Arkansas Department of Education

About: Arkansas Department of Education is a government organization based out in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: School choice & Voucher. The organization has 37 authors who have published 112 publications receiving 1325 citations. The organization is also known as: ADE.

How Does Retirement Impact Health Behaviors? An International Comparison

Abstract: Recent work has found that retirement may lead to improvements in health, although the literature has not yet reached a consensus. This could be due to actual differences in the relationship of interest between countries or due to methodological differences between studies. The first goal of this paper is to estimate the causal impact of retirement on self-reported health using consistent estimation techniques on three harmonized longitudinal data sets, representative of the United States, England, and continental Europe. Using panel data and instrumental variable methods exploiting variation in statutory retirement ages, this paper then estimates how retirement causally affects health and health-related behaviors. We find, in all settings, retirement leads to better self-reported health, but that magnitude of the effect varies considerably. We also find that retirement increases the amount of exercise for those retiring from nonphysical jobs in all settings. The effect of retirement on addictive behaviors (drinking and smoking) was more mixed across settings. These findings suggest that public health interventions targeted to get near retirees to exercise more could allow countries to reap the benefits of a longer-working life while minimizing the associated health decline.

The Politically Correct University

Abstract: This book explores and offers remedies to the culture of political correctness in American higher education. We focus on the problem of liberal political orthodoxy in teaching and scholarship and seek to understand how diversity – of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, but not of ideas -- has become the dominant ideology in higher education. The dearth of conservative, libertarian, and neoliberal thinkers limits the type of questions asked and the phenomena studied; hinders credibility and dialogue between academic experts and large swaths of voters and policymakers; and, by limiting students’ exposure to different ideas, inhibits the ability of the university to produce thoughtful citizens. The book provides the most current and comprehensive statistical analysis of the relative rarity of conservative and libertarian professors, and takes an in-depth look at the effects of political correctness on specific academic disciplines, including political science, history, English, anthropology, and linguistics. It also explores the psychological and sociological mechanisms by which such imbalance comes about, and considers how and why academia stresses demographic diversity while largely eschewing political diversity. The book’s contributors contend that a combination of faculty composition, self-selection by conservatives, discrimination against conservatives in faculty hiring, and the tendency of political correctness to favor liberal views has produced a situation where conservative perspectives are often underrepresented in higher education. The contributors to this volume offer a range of solutions: programs or centers within universities, which operate outside official departments and allow conservative faculty to freely explore particular topics with sympathetic students; a larger role for alumni and trustees in overseeing their institutions; and a change in how liberal arts scholars understand themselves—not as provocative debunkers of accepted ideas, but as discoverers of truth.

What Explains the Gender Gap in Financial Literacy? The Role of Household Decision-Making

Abstract: Research has shown that financial illiteracy is widespread among women, and that many women are unfamiliar with even the most basic economic concepts needed to make saving and investment decisions. This gender gap in financial literacy may contribute to the differential levels of retirement preparedness between women and men. However, little is known about the determinants of the gender gap in financial literacy. Using data from the RAND American Life Panel, the authors examined potential explanations for the gender gap including the role of marriage and division of financial decision-making among couples. They found that differences in the demographic characteristics of women and men did not explain much of the financial literacy gap, whereas education, income and current and past marital status reduced the observed gap by around 25%. Oaxaca decomposition revealed the great majority of the gender gap in financial literacy is not explained by differences in covariates – characteristics of men and women – but due to coefficients, or how literacy is produced. They did not find strong support for specialization in financial decision-making within couples by gender. Instead, they found that decision-making within couples was sensitive to the relative education level of spouses for both women and men.

Helping Hand or a Hurdle Too High? An Evaluation Of Developmental Coursework at Arkansas's Flagship University

Abstract: High school graduation serves as an important gateway to increased professional opportunities. Not only does a high school graduate improve the national economy, a high school diploma is the key to opening the door to college. However, obtaining a high school degree does not necessarily ensure college readiness. In fact, many high school graduates are not prepared for college coursework, but still apply to and attend college in our college for all system. The class of 2013 saw only 38 percent of students test at a level considered prepared for college on the reading portion of the NAEP, but the problem is 66 percent of these students went on to enroll in college (Petrilli, 2016). In order to rectify this situation of unprepared students entering post-secondary education, colleges have implemented developmental coursework policies to prepare students for college-level coursework. Here, we add to the literature by examining the impacts of developmental coursework on students at Arkansas’s flagship public institution. We use a regression discontinuity design to examine multiple bandwidths of student-level observations for first-time enrollees from 2003-2014. The full sample includes 40,395 first-time enrollees for the time period of interest, 92 percent reported scores for each of the three ACT sections that determine recommendation for remediation. Using marginal effects to predict outcomes, we find that students recommended to developmental math courses are less likely to persist in college and less likely to graduate in 4 years after enrollment. We find that students recommended for developmental English coursework were more likely to persist into the second semester and year of college but were less likely to graduate in 4 years. We conclude that developmental coursework at the University of Arkansas, while having mixed impacts on students, could be due to the quality of student choosing to attend the state’s flagship institution and the state’s policies tied to opting-in and placing-out of developmental courses.

Assessing the Impact of Holocaust Education on Adolescents’ Civic Values: Experimental Evidence from Arkansas

Abstract: American adults overwhelmingly agree that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, yet few studies investigate the potential benefits of Holocaust education. We evaluate the impact of Holocaust education on several civic outcomes, including “upstander” efficacy (willingness to intervene on behalf of others), likelihood of exercising civil disobedience, empathy for the suffering of others, and tolerance of others with different values and lifestyles. We recruit students from two local high schools and randomize access to the Arkansas Holocaust Education Conference, where students have the chance to hear from a Holocaust survivor and to participate in breakout sessions with leading Holocaust experts. We find that students randomly assigned to attend the conference become more knowledgeable about the Holocaust and are more willing to act as an upstander on behalf of others. In our subgroup analysis, we find that minority students are significantly more willing to act as an upstander relative to their white peers.