With a $275,000 grant from MIT Blueprint Labs, two University of Michigan professors will tease out why some schools better prepare students for college than others.
The project is led by Sarah Cohodes, associate professor at the Ford School of Public Policy, and Chris Torres, associate professor of educational policy and leadership at the Marsal Family School of Education.
Cohodes’s recent research on Massachusetts charter schools revealed that several educational models that cater to different student populations can foster college success. This new research will go beyond the initial findings to understand the underlying mechanisms.
“My colleagues and I have been studying charter schools in Massachusetts for over a decade, taking advantage of the natural experiments created by charter school application lotteries,” said Cohodes. “The lotteries allow us to estimate causal effects of charter school attendance and the long time horizon means we can look at the impact of charter attendance on a broad range of outcomes including test scores and college graduation.”
The researchers will employ a mixed-methods approach to understand how charter schools achieve notable college outcomes. A robust quantitative analysis will examine potential drivers and their effects on student success, such as the quality of the college attended, the development of noncognitive skills through attendance and discipline, student course selection and grades, and school characteristics such as teacher-student ratios. This will be accompanied by a qualitative study featuring interviews with school leaders and alumni, as well as case studies to understand how practices and structures were created and perceived.
Cohodes says the causal evidence from her study can be broadly applied beyond the context of charter schools.
“One of the original premises of the charter school movement was that the schools would be ‘laboratories of innovation.’ Now that we know that many of these schools do boost college outcomes, this project seeks to understand the specific practices and contexts that lead to college success with the idea that these lessons will be applicable both in charter schools and beyond.”
MIT Blueprint Labs is a non-partisan research lab based at MIT with affiliates at universities and institutions across the world. Blueprint’s Charter School Research Collaborative brings together practitioners, policymakers, funders, and researchers to fund actionable, high quality research on charter schools.
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