the quality of charter schools in Texas in terms of mathematics and reading achievement and finds that, after an initial start-up period, average school quality in the charter sector is not significantly different from that in regular public schools. Perhaps most important, the parental decision to exit a charter school is much more sensitive to education quality than the decision to exit a regular public school, consistent with the notion that the introduction of charter schools substantially reduces the transactions costs of switching schools. Low income charter school families are, however, less sensitive to school quality than higher income families.

In the last three decennia, many governments have introduced market mechanisms in education. They have done so by enhancing parental choice and encouraging school competition, through policies like abolishing catchment areas, creating voucher programmes and setting up charter schools. These market mechanisms have given rise to fierce debates in both political and scientific circles. However, most prior reviews of research literature in this area have concluded that the effects of market mechanisms in education are small, if they are found at all. This review tries to answer the question why that is the case, by analysing the causal pathways that link market mechanisms to educational outcomes and by reviewing the empirical evidence for each step along those causal pathways. The findings of this review point to the need for a nuanced and qualified discussion about market mechanisms in education. What market mechanisms mean in actual practice strongly depends on (local) contexts, while the impact of market mechanisms is related to other policies impacting on parental choice behaviour as well as actions taken by schools. Appended are: (1) Country Case Studies; and (2) Terminology. Notes are also included. (Contains 1 table.)

While the goals of the integration of schools legally mandated by "Brown v. Board of Education" are very broad, here we focus more narrowly on how school racial composition affects scholastic achievement. Uncovering this effect is difficult, because racial mixing in the schools is not an accident but rather an outcome of both government and family choices. Our evaluation, made possible by rich panel data on the achievement of Texas students, disentangles racial composition effects from other aspects of school quality and from differences in abilities and family background. The results show that a higher percentage of black schoolmates has a strong adverse effect on the achievement of blacks and, moreover, that the effects are highly concentrated in the upper half of the skill distribution. In contrast, racial composition has a noticeably smaller effect on achievement of blacks with lower initial achievement and of whites--strongly suggesting that the results are not a simple reflection of unmeasured school quality. The uneven distribution of blacks across school districts can explain a significant portion of the black-white achievement gap in Texas. [Discussion Paper also supported by the Packard Humanities Institute.]

Pay for performance is a popular public education reform, and millions of dollars are currently being targeted for pay for performance programs. These reforms are popular because economic and management theories suggest that well-designed incentive pay programs could improve teacher effectiveness. There is little evidence about the characteristics of a well-designed incentive pay plan for teachers, however. This study takes advantage of a recent natural experiment in Texas to explore the optimal design of teacher incentive plans. We find that when given the opportunity, teachers design relatively weak incentive pay plans. In turn, those relatively weak incentives do not appear to have induced any significant changes in teacher productivity, although they did have a significant impact on teacher turnover. As such, our evidence suggests that the types of incentives that appeal to teachers (and their unions) may not be optimal from the employer perspective. (Contains 7 tables, 2 figures and 20 footnotes.)

Results of a study concerning the relationships between state policies and private college enrollments, enrollment demographics, and finance are presented. After considering national enrollment trends in the independent sector, attention is directed to the impacts on private colleges of state fiscal policies, including aid to private colleges and their students as well as tuition levels at the public sector. Also considered are results of research in five states on the nature and impacts on the private sector of states' higher education planning and program review policies, as well as policies toward information collection and dissemination in higher education. The research also examines the impact of state policies concerning access/choice. Three model state policy postures toward private higher education are addressed: the laissez-faire approach (California and Texas), the market-competitive posture (Indiana), and the regulatory posture (New York and Illinois). Data were also obtained from a survey of state independent college association executive officers from 19 states. Appended is the questionnaire for this survey, which was conducted by the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities. (SW)

This document reviews the state of medical and dental education in Texas, 1974-80. Recommendations suggest: (1) The Advisory Committee and the Task Force for Medical and Dental Education would be continued as planning bodies to be convened at least once every two years. (2) No new medical or dental schools are recommended since the state will be able to meet current demands for medical and dental manpower if: (a) the trends of the past six years continue, and (b) the presently approved medical and dental schools are expanded to their currently approved optimum capacities. (3) Increased State of Texas support is recommended to continue augmentation of primary care education in all Texas medical schools for undergraduate medical students, and resident physicians in hospitals and in other clinical facilities. Working papers in the document deal with additional manpower, medical and dental school admissions, underrepresentation of minority students in medical and dental schools in Texas, curricula and educational methodologies, cost and financial implications, and future studies. (MJM)

