How unemployed parents might affect your job

A recent paper titled "Short-run Effects of Parental Job Loss on Children's Academic Achievement", found the following

We study the relationship between parental job loss and children’s academic achievement using data on job loss and grade retention from the 1996, 2001, and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that a parental job loss increases the probability of children’s grade retention by 0.8 percentage points, or around 15 percent. After conditioning on child fixed effects, there is no evidence of significantly increased grade retention prior to the job loss, suggesting a causal link between the parental employment shock and children’s academic difficulties. These effects are concentrated among children whose parents have a high school education or less.

Parents becoming unemployed affect their children's academic achievement. Here's the unemployment trend for Ohio

As you can see, in recent years, unemployment in Ohio has escalated alarmingly to around 10%. That's a lot of students who have potentially been academically impacted by this trend.

We mention this because this is just one variable of many that isn't captured through student/teacher linkage, or the Value Add calculation, yet could critically affect student achievement and hence their teacher's evaluations.

What happens to these teacher level value add scores when a large local employer has mass layo-offs? Will it lead to lower performance evaluations for teachers in that area? Would that be fair?

These kinds of questions are going to need to be investiagted, and having silly web forms isn't going to cut it.

The Columbus parent trigger profit motive

A smart and interesting post at Plunderbund, discusses which of the Columbus schools might be susceptible to a parental takeover, now that the Ohio house has reduced their statewide parent trigger provision to a trial in Columbus.

So how likely is that to take place? Consider some details:

As reported by ODE for 09-10, 21 percent of the students at Weinland Park are at the school for less than one year. That also means that the number of parents involved enough to sign the petition is around 80%, with the student population constantly changing. So if 50% of the parents need to sign, but only 80% are around, the parent(s) leading this effort must obtain the signatures of approximately 63% of the parents. And Weinland Park serves a population categorized as 93.7% “economically disadvantaged” in a building that already runs a non-standard year-round schedule. For additional perspective, the number of economically disadvantaged students is 43% statewide. I’m going to take a wild guess and project that these families have greater concerns than taking over a school. Just a guess.

This is a smart and reasonable observation, but as we pointed out in an article a while ago, it's not the only consideration to account for. Indeed, other provisions included in the budget bill could have a significant impact too.

The other question to be asked is this;

How much money could a for-profit charter make by sponsoring an effort to take over one of these Columbus schools?

With an empty promise to desperate parents to fix things, and a paid effort to garner the required parental support for the takeover, these schools might be easy marks, with easy profits to follow.