Evaluation of the efficacy of school policies requires measures of student performance across schools and states, but conventional approaches to constructing the relevant data can be very misleading. This paper develops an approach to estimating marginal school effects at the state level. It...

Many school districts experience difficulties attracting and retaining teachers, and the impending retirement of a substantial fraction of public school teachers raises the specter of severe shortages in some public schools. Schools in urban areas serving economically disadvantaged and minority...

Persistent increases in spending on elementary and secondary schools have gone virtually undocumented. Real expenditure per student increased 3½ percent per year over the period 1890-1990. Decomposition of the spending growth shows that it resulted from a combination of falling pupil-staff...

This paper investigates the effects of California’s billion-dollar class-size-reduction program on student achievement. It uses year-to-year differences in class size generated by variation in enrollment and the state’s class-size-reduction program to identify both the direct effects of...

Voluntary and enforced compliance by school districts has reduced the segregation of U.S. public schools. A key question is whether desegregation programs have raised lifetime earnings for blacks, either through the expansion of interracial contact or improvements in school quality. This paper...

This paper investigates the extent to which academic preparation, the structure of labor market opportunities, and exposure to nonmarket income alternatives explain race and gender differences in schooling and employment. Despite lower overall high school continuation and college attendance...

Measuring educational performance and understanding its determinants are important for designing policies with respect to such varying issues as teacher accountability, educational finance systems, and school integration. Unfortunately, past analyses of student achievement and educational...

There are three distinct research traditions in the analysis of individual earnings determination: human capital, or earnings function, analyses; aggregate wage analyses; and labor demand analyses. An important and incongruous aspect of each is the treatment of geographical differences in labor...