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At issue is the school-to-prison pipeline--a term often used to describe the connection between exclusionary punishments like suspensions and expulsions and involvement in the criminal justice system. Black and Hispanic students are far more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled, and Black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately represented in the nation's prisons. Is there a causal link between experiencing strict school discipline as a student and being arrested or incarcerated as an adult? Research shows that completing more years of school reduces subsequent criminal activity, as does enrolling in a higher-quality school and graduating from high school. Yet there is little evidence on the mechanisms by which a school can have a long-run influence on criminal activity. To address this, the authors examined middle-school suspension rates in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, where a large and sudden change in school-enrollment boundary lines resulted in half of all students changing schools in a single year. They estimate a school's disciplinary strictness based on its suspension rates before the change and use this natural experiment to identify how attending a stricter school influences criminal activity in adulthood. Their analysis shows that young adolescents who attend schools with high suspension rates are substantially more likely to be arrested and jailed as adults. These long-term, negative impacts in adulthood apply across a school's population, not just to students who are suspended during their school years. Students assigned to middle schools that are one standard deviation stricter--equivalent to being at the 84th percentile of strictness versus the mean--are 3.2 percentage points more likely to have ever been arrested and 2.5 percentage points more likely to have ever been incarcerated as adults. They also are 1.7 percentage points more likely to drop out of high school and 2.4 percentage points less likely to attend a 4-year college. These impacts are much larger for Black and Hispanic male students. The authors also find that principals, who have considerable discretion in meting out school discipline, are the major driver of differences in the number of suspensions from one school to the next. The findings show that early censure of school misbehavior causes increases in adult crime--that there is, in fact, a school-to-prison pipeline. Further, they find that the negative impacts from strict disciplinary environments are largest for minorities and males, suggesting that suspension policies expand preexisting gaps in educational attainment and incarceration. There is some limited evidence of positive effects on the academic achievement of white male students, which highlights the potential to increase the achievement of some subgroups by removing disruptive peers. However, any effort to maintain safe and orderly school climates must take into account the clear and negative consequences of exclusionary discipline practices for young students, and especially young students of color, which last well into adulthood.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to identify and turn around struggling schools, with federal school improvement money required to fund evidence-based policies. Most research on turnarounds has focused on individual schools, whereas studies of district-wide turnarounds have come from relatively exceptional settings and interventions. We study a district-wide turnaround of a type that may become more common under ESSA, an accountability-driven state takeover of Massachusetts's Lawrence Public Schools (LPS). A differences-in-differences framework comparing LPS to demographically similar districts not subject to state takeover shows that the turnaround's first 2 years produced sizable achievement gains in math and modest gains in reading. We also find no evidence that the turnaround resulted in slippage on nontest score outcomes and suggestive evidence of positive effects on grade progression among high school students. Intensive small-group instruction over vacation breaks may have led to particularly large achievement gains for participating students.

When congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), standardized testing in public schools became the law of the land. The ambitious legislation identified test-based accountability as the key to improving schools and, by extension, the long-term prospects of American schoolchildren. Thirteen years later, the debate over the federal mandate still simmers. NCLB required that states test students in math and reading each year, that average student performance be publicized for every school, and that schools with persistently low test scores face an escalating series of sanctions. There is now ample evidence that these requirements have caused test scores to rise across the country. What is not known is: Do these improvements on high-stakes tests represent real learning gains? And do they make students better off in the long run? In fact, very little is known about the impact of test-based accountability on students' later success. If academic gains do not translate into a better future, why keep testing? In this study, the authors present the first evidence of how accountability pressure on schools influences students' long-term outcomes. They do so by examining how the test-based accountability system introduced in Texas in 1993 affected students' college enrollment and completion rates and their earnings as adults. Though the Texas system predates NCLB, it was implemented under then governor George W. Bush and it served as a blueprint for the federal legislation he signed as president nearly a decade later. More important, it was implemented long enough ago to allow us to investigate its impact on adult outcomes, since individuals who were in high school in the mid- to late 1990s have now reached adulthood. The analysis reveals that pressure on schools to avoid a low performance rating led low-scoring students to score significantly higher on a high-stakes math exam in 10th grade. These students were also more likely to accumulate significantly more math credits and to graduate from high school on time. Later in life, they were more likely to attend and graduate from a four-year college, and they had higher earnings at age 25. Those positive outcomes are not observed, however, among students in schools facing a different kind of accountability pressure. Higher-performing schools facing pressure to achieve favorable recognition appear to have responded primarily by finding ways to exempt their low-scoring students from counting toward the school's results. Years later, these students were less likely to have completed college and they earned less. The results indicate that school accountability in Texas led to long-term gains for students who attended schools that were at risk of falling below a minimum performance standard. Efforts to use high-stakes tests to regulate school quality at a higher level, however, did not benefit students and may have led schools to adopt strategies that caused long-term harm.

Economists are increasingly focused on the importance of so-called 'soft skills' for labor market success. The evidence is overwhelming that these skills--also called 'non-cognitive skills'--are important drivers of success in [...]

In this study, the author investigates whether the opportunity to attend a school other than a student's assigned neighborhood school reduces criminal activity, especially among disadvantaged youth. Many of the schools chosen by the students were "better" on traditional indicators, such as student test scores and teacher characteristics. All of them, however, were preferred by the applicant over the default option. The analysis therefore sheds light on whether efforts to expand school choice can be an effective crime-prevention strategy, particularly when disadvantaged students can gain access to "better" schools. He compares the criminal activity of students who won the lottery to attend their first-choice school to that of students who lost the lottery. He finds consistent evidence that attending a better school reduces crime among those age 16 and older, across various schools, and for both middle and high school students. The effect is largest for African American males and youth who are at highest risk for criminal involvement. In general, high-risk male youth commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning the school-choice lottery. They are also more likely to remain enrolled in school, and they show modest improvements on measures of behavior such as absences and suspensions. (Contains 2 figures.)