A study examined policies addressing minority student retention in higher education at the national, state, and institutional level in order to clarify how the discourse surrounding minority student retention in higher education is related to social and political purposes and existing power arrangements. The study proceeded by critically examining two documents issued by national groups, reports issued by state level educational bodies in Arizona and Texas, as well as reports prepared by the University of Texas at Austin and by the University of Arizona. For each set of documents representing either the national, state, or institutional level the study looked at the following questions: (1) Who is authorized to speak on minority student retention? (2) Who listens? (3) What can be said? (4) What remains unspoken? (5) Which metaphors, modes of argumentation, explanation, and description are valued? and (6) Which ideas are advanced as foundational to the discourse? This content analysis of retention policies found that the policies leave intact a fundamental ideology of cultural deficit and disadvantage and support existing power arrangements. The analysis also found that policy reports address the same topics, use similar metaphors, advance the same ideas as foundational to the discourse, and fail to acknowledge racism. Included are 30 references. (JB)

Texas students have made extraordinarily large gains on statewide achievement tests, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), gains so dramatic that they have been dubbed the "Texas miracle." There is general agreement that these gains are attributable to the high stakes accountability system in Texas, but there is some question about what they really mean. Several analyses were conducted to examine whether TAAS scores can be trusted to provide an accurate index of student skills and abilities. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were used to determine how much students in Texas have improved and whether this improvement is consistent with what has occurred nationwide. Whether gains in TAAS scores between 1994 and 1998 were comparable to those on the NAEP was studied. Also measured was whether differences in scores between whites and students of color on the TAAS were consistent with the difference between these groups on the NAEP. Finally, whether TAAS scores were related to scores on three other tests given to students in 20 Texas elementary schools was studied. Findings from these analyses raise serious questions about the validity of gains in TAAS scores. The main finding is that average test score gains on the NAEP in Texas exceeded those of the nation in only one of three comparisons. The results illustrate the difficulties in relying on statewide test results as the sole measure of student achievement when these scores are used to make high stakes decisions about teachers and schools, as well as student. (Contains 27 references.) (SLD)

In response to concern about the supply of minority faculty available to replace retiring academics, a study investigated academic achievement in doctoral programs by two of the United States' fastest-growing subpopulations, Mexican-Americans (MA) and American Indians (AI). The objectives were to establish a conceptual framework, to refine existing methodology, and to develop a model of minority student achievement in doctoral programs, extending earlier research not focusing on these groups. The study targeted this population in six universities in five southwestern states. A total of 343 students (291 Hispanic and 52 American Indian) in all disciplines awarding Ph.D. or Ed.D. degrees were surveyed, and from these, 214 usable responses were received--176 from Hispanics identified as MAs and 38 from AIs. The variables investigated were those with the greatest effect on four outcomes: doctoral satisfaction, doctoral grade point average, intent to finish, and intent to enter college faculty. Results demonstrate that there are strong effects of the extracted factors relating to the doctoral academic experience that ultimately lead to doctoral achievement for these populations. Especially salient were effects of gender, mentoring, faculty relationships, feelings of racial discrimination and alienation, perceptions and experiences of faculty and departmental attitudes, academic self-concept, aspirations, and family support. Based on the findings, a structural model for academic achievement factors among Mexican-American and American Indian doctoral students is being developed. Includes 15 references. (MSE)

This report of the Coordinating Board's Nursing Project Council is the culmination of three years' intensive effort to provide the State of Texas with a plan on which those responsible for helping meet the health care needs can rely in determining where nurses are needed, what their educational preparation should be, and how the nurses can be utilized for maximum efficiency. The study made inquiries of registered nurses, vocational nurses, physicians, nursing students, and others who could be expected to provide information on the subject. Discussed in this report is: a profile of nursing in Texas, utilization of nurses, nursing education (needs and curriculum analysis), regional perspective, cooperative approach to meeting nursing needs, difinition of terms, and a selected bibliography. The appendixes include statistical data on the status of nursing by region and selected copies of survey instruments used for the many surveys incorporated in this study. The intent of this report has been to provide reliable direction for agencies, institutions, and professional organizations interested in improving nursing education and delivery of health care. (Author/PG)

