Jaren Haber: Hello everybody, my name is Jared Hey we're I'm a recent PhD at UC Berkeley sociology and now I'm going to be a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, and this is a my presentation for a sad American Sociological Association.
Jaren Haber: roundtable on school contacts so I ready and let me go ahead and share my screen here.
Jaren Haber: All right. And here is
Jaren Haber: My presentation. Okay, so, yeah. So you've got to be me. And now I'm going to be on the side of the screen with you so
Jaren Haber: This is one of my ongoing projects. It is essentially my my dissertation. There's also a forthcoming article in sociology of education either same title project has a lot of different arms to it tentacles of the octopus, if you will. This is kind of the main work and you know I presented
Jaren Haber: Efficiently to you. So a computational analysis of charter schools identities and stratification.
Jaren Haber: Alright, so, as you know, charter schools are a increasingly big deal on the American educational landscape in the last 2530 years. The first laws are passed in 92 that's when the first schools are open in Minnesota California was not far after that and you see
Jaren Haber: Here a map of the density of charter schools, the proportion all schools in that state that our charter school. This is not the density of portion of students.
Jaren Haber: This, it looks slightly different. That way, California still very dense but Arizona would be the densest as far as proportion of students get enrolled and charter schools. Um, yeah, now you to all the way through 95 and they've been getting increasingly
Jaren Haber: Popular when you use that word, and they've been tripling or quadrupling in some years, ever since the mid 90s, there's a big boom in the early 2000s.
Jaren Haber: In 2010 there was kind of a gradual slowing down the rate of charter school founding still there's still an increasing proportion of the second at a charter schools.
Jaren Haber: But yeah, there's some evidence of the trend kind of leveling off in popularity, perhaps due to lack of teachers to start them. It's very demanding work.
Jaren Haber: Okay, so that's just the context here in charter school, by the way, just to give you a broad definition is a publicly funded school they're funded the same traditional public schools are like PR people state allocation of funds and they're authorized every
Jaren Haber: Three to five years, depending on your district and usually by the school district, but sometimes the universities are other local actors and they are more private and operations. So in many states schools have wide curricular freedom.
Jaren Haber: They are required to take stupid state exams and are held accountable to those in principle.
Jaren Haber: But largely their workforces our lesson unionize and less certified
Jaren Haber: Okay, so that's just a broad big picture for you get started. And yeah, the next sort of broad social context piece here.
Jaren Haber: Is the increasing proportion of schools in the US. This is showing up of the schools that are segregated by race, so intense segregation means that there are 90 200% of given race. So here we aggregate
Jaren Haber: Latino, Asian black American Indian mixed race into one big category non white is their label for it. There's white students and you see that
Jaren Haber: Portion of school. Since the 80s late 80s that are intensely segregated into non white STUDENT BODIES has been steadily increasing this has still been going up.
Jaren Haber: Whereas, interestingly enough, the portion of schools that are interested intensely segregated, but just white has been going down. So there is kind of a some increased contact and mostly white schools, but much less. So for all of the ethnic minorities over time. And in this trend.
Jaren Haber: There's a lot of evidence suggesting that school is actually the worst of them. So it's from Associated Press study
Jaren Haber: 17% of charter schools are over 99% on why don't like to call this apartheid schools is one term for it.
Jaren Haber: Compared to 4% traditional public schools. And this is the matter how you slice it up over time. This trend has been increasing, and
Jaren Haber: Charter schools have been more segregated in traditional public schools. So what's the mechanism for that is kind of my my entry point into this literature, I provide kind of a novel.
Jaren Haber: Way to look at how this might be happening based on somewhat on parents choices and largely on sort of broader demographic trends and charter schools.
Jaren Haber: Alright so broadly, what I'm asking here, this is the
Jaren Haber: Very broad question. I'm trying to insert a distinct education ideologies cause parents and self sort my racing class and other words, does the language.
Jaren Haber: And potentially practice, but I can't speak to that, there's a language around education its purposes, its mission.
Jaren Haber: Attract parents
Jaren Haber: I niche by racing class sort of group. So you can imagine archetype really low income communities of color as one kind of group of people
Jaren Haber: And then you've got affluent white families as another group.
Jaren Haber: Message. That's kind of how it breaks down. But you can think of it in the morning. My name is Cliff one
Jaren Haber: Dude, this language around educational ideology break people down by by group does it increase segregation ultimately that's what I'm asking.
Jaren Haber: For better outcome here more specific question I have is, what's the relationship between the testicles race and class composition and his emphasis on IBM inquiry based learning is an acronym, you'll see all throughout this presentation.
