The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) recommends that there be no more than 250 students to each school counselor. Although numerous studies in the education literature show that school counselors play a positive role in educating children, to our knowledge, this is the first study answering the question of whether lower student to counselor ratios, all else equal, improve student outcomes. Using data provided to us by Florida's Alachua County School District and the University of Florida Counselor Education Department, we show that lower student to counselor ratios decrease both the recurrence of student disciplinary problems and the share of students involved in a disciplinary incident. These effects are greater for minority and low-income students. The fixed-effect models used, control for all unobserved heterogeneity across schools, isolating the effects on discipline from the within-school changes in the student-to-counselor ratio. The empirical methodologies employed produce unbiased estimates as long as the variation in the student to counselor ratio is not driven by unobserved factors that affect disciplinary outcomes.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: