Elite Schools and Academic Achievement

Damon Clark

This project will examine the impact of attending elite public schools (grammar schools) in the UK. Students are assigned to these schools on the basis of a test taken in primary school, and I will exploit this rule using a regression discontinuity approach, comparing those students just above and just below the elite school passing cutoff on a wide range of high school outcomes, including standardized test scores, the probability of enrolling in advanced courses and college entry patterns. I have already completed preliminary work using data from one school district and have recently received data from another. I will also compare my results to estimates based on nationally representative datasets that do not contain assignment test scores and cannot therefore implement this type of research design.The results can inform debates in those (predominantly European countries) that operate these kinds of schools. The results will also allow us to assess whether existing US choice results generalize to other settings. While many of the “choice” schools to which some US students now have access appear popular with parents, recent studies have found that the causal effect of attending these schools is at best small, at least on “basic” outcomes such as statewide test scores. My work will complement this research by considering a setting in which between-school differences in peer quality, teacher quality and so on are even larger, and by considering the impacts on a wider range of outcomes.

About Damon Clark

Damon Clark was born and educated in the UK. Having received his D.Phil. in Economics at Nuffield College, Oxford in 2002 he spent two years as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley where he worked under Professor David Card. In September 2005 he took up an Assistant Professorship in the Economics Department at the University of Florida. Professor Clark’s D.Phil. thesis (“Further Education and Training in Britain and Germany”) examined differences in post-secondary institutions across Britain and Germany. His post-doctoral work has been focused on high schools. At Berkeley he worked on a project entitled “Politics, Markets and Schools: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Autonomy and Competition from a Truly Revolutionary UK Reform”. This analyzed the impact of a radical Thatcher reform that allowed public high schools to become quasi-independent and in 2005 he won a “Young European Economist” award for this work. Since moving to Florida Professor Clark has began work on a number of US-related high school education topics and is Principal Investigator on an exit exam project that was awarded a large grant by the Institute of Educational Sciences in 2006. Outside of work Professor Clark enjoys reading, soccer and visiting his parents in England, both of whom are high school principals.