The Elite Illusion - Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools

Aug 29, 2026

Uploaded by Fahsai

Talented students compete fiercely for seats at Boston and New York exam schools characterized by high peer achievement and demanding, tailored curricula. The paper asks whether exam school education adds value beyond regular public education and estimates causal effects of attendance using a regression-discontinuity design with both parametric and non-parametric results. Most students show little achievement impact, and peer/tracking effects appear unimportant; localized gains are found for minority high school English scores and a small subset of 9th graders’ SAT outcomes.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages63

Reading Time2 h 39 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Exam school admission and baseline achievement gaps

Research question and empirical strategy (regression-discontinuity)

Outcome measures and findings

Peer and tracking effects

External validity and subgroup impacts

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 authors and do not reflect the views of either the Boston Public Schools or the NYC Department of Education. 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 many helpful discussions along the way. Weiwei Hu and Miikka Rokkanen provided superb research assistance. Pathak thanks the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where parts of this work were completed, and the NSF for financial support. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 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, Revised September 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 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. 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. 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. Finally, we explore the external validity of RD estimates, arguing that as best we can tell, there is little effect of an exam school education on achievement even for the highest-ability marginal applicants and for applicants to the right of admissions cutoffs. On the other hand, a Boston exam school education seems to have a modest effect on highschool English scores for minority applicants. A small group of 9th grade applicants also appears todo 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 a

FAQs

What is the main question about Boston and New York exam schools in this paper?

Whether attending an exam school produces additional achievement value compared with a regular public education, beyond differences created by selective admissions.

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

It uses a regression-discontinuity design and reports both parametric and non-parametric estimates of the effects of attendance.

What does the evidence suggest about exam schools’ achievement impacts?

The results indicate little effect for most students, with peer and tracking effects found to be unimportant; however, modest localized gains appear for some minority applicants’ high school English and for a small group of 9th graders on SAT Reasoning.

Aug 29, 2026

Uploaded by Fahsai