The Effect of Community Traumatic Events on Student Achievement: Evidence from the Beltway Sniper Attacks

No 21055, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Community traumatic events such as mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural or man-made disasters have the potential to disrupt student learning in numerous ways. For example, these events can reduce instructional time by causing teacher and student absences, school closures, and disturbances to usual classroom routines. Similarly, they might also disrupt home environments. This paper uses a quasi-experimental research design to identify the effects of the 2002 “Beltway Sniper” attacks on student achievement in Virginia’s public elementary schools. In order to identify the causal impact of these events, the empirical analysis uses a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits geographic variation in schools’ proximity to the attacks. The main results indicate that the attacks significantly reduced school-level proficiency rates in schools within five miles of an attack. Evidence of a causal effect is most robust for math proficiency rates in the third and fifth grades, and third grade reading proficiency, suggesting that the shootings caused a decline in school proficiency rates of about five to nine percentage points. Particularly concerning from an equity standpoint, these effects appear to be entirely driven by achievement declines in schools that serve higher proportions of racial minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Finally, results from supplementary analyses suggest that these deleterious effects faded out in subsequent years.

JEL-codes: I12 I21 I24 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
Note: CH ED EH LE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Seth Gershenson & Erdal Tekin, 2018. "The Effect of Community Traumatic Events on Student Achievement: Evidence from the Beltway Sniper Attacks," Education Finance and Policy, vol 13(4), pages 513-544.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21055.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Effect of Community Traumatic Events on Student Achievement: Evidence from the Beltway Sniper Attacks (2018)
Working Paper: The Effect of Community Traumatic Events on Student Achievement: Evidence from the Beltway Sniper Attacks (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21055

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21055

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().