Katrina and the Students

Finally the paper using Katrina as a natural experiment that assigned kids to new school environment is out, and it's by none other than Bruce Sacerdote. The title is (wait for it) "When the Saints Come Marching In: Effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on Student Evacuees." I've been telling people ever since just after Katrina that it was only a matter of time til this paper was written.

I examine academic performance and college going for public school students affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Students who are forced to switch schools due to the hurricanes experience sharp declines in test scores in the first year following the hurricane. However, by the second and third years after the disaster, Katrina evacuees displaced from Orleans Parish appear to benefit from the displacement, experiencing a .15 standard deviation improvement in scores. The test score gains are concentrated among students whose initial schools were in the lowest quintile of the test score distribution and among students who leave the New Orleans MSA. Katrina evacuees from suburban areas and Rita evacuees (from the Lake Charles area) eventually recover most of the ground lost during 05-06 but do not experience long term gains relative to their pre-Katrina test scores. High school age Orleans evacuees have higher college enrollment rates than their predecessors from the same high schools. Meanwhile, Katrina evacuees from the suburbs experience a 3.5 percentage point drop in their rate of enrollment in four year colleges. Those evacuees do not to make up for the decline in the subsequent two years. Later cohorts of suburban New Orleans evacuees are unaffected. The results suggest that for students in the lowest performing schools, the long term gains to achievement from switching schools can more than offset even substantial costs of disruption.

This is intuitive. I once tutored kids in the 9th ward for the ACT. When I did that, I was told that 50 of the 57 worst performing high schools in the state of Louisiana were in New Orleans. If you believe that there are peer effects and causal effects running from school quality to student outcome, then taking kids out of the 9th ward and putting them anywhere else in the world is going to expose them to better environments. The 9th ward was, more or less, the bottom percentile of all schools in the entire world as far as I could tell.