Jaren Haber: And I'll, I'll motivate why I choose this particular educational ideology inquiry based learning is
Jaren Haber: Yeah, my question is, is that separate people as like a specific sort of language or idea.
Jaren Haber: Based on racing class school and district levels. All right, so how do I answer that question. I use this really rich big data from charter school websites, all of them. So here's some examples. Here's the KIPP school
Jaren Haber: There's another one from Ann Arbor.
Jaren Haber: Yeah variety of names here public school Academy is also a charter
Jaren Haber: One more.
Jaren Haber: And one more. Just to give you a sense of that diversity there is zero consistency and structure, but typically they talk about their mission on the front page or the about us page information is often kind of buried in there, but ultimately we're looking for something like this.
Jaren Haber: Kind of scroll down the page on this particular school and
Jaren Haber: most interested in. Are these these values, these kind of ideology about what what learning is for what's the purpose of it.
Jaren Haber: So ultimately, I would want to pull out this information, but because these websites so messy. I just use the entire website which is entitled like almost entirely self description has another
Jaren Haber: There's another example.
Jaren Haber: And just from these two examples. You see there is something about innovative nature based learning, and then something about urban students needing support. This is typical.
Jaren Haber: There's a kind of the polarity. And most of these websites. But to me, I think suggests a racing class based appeal either talking more about support in urban areas and more about innovation and nature in
Jaren Haber: Suburban and white communities, it seems that way. But I'm trying to test whether that's the robust Association.
Jaren Haber: Using this data. So yeah, the biggest thing is website subscriptions for charter schools that 7000 of them have a director your school is from the education department. Common Core Data in particular on free and reduced lunch is telling measure
Jaren Haber: Is a proxy for poverty measure class and certain demographics. This is
Jaren Haber: arguably more reliable data. This is a little bit messy, but it's the best we can do at a broad level.
Jaren Haber: What I just said, and then community to information from the American Community Survey on recent class education and there's a lot more data. I could use but I keep it fairly simple. The ultimate analysis.
Jaren Haber: I mean by the Census Bureau. Then lastly education outcomes in particular math and reading language arts, these are
Jaren Haber: The mechanism for accountability at the school level across the country and I just looked at percent proficiency at the school level again a little bit. A little bit blurred, but
Jaren Haber: best we can do for the entire country. And I really want that that granular data. The association to kind of try to break it break it down as much as I can.
Jaren Haber: And get this from the impact assessment data location department. So this is what the data basically look like. And this is a word cloud. The most most common words are bigger.
Jaren Haber: Less common words are smaller and it's arranged randomly. It's really just a visual way of getting a sense for what's in this text corpus.
Jaren Haber: School is the biggest. The most common term, not a big surprise. They'll talk a lot about programs academics community staff children contact work, etc. So this is like
Jaren Haber: Kind of ritualistic language every school needs to talk about these things, the role of the state or other activities. Something about science, most of the time.
Jaren Haber: So this is not probably going to differentiate schools. I want to get at something a bit sharper that will do a better job of separating different kinds of communities, just to test my my theory that
Jaren Haber: The language used to describe educational ideology.
Jaren Haber: Allows allows parents and mechanism to sort themselves out on the cultural or status basis.
Jaren Haber: Which leads to segregation. Okay, a little bit more about the methods. First up, I didn't text analysis using a custom dictionary for inquiry based learning ideal.
Jaren Haber: And then word in buildings as well to try to map out the relationships between words and get a, get a validated dictionary or words related to group based learning. And you'll see a little bit more
Jaren Haber: Next stage doing some mix effects regression models is a pretty robust method.
Jaren Haber: However, since I just have beta rhetorical identities. At one point in time, which is gathered in May 2018
Jaren Haber: This is mostly a cross sectional analysis. There's some caveats there. But yeah, a robust cross functional analysis, ultimately, as a fixed effects portion to account for consistency.
Jaren Haber: Within school districts and charter charter school management organizations and a random effects portion as well.
Jaren Haber: Now we will try to do is examine relationships between their identities repin school and district class and race competition, the district's demographics as an alternative mechanism. I'm thinking that
Jaren Haber: Yes, they could look at how
Jaren Haber: The educational ideologies, use a bit of school influence their school demographics, but presumably there's also a relationship between the people in the community and what portion of them and what type of come to a given school
Jaren Haber: For school and the black neighborhood to end up with mostly black students and less surprising that a differential there which I also utilize
Jaren Haber: Okay and pushing the state and CMO
Jaren Haber: In school district as well. Back to account for similarities within based on state policy based on to mention organization sort of missions as well as based on the school district policy and demographic trends.
