State Exit Exams and Graduation Rates: A Hierarchical SLX Modelling Approach

Joshua Hall, Donald Lacombe and Shree Pokharel
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Donald Lacombe: Texas Tech University
Shree Pokharel: West Virginia Legislature

No 20-05, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: The literature on high school exit exams has found both positive and negative effects of these high stake exams on high school graduation rates. To this point the literature has not taken into account the embedded nature of school districts within state education systems. We employ a Bayesian Hierarchical SLX model to account for the hierachical nature of education data in the United States. Our approach also allows us to account for spatial spillovers that influence graduation rates across districts and states. Using school district and state-level data for 45 states and 8194 school districts in the United States in 2015, we generally find no statistically significant effect of state exit exams on high school graduation rates. Random effect coefficients, however, point towards high school exit exams being negatively associated with graduation rates in a handful of states.

Keywords: Spatial dependence; Bayesian statistics; hierarchical modelling; state exit exams (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 C21 C30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
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Journal Article: State Exit Exams and Graduation Rates: A Hierarchical SLX Modelling Approach (2020)
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