Thesis (B.A.(Hons.)) -- University of Adelaide, 1976. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1997. / Bibliography: leaves 127-131.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-140). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-140). Also available on the Internet.

School districts and states have increasingly abandoned traditional school reform efforts in favor of simply closing low-performing schools. This movement reflects growing frustration among policymakers with the disappointing effects of previous school improvement policies, and the view that some schools may simply lack the capacity to undertake meaningful improvements. This paper focuses on arguably the most aggressive school closure policies in the nation--those in New York City. Over the past decade, New York City has closed over 100 schools. Using a longitudinal database of students and schools, I explore the implementation and effects of closure and reconstitution of middle schools in New York City, and assess the links between school closure and student academic development and behavior. My descriptive findings indicate that schools selected for closure have significantly lower school-average state test score exams and lower attendance rates compared to other middle schools for several years prior to closure, and that students who attend these schools are almost exclusively Hispanic and Black, more likely to come from low-income families, and more mobile than other middle school students in the district. I also find that students enter these middle schools already at a significant academic disadvantage. I examine characteristics of the reconstituted schools that replace the closed schools, and find that in terms of demographics, reconstituted schools enroll students similar to those served by the closed schools that they replaced. However, the reconstituted schools serve higher performing students with fewer absences and tardies in the year prior to enrolling in middle school. To assess the impact of school closure on student academic outcomes, I use propensity-score matching within a difference-in-differences framework. I find a small, positive effect of school closure on student test scores and rates of absences. As a robustness check, I conduct a second set of analyses using student fixed-effects models that produced similar results: students learn slightly less at chronically underperforming schools, compared to what would have happened had they attended an alternate school. School closure appears to be a somewhat effective in improving student academic outcomes. It is not clear, however, whether the policy is efficient given the small effects and the considerable disruption associated with the policy. Future research should examine the fiscal costs associated with closure, compared to costs of other policies with similar effects.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Virginia Commonwealth University, 2010. / Prepared for: Center for Public Policy. Title from resource description page. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

This qualitative, phenomenological study examined teachers' experiences of the policy context of the fall of 2013 in the School District of Philadelphia. It was an extremely turbulent time resulting from a cascading policy environment with origins in federal government mandates. The study focused on ten teachers' perceptions of policy implementation in one comprehensive high school. Each teacher was interviewed once in the summer of 2017. State, local, and school specific policy forces were examined. Turbulence theory anchored the study. Teacher interview data were used to construct a turbulence gauge for the school, shedding light on teacher perceptions of the magnitude of disruption. Events from 1997 to 2013 in the School District of Philadelphia provided evidence that policy forces from different governance levels and various contextual factors cascaded upon each other yielding a crescendo of policy implementation experienced by teachers in the fall of 2013. Findings indicated that teachers' perceptions of policy implementation during the fall of 2013 were traumatic, chaotic, and compliance-driven. Teachers primarily held the district responsible for the state of affairs, then the principal, and lastly, the federal government. A finding of severe turbulence was assigned to the school reflecting teachers' perceptions of policy implementation. This study informs school leaders in domains related to policy implementation, strategic planning, and impacts on human capital. Future studies should examine how policy implementation in the NCLB era manufactures an up-tempo change culture which converges on teachers and impacts their perceptions of efficacy and capacity to deliver instruction. Key terms: policy implementation, NCLB, Turbulence Theory, Philadelphia, affective, school closings / Educational Administration