Jaren Haber: Alright, so we're embedding is a one of those popular natural language processing tools which I apply here. This is the dictionary came up with the bold words are the one district with
Jaren Haber: Use the word algorithm. And these distances are based on TCT
Jaren Haber: P distributed stochastic neighbor and things I think is what that stands for the dimensions of really mean anything is just a way of representing in two dimensions. The 300 dimensions and then word embedding model itself so
Jaren Haber: Maybe I can back up just a second and say that word embedding is a method of representing relationship between words and the corpus. So in our case.
Jaren Haber: I start with a couple of words and I say, hey, based on their, their co occurrences. In other words, across, across this corpus across all the schools.
Jaren Haber: What are other words that tend to occur in similar contacts, which implies they have similar meetings and the cultural relationship there is
Jaren Haber: Is embedded is implied and has been supported by a lot different study. So in this case, some other words I find the relevant and on constructivism critical thinking and they kind of loosely cluster in this space by
Jaren Haber: By their meaning not too important here, but
Jaren Haber: Let's see experimentation poster expedition that inquiry based. That makes sense, experiential is closer integrative and student centered. Yeah. Maybe so, but anyway, you get a sense for the words and how they're distributed over space. It's just a model for how I create the dictionary.
Jaren Haber: And that allows me to create something like this. Um, this is a representation of school philosophy or identity across all of us, I simply I think two measures.
Jaren Haber: I don't actually use this in this study is just a kind of a Juris stick
Jaren Haber: You can imagine that the schools that are more orange or more traditional in their focus and and more blue is more progressive
Jaren Haber: Which is sort of an inspiration for how I ended up choosing choosing IPL as a as a measure, but
Jaren Haber: Yeah, those kind of just to give you a sense of what the data is actually looking at the bigger bubble ones are bigger schools. There's a variety of I didn't use in here and then measure it using the text in the websites. In short, okay right so here's the results in mixed effects regressions.
Jaren Haber: Regression coefficients, see, okay. So you said for students and this is impact on IBM inquiry based learning the portion of words in the website that come from the dictionary have selected terms, which is what I showed you in that visual a minute ago.
Jaren Haber: Right, so the more or the student body is the more
Jaren Haber: The less they use IBM language in the website. And this is a small on this graph, but it's it's actually statistically significant, whereas percent poor in the school district also makes a big difference. The effect sizes larger
Jaren Haber: But the standard deviation is much broader so the net effect of these two things about the same.
Jaren Haber: Whereas for race at the district.
Jaren Haber: District, actually. And here's the school level as a more consistent and robust
Jaren Haber: Impact
Jaren Haber: On IBM. Okay, so there's a strong association there. What, what else can we say here even holds net of academic quality. So there's a lot of
Jaren Haber: I guess hand waving by everyone from legislators to parents to school people
Jaren Haber: Organizers maybe it says that the school scores would would impact it status certainly people notice this pay attention to some extent.
Jaren Haber: But the question is whether that explains the demographic outcomes here net of IBM. So the outcome in this graph is demographics. So you got race at the top and poverty at the bottom so i bL which is logged here because
Jaren Haber: It has decreasing significant SIGNIFICANT PORTION increases.
Jaren Haber: I'd be all has a significant negative impact and that holds even when you take into account proficiency in math and reading
Jaren Haber: So yes, these things matter. Reading matters has a bigger effect size than ideal does
Jaren Haber: But this effect is robust to even these considerations. So takes out a big alternative explanation here, which is something off about these white schools that attracts by parents, their scores. Turns out that's not
Jaren Haber: An adequate explanation for the self sorting weren't serving results in segregation and math is actually a weaker affect my deal does okay so broad conclusions here.
Jaren Haber: Yeah, so it does seem like based on this analysis. Yes, I'm not looking at school choice day that's I'm not looking at parents preferences.
Jaren Haber: But if you look at the school that dirty and then the kind of people that end up enrolling there does suggests
Jaren Haber: That there is some self sorting going on with the ideology, the school chooses and who is appealing to and actually who ends up enrolling there.
Jaren Haber: So there is something distinct here about schools innovations attracting certain kinds of people and reproducing inequality by segregating students into schools where they're more likely to be with students that are similar to them.
Jaren Haber: Try schools are innovating, it's actually results in a new mechanism for any quality.
