Distance and Disengagement in Middle School: Does Transportation Make A Difference?

with Amy Ellen Schwartz and Sarah Cordes

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While disengagement in middle school has many negative consequences, little is known as to how longer commutes to middle school and school transportation ameliorate or exacerbate the issue. Using data on New York City middle school students, we begin to fill this gap by providing both descriptive and credibly causal evidence on the relationship between distance, transportation, and student engagement. We find that distance is negatively associated with engagement, as students who travel further to school have lower attendance and higher chronic absenteeism. However, among those who are eligible, transportation can improve engagement, with larger effects for students at choice schools--increasing attendance by 1.095 percentage points (or 2 days) and decreasing chronic absenteeism by 6 percentage points (or 40 percent). Further, evidence suggests that school buses have larger positive effects on engagement than public transit.

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Using Pupil Transportation Data to Explore Educational Inequities  and Outcomes: A Case Study from New York City

with Sarah Cordes, Christopher Rick, Meryle Weinstein, and Amy Ellen Schwartz

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This article explores how researchers can use pupil transportation data to explore key questions about the role of transportation in educational access and equity, such as how students get to school and the effect of transportation on student outcomes. We first describe different sources of transportation data that are available to researchers, provide a brief review of relevant literature, and discuss potential sources of measurement error in pupil transportation data. Next, we use administrative data from New York City to illustrate how pupil transportation data can be used to understand transportation eligibility and assignment as well as to describe the characteristics of students’ commutes to school. For example, we find that not all students assigned for free transportation take it up. Specifically, although 47 percent of K-12 students in 2017 were eligible for pupil transportation based on distance with another 9 percent of students receiving exceptions, only 45 percent of students were assigned to a full-fare MetroCard, general education bus, or special education bus. Further, we find the average commute to school for walkers and bus riders is quite similar—around 30 minutes—although there is wide variation as some students experience very short or very long commutes. We end with a discussion of the importance of the institutional context when conducting research using pupil transportation data and best practices when using administrative data.

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California Paid Family Leave and Parental Time Use

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Paid family leave policies are intended to help working parents fulfill their work and childcare responsibilities by providing them with paid time off from work after the birth of a child. While other research has shown that paid leave policies increase leave-taking among parents, little is known about how parents of infants spend their time while they are on leave and shortly after returning to work. Using the American Heritage Time Use Study and taking a difference-in-differences approach, this paper shows  that the California Paid Family Leave policy led to an additional six hours per week mothers spend on child care activities, four additional hours in basic care and two in educational or recreational care. Notably, the availability of paid leave resulted in increases in time mothers spend with children even after they return to work. The increases in maternal time investments also appear to persist beyond infancy, until children reach age three.  While fathers are also eligible for paid leave under the California policy, the policy did not induce a change in the total amount of time fathers spend on child care but did result in slightly more time spent playing with children and less time on basic care activities. Given the large literature showing that parental time investments, especially those made early in a child’s life, play a strong role in child cognitive skill development, the findings in this paper are important for policymakers considering enacting paid leave policies.

 

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Can Parental Leave Policies Change Leave Taking Norms? Evidence from Immigrants

with Delia Furtado

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This article explores the role of norms in determining parental leave taking behavior by examining the impacts of home country parental leave policies on immigrants in the United States. Because immigrants are all exposed to a common set of US laws and institutions but bring with them the norms and cultural values from their home countries, the impacts of additional weeks of paid leave in home countries on leave-taking behaviors among immigrants in the U.S. can be seen as evidence of a role played by cultural norms. Our baseline results suggest that indeed immigrants from countries offering more generous parental leave policies are more likely to take leave in the US. The main contribution of this paper, however, is in its examination of whether changes in policies can yield changes in norms. We find that even in models with country of origin fixed effects, changes in home country policies yield changes in leave-taking in the United States, a result suggesting that indeed policies can change norms. We show that these changes are driven by the norms associated with the wife rather than the husband within immigrant couples coming to the U.S. from different countries or different times. Interestingly, more recent immigrant arrivers are more affected by current day norms than the norms associated with the policies from when they migrated, a result potentially explained by the increased role of social media in the transmission of norms.

 

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