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Are Measured School Effects Just Sorting? Identifying Causality in the National Education Longitudinal Survey
David I. Levine, University of California, Berkeley
Gary Painter, University of Southern California
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ABSTRACT: Youth sharing a school and neighborhoods often have similar academic achievement. This correlation between neighborhood quality and youth achievement holds even when controlling for many observable features of a
family. Nevertheless, the correlation is not entirely causal because families and youth are sorted into relatively homogeneous groups. Thus, the quality of the
school or neighborhood in part acts as a proxy for hard-to-measure attributes of the family.
To enable separate estimation of sorting and school effects, we use the characteristics of the high school students will attend as an additional indicator of
family background. When we compare youth who are at the same junior high school, the above measure is an appropriate instrument to identify family background separately from neighborhood and junior high school effects. Even after this correction, the point estimate of school effects on student achievement
remains large and is statistically significant.
SUGGESTED CITATION:
David I. Levine and Gary Painter,
"Are Measured School Effects Just Sorting? Identifying Causality in the National Education Longitudinal Survey "
(November 20, 2000).
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Working Paper Series.
Paper iirwps-078-00.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/iir/iirwps/iirwps-078-00
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