Assessing Educational Practices: The Contribution of Economics

Assessing Educational Practices introduces the nonspecialist to the research methods used by economists in studies of education practices and the institutions and markets in which education takes place. The ten chapters, all commissioned for this book, explain the way economists think about teachers' salaries, student achievement, class size, school organization, and other subjects of current debate in education. Each author demonstrates how methods used in economics can be applied to measure the success and failures of educational practices. All the contributions focus on precollege education and the discussion is largely based on the United States experience. One chapter looks at teaching in the United Kingdom, and another at international comparisons of incentives and student performance. Other topics include the effect of school quality on students' future earnings, merit pay for teachers, school spending and budgets, the relationship between competition and school quality, and proposals to improve secondary schools.