Most teachers and principals will tell you that non-instructional school staff can make a big difference in school performance. Although we may all know this, it’s always useful to have empirical research to confirm it, and to examine the size and nature of the effects.
In this paper, economists Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra put forth one of the first rigorous tests of how one particular group of employees – school counselors – affect both discipline and achievement outcomes. The authors use a unique administrative dataset of third, fourth, and fifth graders in Alachua County, Florida, a diverse district that serves over 30,000 students. Their approach exploits year-to-year variation in the number of counselors in each school – i.e., whether the outcomes of a given school change from the previous year when a counselor is added to the staff.