| This research first outlines the history of the Chicago Public School (CPS) system, showing a trend of policy changes that only produced temporary improvements in student performance on standardized tests and graduation rates. Then, with publicly available, school-level data on the pass rates of all Illinois public schools on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) from the 2003-2004 to 2014-2015 school years, this research estimates the effect that closing 49 CPS elementary schools in 2013 had on student performance on the ISAT the year after the closing. This research found that for the schools who received the displaced students, their pass rates on the 2013-2014 ISAT decreased more than 3 percentage points from the pass rates of the previous 2012-2013 school year. While this result was not significant, it was a greater decline in pass rates than seen in all other Illinois public elementary schools or in other comparable schools in Illinois. Finally, this research estimates the relationship between using a payday lender and being unbanked for households in the US. Using the Current Population Survey UnbankedUnderbanked Supplement for January 2009, June 2011, and June 2013, a recursive bivariate nonlinear probability model shows that the two probabilities are statistically correlated, and controlling for demographic characteristics, being unbanked decreases the probability that a household uses a payday lender. |
