Coauthored with Katy Rouse and Justin Haan.
Forthcoming in Applied Economics Letters
Abstract:
Multi-track year-round school calendars are growing in popularity, in part because it is believed that they will aid low-achieving students by alleviating summer learning loss. Existing research however, is focused on estimating mean impacts or analyzing effects by subgroup. We instead use a quantile regression approach with school and grade-by-year fixed effects to estimate the distributional impact of year-round education in the context of a natural experiment setting in Wake County, NC. Our results suggest that while the average impact may be negligible, year-round education has a small positive impact on the achievement of the lowest-performing students. This finding supports the assertion that more frequent shorter school breaks may be beneficial for some students, while having little effect on the achievement of most students.