Jaren Haber: Yes, and despite what people say. But academic quality objective measures like percent proficiency and reading and math by any state standard
Jaren Haber: It's not as important compared to IBM, which is just, again, a single ideology, particularly segregating one, but there are many more axes.
Jaren Haber: Are many more recall categories or dictionaries or types of language schools can use the parents were paying attention to for sure by reading a website, you know, they read them very quickly. It turns out the language matters.
Jaren Haber: Okay, yes. And like I said, this is not school choice data we need direct observational in life student data and answer these questions even more convincingly
Jaren Haber: If I had data on your school website. The whole the whole universe, not just from May 2018 when this scraped but for a series of years, I could make even more.
Jaren Haber: Amazing claimed by think or if I'd spend some time in schools, observing what the stakeholders are advocating for, like, where do these missions Satan's come from. It's generally speaking, kind of a school or staff level collaboration certainly speaks to actual values people hold
Jaren Haber: To observe like
Jaren Haber: The extent to which they're considering neighborhood segregation or diversity or what kinds of students are appealing to in particular.
Jaren Haber: Is there actually a consciousness of racing class. Like, is there an intentional.
Jaren Haber: Attraction here or maybe it's not. Maybe it's just values that people share which would nonetheless to have the same outcome, but it speaks to, I think, how these how it's how it's coming about.
Jaren Haber: Okay, and then just to step back even further.
Jaren Haber: ization educational policy so charter schools are a form of educational privatization. They are essentially privately run the public publicly funded schools.
Jaren Haber: And what is all that autonomy, giving them. Well, part of it. According to my study is the freedom to advertise themselves.
Jaren Haber: In more unique and targeted ways
Jaren Haber: Which if you've seen her school websites and public school websites. It look very different. The charter school websites typically are more slick streamlined corporate
Jaren Haber: Whereas public school websites are typically nested in kind of a school district website and Lot less information, generally. So this form of privatization is encouraged by education policy has been since
Jaren Haber: George HW Bush and there's no child left behind policy in 2001 and activity.
Jaren Haber: And the net result of this appears to be reproduction of inequality, there's a lot of other different studies that show this happening in different levels, but more charter schools, you tend to have at a national level.
Jaren Haber: The bigger grows education and learning gap. So what's one more outcome of this. Well, it seems to be retrenching existing divisions between raising class groups.
Jaren Haber: And. Okay, so what are some solutions to this just a couple of things to throw out there as possible policy leavers we could implement try to
Jaren Haber: Work against this current maybe to our school to here to stay. What can we do about it, that would have a decrease this kind of self sorting and increasing segregation
Jaren Haber: And we fight against that.
Jaren Haber: We could require when each our school gets reauthorized another authorized when they're when the open and then every three to five years after that.
Jaren Haber: Could require them to show evidence of recruiting for diversity so show us a show the authorizers their marketing materials in there.
Jaren Haber: Yeah, and just evidence to recruit a more diverse pool of students.
Jaren Haber: Are fired that goal is maybe questionable this kind of thing that could be ritualistic maybe they show the evidence without actually having any outcome.
Jaren Haber: Of diverse school. So here's one more idea we could offer incentives for diverse schools. So if a school ends up having a more diverse student body within its walls compared to the community. It's in you can think about school districts or zip codes here.
Jaren Haber: You could offer financial incentive for that. Not just calling themselves diverse by design, not just for having students of color in the middle of the community of color.
Jaren Haber: Were converse. The for for white schools and white neighborhoods, but actually being more diverse in the neighborhoods. They're in
Jaren Haber: You can offer kind of a federal grant for that kind of thing. If you imagine that just like their federal grants for charter schools or schools doing STEM education.
Jaren Haber: And there are there are programs like this in different communities, but do it at a broad level I think
Jaren Haber: Helpful impact on decreasing segregation and mitigating this kind of self sorting terms was a period of you particularly effective that already. So that is my talk. This is my contact information.
Jaren Haber: I forgot to mention you can see these slides online.
Jaren Haber: It was earlier in the talk. It's a bit at least slash
Jaren Haber: Haber dash asap stash 2020
Jaren Haber: Yep. And you can also email me go to my website or a lot more information about the work that I do.
Jaren Haber: Or just maybe share your ideas about what what this problem is about what we can do about it. We engage computational social science. That's what I'm all about. And I hope to hear from you about that. So thank you so much and you go ahead and
Jaren Haber: exit out of here.
Jaren Haber: Recording
Jaren Haber: Okay, see you