This paper explores the phenomenon referred to as test score inflation, which occurs when achievement gains on "high-stakes" exams outpace improvements on "low-stakes" tests. The first part of the paper documents the extent to which student performance trends on state assessments differ from those on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). I find evidence of considerable test score inflation in several different states, including those with quite different state testing systems. The second part of the paper is a case study of Texas that uses detailed item-level data from the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) and the NAEP to explore why performance trends differed across these exams during the 1990s. I find that the differential improvement on the TAAS cannot be explained by several important differences across the exams (e.g., the NAEP includes open-response items, many NAEP multiple-choice items require/permit the use of calculators, rulers, protractors or other manipulative). I find that skill and format differences across exams explain the disproportionate improvement in the TAAS for fourth graders, although these differences cannot explain the time trends for eighth graders.

This paper uses administrative data on schooling and earnings from Texas to estimate the effect of college quality on the distribution of earnings. We proxy college quality using the college sector from which students graduate and focus on identifying how graduating from UT-Austin, Texas A\&M or a community college affects the distribution of earnings relative to graduating from a non-flagship university in Texas. Our methodological approach uses the rich set of observable student academic ability and background characteristics in the data to adjust the earnings distributions across college sectors for the fact that college sector quality is correlated with factors that also affect earnings. Although our mean earnings estimates are similar to previous work in this area, we find evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the returns to college quality. At UT-Austin, the returns increase across the earnings distribution, while at Texas A\&M they tend to decline with one's place in the distribution. For community college graduates, the returns relative to non-flagship four-year graduates are negative across most of the distribution of earnings, but they approach zero and become positive for higher earners. Our data also allow us to estimate effects separately by race and ethnicity, and we find that historically under-represented minorities experience the highest returns in the upper tails of the earnings distribution, particularly among UT-Austin and community college graduates. While we focus on graduates, we also show our estimates are robust to examining college attendees as well as to many other changes in the sample and to the estimation strategy. Overall, these estimates provide the first direct evidence of the extent of heterogeneity in the effect of college quality on subsequent earnings, and our estimates point to the need to consider such heterogeneity in human capital models that incorporate college quality.

This paper describes an experiment designed to investigate the impact of aligning student, parent, and teacher incentives on student achievement. On outcomes for which incentives were provided, there were large treatment effects. Students in treatment schools mastered more than one standard deviation more math objectives than control students, and their parents attended almost twice as many parent-teacher conferences. In contrast, on related outcomes that were not incentivized (e.g. standardized test scores, parental engagement), we observe both positive and negative effects. We argue that these facts are consistent with a moral hazard model with multiple tasks, though other explanations are possible.

The racial achievement gap in education is an important social problem to which decades of research have yielded no scalable solutions. Recent evidence from "No Excuses" charter schools--which demonstrates that some combination of school inputs can educate the poorest minority children--offers a guiding light. In the 2010-2011 school year, we implemented five strategies gleaned from best practices in "No Excuses" charter schools--increased instructional time, a more rigorous approach to building human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations--in nine of the lowest performing middle and high schools in Houston, Texas. We show that the average impact of these changes on student achievement is 0.276 standard deviations in math and 0.059 standard deviations in reading, which is strikingly similar to reported impacts of attending the Harlem Children's Zone and Knowledge is Power Program schools--two strict "No Excuses" adherents. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of the scalability of the experiment.

The Texas 10% law states that students who graduated among the top 10% of their high school class are guaranteed admission to public universities in Texas. We estimate the causal effects of this admissions guarantee on a sequence of connected decisions: students' application behavior, admission decisions by the university, students' enrollment choices conditional on admission; as well as the resulting college achievement. We identify these effects by comparing students just above and just below the top 10% rank cutoff. While this design is in the spirit of a regression discontinuity, we note important differences in approach and interpretation. We find that students react to incentives created by the admissions guarantee--for example, by reducing applications to competing private universities. The results also suggest that the effects of the admissions guarantee depend on the university and the type of students it attracts, and that the law is binding and alters the decisions of the admissions committees. We find little evidence that the law increases diversity or leads to meaningful mismatch for the marginal student admitted.

