THE ELITE ILLUSION - ACHIEVEMENT EFFECTS AT BOSTON AND NEW YORK EXAM SCHOOLS

Sep 15, 2026

Uploaded by Jake

Talented students compete fiercely for seats at Boston and New York exam schools. These schools combine high peer achievement and a demanding, district-tailored curriculum for top achievers. While exam school students perform well academically, the added value versus regular public education remains uncertain. The paper estimates causal effects using a regression-discontinuity design, reporting parametric and non-parametric results, and addresses confounding from multiple, closely spaced cutoffs.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages82

Reading Time3 h 27 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Research question and motivation

Admissions selectivity and selection bias

Method overview

Regression-discontinuity design and estimation

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE ELITE ILLUSION: ACHIEVEMENT EFFECTS AT BOSTON AND NEW YORK EXAM SCHOOLS Atila Abdulkadiroglu Joshua D. Angrist Parag A. Pathak Working Paper 17264 [http://www.nber.org/papers/w17264](http://www.nber.org/papers/w17264) NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 July 2011 Our thanks to Kamal Chavda, Jack Yessayan, and the Boston Public Schools and to Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, Thomas Gold, Jesse Margolis, and the New York City Department of Education for graciously sharing their data. The views expressed here are those of the of authors and do not reflect the views of the Boston Public Schools, the NYC Department of Education, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. We thank participants in the June 2010 Tel-Aviv Frontiers in the Economics of Education conference for comments and in particular our discussant Jonah Rockoff, who also contributed data on teacher tenure in NYC. We're also grateful to Daron Acemoglu, Gary Chamberlain, Glenn Ellison, and Guido Imbens for helpful discussions along the way. Weiwei Hu and Miikka Rokkanen provided superb research assistance. Pathak also thanks the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where parts of this work were completed, and the NSF for financial support. © 2011 by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Joshua D. Angrist, and Parag A. Pathak. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Joshua D. Angrist, and Parag A. Pathak NBER Working Paper No. 17264 July 2011 JEL No. I20 ABSTRACT Talented students compete fiercely for seats at Boston and New York exam schools. These schools are characterized by high levels of peer achievement and a demanding curriculum tailored to each district's highest achievers. While exam school students clearly do very well in school, the question of whether an exam school education adds value relative to a regular public education remains open. We estimate the causal effect of exam school attendance using a regression-discontinuity design, reporting both parametric and non-parametric estimates. We also develop a procedure that addresses the potential for confounding in regression-discontinuity designs with multiple, closely-spaced admissions cutoffs. The outcomes studied here include scores on state standardized achievement tests, PSAT and SAT participation and scores, and AP scores. Our estimates show little effect of exam school offers on most students' achievement in most grades. We use two-stage least squares to convert reduced form estimates of the effects of exam school offers into estimates of peer and tracking effects, arguing that these appear to be unimportant in this context. On the other hand, a Boston exam school education seems to have a modest effect on high school English scores for minority applicants. A small group of 9th grade applicants also appears to do better on SAT Reasoning. These localized gains notwithstanding, the intense competition for exam school seats does not appear to be justified by improved learning for a broad set of students. Atila Abdulkadiroglu Duke University Department of Economics Durham, NC 27708 [atila.abdulkadiroglu@duke.edu](atila.abdulkadiroglu@duke.edu) Joshua D. Angrist Department of Economics MIT, E52-353 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 and NBER [angrist@mit.edu](angrist@mit.edu) Parag A. Pathak MIT Department of Economics 50 Memorial Drive E52-391C Cambridge, MA 02142 and NBER[ppathak@mit.edu](ppathak@mit.edu) 1 Introduction The Boston and New York City public school systems include a handful of highly selective exam schools. Unlike most other American public schools, exam schools screen applicants on the basis of a competitive admissio

FAQs

What is the main question of the paper?

Whether attending a Boston or New York exam school provides added academic value compared with a regular public education, despite the schools’ strong selectivity.

How does the paper estimate the causal effect of exam school attendance?

It uses a regression-discontinuity design, producing both parametric and non-parametric estimates.

What outcomes are analyzed in the study?

State standardized achievement test scores, PSAT and SAT participation and scores, and AP scores are examined.

Sep 15, 2026

Uploaded by Jake