Schools near state lines perform worse and rules discouraging teachers from moving may be to blame

[TexasTowelie]

Want a leg up in school? Don’t attend one near a state border.

That’s the surprising finding of a new study published in the Economics of Education Review. The likely culprit: certification and pension rules that discourage teachers from moving between states, limiting the labor pool on each side of the border.

The peer-reviewed paper focuses on test scores at public middle schools near a state boundary. Eighth-graders attending those schools, the researchers find, perform consistently worse in math than students at non-boundary schools. (The results are negative in reading, too, but smaller and not always statistically significant.)

One reason the findings ought to catch the attention of policymakers across the country: the data comes from 33 states, including big ones like Florida, New York, and Texas.

“We estimate that roughly 670,000 students are enrolled in middle schools nationally that are {considered} ‘intensely affected’ by a state boundary in our study,” the researchers write.

Read more: http://www.coloradoindependent.com/166437/schools-state-lines-chalkbeat

[BigmanPigman]

1. I wonder how schools which share borders with other countries fare in comparison.

Did they study the states that border Canada and Mexico too? I taught in San Diego and would be curious.

[Igel]

2. I'd want to see their data.

I'm not saying they're wrong. They sound completely plausible. I teach in Texas, I could be certified in some states but others might be more difficult because certification requirements differ so much.

But I know that many of the states I've lived in have their population centers well away from the state border. If you look at the population near the state borders, it's a small percentage of the total population. Not so true in the NE megalopolis, or in places like Portland, OR or El Paso, TX. But at that point, you start wondering which of the 50 states are in their sample of 33.

At that point you also start wondering about the teachers who wind up in the middle of nowhere teaching. Might be interesting to match state-internal schools with boundary-proximal schools at a given distance from major population centers and see if there's a difference. I.e., check for a state-line versus rural confound.

Esp. since the effect is small.