This dissertation consists of three essays in the field of health economics. The first essay provides the first causal evidence that bargaining power in a relationship shapes pregnancy outcomes and health disparities in the US. A key driver of bargaining power is the availability of potential non incarcerated male partners in the local dating market, which I define at the race by cohort by county level. Because these sex ratios are endogenous, I use a novel instrument that leverages the randomness in sex at birth and the persistence of local demographics to isolate exogenous variation in the relative availability of men. Greater female bargaining power causes better outcomes: fewer out-of-wedlock births, less chlamydia and hypertension among mothers, and fewer infants with APGAR score below the normal level. The marriage market makes a significant contribution to racial disparities in pregnancy health. Specifically, Black women face relatively poor prospects when looking for a partner compared to White women: while there are 102 White men per 100 White women, only 89 Black men are available per 100 Black women. According to my estimates, Black women’s disadvantage accounts for 5-10% of the large racial gap in maternal and neonatal health. The racial difference in male availability is mostly policy-driven, as incarceration accounts for 45% of the gap. A counterfactual policy equalizing county-level incarceration rates for non-violent offenses between Black and White people would prevent 200-700 adverse pregnancy outcomes per year among Black mothers through the bargaining power channel alone. The second essay investigates how reopening hotels and ski facilities in Poland impacted tourism spending, mobility, and COVID-19 outcomes. We used administrative data from a government program that subsidizes travel to show that the policy increased the consumption of tourism services in ski resorts. By leveraging geolocation data from Facebook, we showed that ski resorts experienced a significant influx of tourists, increasing the number of local users by up to 50%. Furthermore, we confirmed an increase in the probability of meetings between pairs of users from distanced locations and users from tourist and non-tourist areas. As the policy impacted travel and gatherings, we then analyzed its effect on the diffusion of COVID-19. We found that counties with ski facilities experienced more infections after the reopening. Moreover, counties strongly connected to the ski resorts during the reopening had more subsequent cases than weakly connected counties. The third essay studies the diffusion of influenza-like illnesses (ILI) through social and economic networks. Using almost two decades of weekly, county-level infection and mortality data from Poland, it studies within and across-counties ILI transmission. Firstly, it evaluates the causal effect of school closures on viral transmission. The results show that closing schools for two weeks decreases the number of within county cases by 30-40%. The decline in infections extends to elderly and pre-school children. In addition, flu-related hospitalizations drop by 7.5%, and mortality related to respiratory diseases among the elderly drops by 3%. Secondly, the paper demonstrates the significant contribution of economic links to diffusion across counties. The disease follows the paths of workers commuting between home and workplace. Together with the structure of the labor mobility networks, these results highlight the central role of regional capitals in sustaining and spreading the virus.

This dissertation consists of three essays in public economics. The three chapters focus on interactions between public and private economic decisions. The first two chapters focus on unemployment insurance (UI) policy in the United States. The third discusses public-private interactions in the education market. The first chapter, a joint work with Arindrajit Dube, Calvin Jahnke, Raymond Kluender, Suresh Naidu, and Michael Stepner estimates the labor supply and spending responses to a large change in UI benefits during the pandemic. We examine the effects of the sudden withdrawal of expanded pandemic unemployment benefits in June 2021 using anonymized bank transaction data for 16,548 individuals receiving UI in April 2021. Comparing the difference in differences between states withdrawing and retaining expanded UI, we find that UI receipt falls 35 p.p. while employment rises by only 4.4 p.p. by early August. Average cumulative UI benefits fall by $1,385 while average cumulative earnings increase by only $93. Heterogeneity by unemployment duration implies that these effects are primarily driven by extensive margin expiration of benefits, rather than intensive margin reductions in the benefit level. The second chapter examines the role of gifts and loans from friends and family during unemployment. These transfers play a largely unstudied informal insurance role in high-income countries, making it difficult to assess their implications for social insurance policy. I present new results on informal insurance paid via person-to-person (P2P) payment platforms using a survey-linked administrative bank transaction dataset covering 130,502 low-income users from the US who were unemployed at least once between July 2019 and September 2020. Event study estimates show average monthly inflows from all P2P platforms increase by $30, or 2% of lost earnings, one month after job loss before returning to baseline over 10 months. Single mothers and the long-term unemployed receive the largest increases, as do those living in high-income areas. I exploit three plausibly exogenous changes to federal pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) policy to estimate that UI benefits crowd out at most $0.04 of informal P2P transfers. Using the social insurance framework introduced in Chetty & Saz (2010), my crowd-out estimates indicate negligible welfare consequences for an additional dollar of benefits. Altogether these results imply that public UI benefits can raise welfare by pooling risk across networks without reducing within-network targeting of informal insurance. The third chapter asks whether public school services fill in gaps left by private school failures. Specifically, it explores what type of schools enter the market and experience an increase in enrollment after reports of abuse by Catholic priests lead to Catholic Schools closures. I use a two-way fixed effects event study method to estimate a change in enrollments and number of different types of schools after a report of priest abuse within the same zip code, school district, or county. I find there are 0.2 fewer Catholic schools and Catholic school enrollment falls by 75 students after six years, which are offset by a 0.2 and 50-student increase in charter school counts and enrollments on average. These increases are unique to charter schools and is not observed in other public or non-Catholic private schools. Altogether, these results suggest that former Catholic schooled families show a preference for charter schools over other public schools, which may be due to the low-cost and similar emphasis on discipline and academic achievement.