What happens in schools to affect student outcomes

I focus on two determinants of a school's environment and institutional organization and how they affect student outcomes. The first factor is peer group effects and financial changes due to changes in the demographic composition of the student body, and the second is a school's delegation of educational tasks between parents and school officials. Immigration by non-US citizens into school districts changes the composition of these schools' populations. When parents decide to become involved in their child's education, often by volunteering at the school, this decision affects the allocation of school duties.; The first chapter analyzes the effect of immigration on SAT scores and college application patterns of high school students in California and Texas. The dataset used is longitudinal in nature and is matched via a unique algorithm to the Census 2000 summary tabulation files to determine immigration at the local Census place-level. This chapter's main finding is that immigration in the 1990's did not have a strong negative impact on the student outcomes of U.S. citizens. Using an instrumental variables approach to control for endogeneity of the percentage of non citizens taking the SAT in a school, it is found that immigration does not harm, and possibly benefits, student outcomes. The second chapter analyzes the impact of parental volunteering and involvement in schools nationwide. Using the level of social capital as an instrumental variable for the propensity to volunteer, I find that parent volunteering is compensatory in nature and its beneficial effects on the test scores and delinquency outcomes of students is in fact underestimated. This analysis provides evidence in favor of the beneficial effects of parental volunteering currently common in many schools.