Age based school entry laws force parents and educators to consider an important tradeoff: Though students who are the youngest in their school cohort typically have poorer academic performance, on average, they have slightly higher educational attainment. In this paper we document that for a large cohort of California and Texas natives the school entry laws increased educational attainment of students who enter school early, but also lowered their academic performance while in school. However, we find no evidence that the age at which children enter school effects job market outcomes, such as wages or the probability of employment. This suggests that the net effect on adult labor market outcomes of the increased educational attainment and poorer academic performance is close to zero.

Texas requires a school district to offer bilingual education when its enrollment of limited English proficient (LEP) students in a particular elementary grade and language is twenty or higher. Using school panel data, we find a significant increase in the probability that a district offers bilingual education above this 20-student cutoff. Using this discontinuity as an instrument for district bilingual education provision, we find that bilingual education programs do not significantly impact the standardized test scores of students with Spanish as their home language (comprised primarily of ever-LEP students). However, there are significant positive spillover effects to their non-LEP peers.

We use data from the Texas Schools Microdata Panel (TSMP) to examine the extent to which dropouts use the GED as a route to post-secondary education. The paper develops a model pointing out the potential biases in estimating the effects of taking the "GED path" to postsecondary education. Lacking suitable instruments that would allow us to directly address potential biases, our approach is to base our estimates on a set of academically "at risk" students who are very similar in the 8th grade. We observe that the eventual high school graduates in this group have much better postsecondary education outcomes than do the similar at-risk 8th graders who dropped out and obtained a GED. Our model explains the observed differences, and allows for a discussion of the policy challenges inherent in improving the postsecondary outcomes of dropouts.

Ten states, beginning with Texas and California in 2001, have passed laws permitting undocumented students to pay the in-state tuition rate--rather than the more expensive out-of-state tuition rate--at public universities and colleges. We exploit state-time variation in the passage of the laws to evaluate the effects of these laws on the educational outcomes of Hispanic childhood immigrants who are not U.S. citizens. Specifically, through the use of individual-level data from the 2001-2005 American Community Surveys supplemented by the 2000 U.S. Census, we estimate the effect of the laws on the probability of attending college for 18- to 24-year-olds who have a high school degree and the probability of dropping out of high school for 16- to 17-year-olds. We find some evidence suggestive of a positive effect of the laws on the college attendance of older Mexican men, although estimated effects of the laws in general are not significantly different from zero.

Search theory suggests that early career job changes on balance lead to better matches that benefit both workers and firms, but this may not hold in teacher labor markets characterized by salary rigidities, barriers to entry, and substantial differences in working conditions that are difficult for institutions to alter. Of particular concern to education policy makers is the possibility that teacher turnover adversely affects the quality of instruction in schools serving predominantly disadvantaged children. Although such schools experience higher turnover on average than others, the impact on the quality of instruction depends crucially on whether it is the more productive teachers who are more likely to depart. The absence of direct measures of productivity typically hinders efforts to measure the effect of turnover on worker quality. In the case of teachers, however, the availability of matched panel data of students and teachers, enables the isolation of the contributions of teachers to achievement despite the complications of purposeful choices of families, teachers, and administrators. The empirical analysis reveals that teachers who remain in their school tend to outperform those who leave, particularly those who exit the Texas public schools entirely. Moreover, this gap appears to be larger for schools serving predominantly low income students, evidence that high turnover is not nearly as damaging as many suggest.

In 2005, hurricanes Katrina and Rita forced many children to relocate across the Southeast. While schools quickly enrolled evacuees, receiving families worried about the impact of evacuees on non-evacuee students. Data from Houston and Louisiana show that, on average, the influx of evacuees moderately reduced elementary math test scores in Houston. We reject linear-in-means models of peer effects and find evidence of a highly non-linear but monotonic model--student achievement improves with high ability and worsens with low ability peers. Moreover, exposure to undisciplined evacuees increased native absenteeism and disciplinary problems, supporting a "bad apple" model in behavior.

