School-to-work programs: Information from two surveys

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 124, Issue 8, 2001, Pages 38-49

  Joyce, Mary ^a   Neumark, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0038975985     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. The Act called for approximately $300 million to be appropriated for fiscal year 1995, with equal amounts being available for fiscal years 1996-99. Federal funding for school-to-work programs is scheduled to end in 2001.
2. Concise definitions of these three components were not provided in the Act. The definitions that follow were developed by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., an organization that has been involved in a large-scale study to evaluate school-to-work grants. See The First National Survey of Local School-to-Work Partnerships: Data Summary, August 1997.
3. A copy of the School-to-work Act is available on the Internet at www.stw.ed.gov/factsht/act.htm.
4. The NLSY97 is an annual survey that, among other things, will interview youths while they make their transition from school to the workforce. When the present analysis was conducted, however, data were available from only one interview with these youths, and most of them were still attending school. Nonetheless, for an analysis of the effects of school-to-work programs on early youth outcomes, see David Neumark and Mary Joyce, "Evaluating School-To-Work Programs Using the New NLSY," Working Paper 7719 (Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2000).
5. Primary sampling units are geographical constructs consisting of either a metropolitan area or a county.
6. Or 5,295 responses out of 7,390. Among the respondents, another 42 failed to answer any of the first 11 questions in the school-to-work section and thus were dropped from the analysis.
7. "Title I" is short for "Part A of Title I of the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994, Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965." Title I is the largest Federal aid program for our Nation's schools and is aimed at providing educational services to children who are the furthest from meeting the standards that each State has set for all children.
8. Throughout this article, all estimates of means, proportions, and percentages are sample-weighted. The logistic regression estimates that appear later are not weighted.
9. Or 4,484 out of 8,984. Actually, 4,489 were asked the school-to-work questions, but 5 were dropped from the analysis due to missing or ambiguous information on their current grade level.
10. Clearly, we will be able to examine this issue when data from later waves of the survey are available.
11. To determine the number of respondents for which information on a given characteristic is missing, simply add up the unweighted numbers in the first column of table 2 and subtract the resulting sum from 4,484.
12. There are, however, instances where this may be valid. In particular, in the NLSY97, the youth was asked whether they "ever" participated in these programs and not whether they participated in the programs at their current school, so it is possible that the youth could have participated in the program at another school or through another organization (i.e. church, business group, or civic organization). However, we suspect that this is at most a minor part of the problem, as the inconsistencies appear almost as severe for school-based as for work-based programs.
13. As mentioned previously, a nonresponse to the question on whether the school offered a particular program was treated as a "no" response. To the extent that this is not the case, the percent of schools estimated to have these programs will be underestimated.
14. That is, we conducted a statistical test that incorporated the standard error associated with each estimate and found that the hypothesis that the two estimates are equal could be rejected at the 5-percent significance level.
15. The incidence rate for schools in which 25 to 75 percent of the student body is black also was larger than the incidence rate for schools in which more than 75 percent of the student body is black; however, this difference, while similar in magnitude to the difference mentioned in the text, was not statistically significant.
16. Note that the odds ratios on a discrete variable should be interpreted relative to the excluded category. The excluded categories in Table 7 are public schools, schools in suburban locations, schools with graduation rates in quartiles 1 to 3, schools with college enrollment in quartiles 1 to 3, schools without breakfast programs, schools without Title 1 funding, and schools without dropout prevention programs.
17. Meaning that we conducted statistical tests incorporating the standard errors associated with each estimate and found that the hypothesis that the two estimates are equal could be rejected at the 5-percent significance level.
18. We also examined the relationship between school-to-work programs and two alternative measures of working that may signal a different level of attachment to the labor force than holding a job during the survey week. The first was an indicator variable for whether or not the youth worked for an employer at any time during the 1996-97 school year or following summer. The second was an indicator variable for whether or not the youth worked for an employer during the 1996-97 school year. The results using the first work variable were very similar to those discussed in the text. The second work variable also was positively related to participation in school-to-work programs, but the association was not statistically significant.
19. The excluded categories in table 12 are youths whose grades in 8th grade were in the "A" to "B" range, youths not working, youths who said their chance of completing college was greater than 66 percent, youths in a college preparatory course of study, male youths, nonblack and non-Hispanic youths, youths whose biological mother has a high school education, youths in public schools, and youths in rural areas.