A half a century has passed since the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned the doctrine of separate but equal in the realm of public education. This chapter attempts to summarize what we know about the impact of Brown on enrollment patterns and academic and economic...

This chapter examines the literature that attempts to measure the relationship between labor earnings and the average quality of a state's elementary and secondary schools where school quality is approximated by statewide average characteristics like the teacher-pupil ratio. We present evidence...

This chapter deals with several salient issues about immigrants to the US and their education. These issues include a comparison of the schooling accomplishments of immigrants compared to the native-born both contemporaneously as well as over time. These comparisons emphasize the considerable...

Improving the quality of instruction is a central component to virtually all proposals to raise school quality. Unfortunately, policy recommendations often ignore existing evidence about teacher labor markets and the determinants of teacher effectiveness in the classroom. This chapter reviews...

Students face four decision margins: (a) How many years to spend in school, (b) What to study, (c) How much effort to devote to learning per year and (d) Whether to disrupt or assist the learning of classmates. The thousands of studies that have applied human capital theory to the first two...

In recent decades, there has been rising anxiety about the quality of the public education in the United States. However, it is important to note that this has not always been the case; in fact, the United States has long been a leader in terms of the public provision of education at all levels...

The survey presents basic facts on wage growth and summarizes the main ideas on the possible sources of this growth. We document that wage growth happens mainly early in the life cycle and is then associated with increasing labor force participation and high job mobility. Wage growth during the...

Any system of primary and secondary schools involves explicit or implicit mechanisms that ration not only financial but also nonfinancial inputs into education production. This chapter focuses primarily on such mechanisms as they relate to the sorting of parents and children into schools and...