New York City Small Schools of Choice Evaluation

Last registered on August 21, 2018
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
New York City Small Schools of Choice Evaluation
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0001909
Initial registration date
February 06, 2017

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
February 06, 2017, 7:24 PM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
August 21, 2018, 1:01 PM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Country
United States of America
Region
New York

Primary Investigator

Name
Rebecca Unterman
Affiliation
MDRC
Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Howard Bloom
PI Affiliation
MDRC
Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2004-08-01
End date
2021-09-01
Keywords
Education
Additional Keywords
high schools, high school graduation
JEL code(s)
Secondary IDs
Abstract
The New York City public school system is the largest in the United States, with over 1,200 schools and more than 1.1 million students enrolled each year. For more than a decade, it has also been the site of an unprecedented investment in high school reform. Beginning in 2002 and with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other philanthropies, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) closed many large, comprehensive high schools with a history of low performance and created hundreds of new small secondary schools. At the same time, the NYCDOE instituted a centralized high school admissions process for matching incoming ninth-grade students to the over 400 high school options available to them.

The small-school movement has been a national one. And while nearly every major American urban district has undertaken efforts to create new small schools or to transform large schools into campuses of small learning communities, there has been little rigorous evidence about the effectiveness of small schools.

New York City uses a lottery-like system to assign students when the high schools they choose are oversubscribed. MDRC has been able to take advantage of that system to develop an unusually large and rigorous study of the impact of these small high schools on students’ academic achievement, high school graduation, and progression into college. The project’s reports and policy briefs provide rigorous evidence that new small public high schools are narrowing the educational attainment gap and markedly improve graduation prospects, particularly for disadvantaged students.
External Link(s)
MDRC Small Schools of Choice project description

Registration Citation

Citation
Bloom, Howard and Rebecca Unterman. 2018. "New York City Small Schools of Choice Evaluation." AEA RCT Registry. August 21. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.1909-4.0
Former Citation
Bloom, Howard and Rebecca Unterman. 2018. "New York City Small Schools of Choice Evaluation." AEA RCT Registry. August 21. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/1909/history/33348
Sponsors & Partners

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
New York City's new small high schools--called Small Schools of Choice (SSCs) in this project--are more than just small. They were authorized through a demanding, competitive proposal process designed to attract innovative ideas for new schools from a range of stakeholders and institutions, from educators to school reform intermediary organizations. The resulting schools emphasize strong, sustained relationships between students and faculty. Each SSC also received start-up funding as well as assistance and policy support from the district and other key players to facilitate leadership development, hiring, and implementation.

While the new small schools in New York City have a wide variety of themes and educational philosophies, they are intended to share three common design characteristics:

-- Academic rigor: Schools are expected to be college preparatory in that they move all students toward acquisition of a New York Regents Diploma.
-- Personalization: Schools were to be small not only in size but also in function to ensure strong student-teacher relationships and to hold adults accountable for individual student outcomes.
-- Community partnerships: Through partnerships with business and community partners, schools were intended to offer learning opportunities outside of the classroom and to infuse relevant real-world examples into classroom instruction. Partners were expected to bolster school capacity in areas ranging from curriculum and instruction to youth development and community outreach.
Intervention Start Date
2005-09-01
Intervention End Date
2021-09-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
high school enrollment, attendance, course credits earned, state exam scores, postsecondary enrollment, postsecondary completion
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
The impact study capitalizes on random elements of the NYCDOE's centralized high school admissions process. Each lottery for a small school of choice is a naturally occurring experiment, which, after some adjustments, makes it possible to produce valid estimates of the effects of enrollment in SSCs on student academic outcomes. The impact study follows four cohorts of students--those entering high school in the fall of 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. The primary sources of data for the analyses are High School Application Processing System (HSAPS) data and school records, which were obtained from the NYCDOE.

Because about 7% of SSC lottery winners do not enroll in an SSC and about 35% of those who lose a particular SSC lottery enroll in a different SSC (whether through HSAPS assignment or otherwise), the contrast between the two groups is diluted. Therefore the estimated effects of winning an SSC lottery are converted into the estimated effects of enrolling in an SSC by means of instrumental variables analysis. For details, see Howard Bloom, Saskia Levy Thompson, and Rebecca Unterman, "Transforming the High School Experience: How New York City’s New Small Schools Are Boosting Student Achievement and Graduation Rates" (New York: MDRC, 2010), at http://www.mdrc.org/publication/transforming-high-school-experience.

The MDRC school characteristics study uses extant data from the U.S. Department of Education, New York State Report Card, and NYCDOE, along with aggregate HSAPS and student records data in a school-level database, to analyze changes in high school options and student enrollment over time. The analyses identify patterns and trends among schools for a number of instruction-related, demographic, and performance-based characteristics by school type as defined by size and selectivity.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
School lottery
Randomization Unit
individual
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
n/a
Sample size: planned number of observations
30,959 student observations (21,085 students)
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
17,981 student observations in the control group; 12,978 student observations in the SSC lottery winner group
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
MDRC
IRB Approval Date
2014-03-14
IRB Approval Number
0003522
Analysis Plan

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials