TY - JOUR
T1 - Does attending a STEM high school improve student performance? Evidence from New York City
AU - Wiswall, Matthew
AU - Stiefel, Leanna
AU - Schwartz, Amy Ellen
AU - Boccardo, Jessica
N1 - Funding Information:
We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation , grant number 0827484 , and helpful comments from Luke Miller, Ryan Yeung, participants at the March 2011 AEFP meetings, the April 2011 NYU IES-PIRT Doctoral Education Seminar, and the November 2011 APPAM meetings.
PY - 2014/6
Y1 - 2014/6
N2 - We investigate the role of specialized science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) high schools in New York City (NYC) in promoting performance in science and mathematics and in closing the gender and race gaps in STEM subjects. Using administrative data covering several recent cohorts of public school students and a rich variety of high schools including over 30 STEMs, we estimate the effect of attending a STEM high school on a variety of student outcomes, including test taking and performance on specialized science and mathematics examinations. While comparisons of means indicate an advantage to attending a STEM school, more thorough analysis conditioning on a rich set of covariates, including previous grade test performance, reduces or eliminates this advantage. Females and males in STEMs do better than their counterparts in Non-STEMs, but the gender gap is also larger in these schools. We also find that the black-white and Hispanic-white gaps are smaller in STEM relative to Non-STEM schools across almost all outcomes, but the Asian-white gap, in contrast, is larger in STEMs relative to Non-STEMs.
AB - We investigate the role of specialized science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) high schools in New York City (NYC) in promoting performance in science and mathematics and in closing the gender and race gaps in STEM subjects. Using administrative data covering several recent cohorts of public school students and a rich variety of high schools including over 30 STEMs, we estimate the effect of attending a STEM high school on a variety of student outcomes, including test taking and performance on specialized science and mathematics examinations. While comparisons of means indicate an advantage to attending a STEM school, more thorough analysis conditioning on a rich set of covariates, including previous grade test performance, reduces or eliminates this advantage. Females and males in STEMs do better than their counterparts in Non-STEMs, but the gender gap is also larger in these schools. We also find that the black-white and Hispanic-white gaps are smaller in STEM relative to Non-STEM schools across almost all outcomes, but the Asian-white gap, in contrast, is larger in STEMs relative to Non-STEMs.
KW - Gender gap
KW - High school performance
KW - STEM
KW - School choice
KW - Women in science
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U2 - 10.1016/j.econedurev.2014.01.005
DO - 10.1016/j.econedurev.2014.01.005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84896511885
SN - 0272-7757
VL - 40
SP - 93
EP - 105
JO - Economics of Education Review
JF - Economics of Education Review
ER -