Major issues affecting higher education in Texas in the 1980s are identified in 20 working papers from outside consultants, the academic community, and Texas College and University System Coordinating Board staff. Topics and authors include: higher education in Texas in the 1980s (Christopher Dede); leadership in higher education (Joseph Kauffman); education for the future (John D. Moseley); media and technology (John E. Fryman); faculty tenure (William R. Keast); the importance of research (H. Eldon Sutton); collective bargaining (Milden J. Fox, Jr.); state support of higher education (John Harris); independent higher education in Texas (Charles H. Oestreich); potential impacts of water resources on higher education in Texas (Robert M. Sweazy, Lloyd V. Urban, and George A. Whetstone); significant issues confronting Texas higher education (William R. Johnson); issues influencing the future of urban institutions of higher education (Charles E. Bishop); health professional education (Edward N. Brandt, Jr.); community college funding (Jean Richardson); public community college program development and evolvement in the 1980s (Robert L. Clinton); investment in higher education; balance between general and vocational education (Doris Burbank); public higher education finance; statewide planning for campus construction; and energy resources. (LB)

Sizeable achievement differences by race appear in early grades, but substantial uncertainty exists about the impact of school quality on the black-white achievement gap and particularly about its evolution across different parts of the achievement distribution. Texas administrative data show that the overall growth in the achievement gap between third and eighth grade is higher for students with higher initial achievement and that specific teacher and peer characteristics including teacher experience and peer racial composition explain a substantial share of the widening. The adverse effect of attending school with a high black enrollment share appears to be an important contributor to the larger growth in the achievement differential in the upper part of the test score distribution. This evidence reaffirms the major role played by peers and school quality, but also presents a policy dilemma. Teacher labor market complications, current housing patterns, legal limits in segregation efforts, and uncertainty about the overall effects of specific desegregation programs indicate that effective policy responses will almost certainly involve a set of school improvements beyond simple changes in peer racial composition and the teacher experience distribution.

We examine the effect of air pollution on school absences using unique administrative data for elementary and middle school children in the 39 largest school districts in Texas. These data are merged with information from monitors maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency. To control for potentially confounding factors, we adopt a difference-in-difference-in differences strategy, and control for persistent characteristics of schools, years, and attendance periods in order to focus on variations in pollution within school-year-attendance period cells. We find that high levels of carbon monoxide (CO) significantly increase absences, even when they are below federal air quality standards.

A state-mandated outcomes assessment test for certification of teachers has been administered in Texas since 1986. At Southwest Texas State University, which produces the most certified teachers in the state, the assessment showed that its students were not also among the best. In response to this situation, a presidential committee conducted research to identify the variables contributing to this poor performance. The data analysis and variables identified led to the following recommendations to the president: increased emphasis on delivering quality undergraduate education by setting the tone and establishing broad institutional goals; improve recordkeeping on student performance to facilitate future studies; encourage the development of program evaluation tools based on student performance; strengthen transfer admission requirements; modify grade point average calculations to include all hours attempted, not just the grade on the last repeat of a course; alter the policy on course withdrawals; and encourage academic departments to monitor grading practices to minimize grade inflation. Progress on implementing these recommendations is also reported. Contains 31 references. (Author/KM)

An economic model of the effects of colleges on their communities was developed. The Texas Input-Output Model was modified into a higher education budgetary model. Included were the positive benefits of tax savings and estimates of the net effect on various communities in which state-supported colleges and universities are located. The output measures were sales and employment. While the model was developed to illustrate the statewide effects of budgetary changes for all Texas colleges and universities, a fictitious urban and rural university were used for illustration. Equations for the budgetary input-output model cover: the number of people employed in the counties in the previous year, fall enrollment at each campus, budgeted appropriations for the previous fiscal year, and the estimated effects of the budgets on local economies. For both universities, employment and enrollment projections and retail sales estimates take into account the following conditions: no change in the previous budget, 10% reduction in the budget, and 5% increase in the budget. Several tables are provided. (SW)