Dropout prevention is highly ranked on the political agenda in many countries. It remains unclear, however, how dropout can be effectively reduced, as many different factors determine student dropout. Community schools recognize this and aim to modernize education such that it better...

The empirical literature on education and crime suggests that both criminal behavior and educational attainment are transferred from parents to children. However, the impact of criminal behavior of parents on educational outcomes of children is generally ignored, even though the entailed social...

Teachers in the Netherlands tend to spend less time in front of the class, and often adopt a more personal approach. This allows them to better adjust their lecturing style to the needs of the individual student with the aim of increasing student performance. However, a more personal approach is...

Policies that aim at improving student achievement frequently increase instructional time, for example by means of an extended day program. There is, however, hardly any evidence that these programs are effective, and the few studies that allow causal inference indicate that we should expect...

This article argues that resource expansion can fail to improve actual student performance because it might cause educators to soften grading standards (i.e., induce grade inflation). Our theoretical model shows that, depending on schools’ and students’ reactions to resource changes, the...

This paper studies the optimal allocation of resources – in terms of school management, teachers, supporting employees and materials – in secondary schools. We use a flexible budget constrained output distance function model to estimate both technical and allocative efficiency scores for 448...

A straightforward way to prevent students from leaving education without a higher secondary diploma is increasing the compulsory education age. The idea is that, by staying longer in school, more students eventually obtain a higher secondary diploma. This paper examines the impact of a one-year...

Students' evaluations of teacher performance (SETs) are increasingly used by universities. However, SETs are controversial mainly due to two issues: (1) teachers value various aspects of excellent teaching differently, and (2) SETs should not be determined on exogenous influences. Therefore,...