Education Commons^™

Family Sources Of Educational Gender Inequality In Rural China: A Critical Assessment, Emily C. Hannum, Peggy A. Kong, Yuping Zhang

Emily C. Hannum

Ability Grouping And Academic Inequality: Evidence From Trinidad And Tobago, Clement (Kirabo) Jackson

C. Kirabo Jackson

In Trinidad and Tobago students are assigned to secondary schools after fifth grade based on achievement tests, generating large differences in school and peer quality. Using instrumental variables to address self-selection bias, I find that being assigned to a school with high-achieving peers has large positive effects on examination performance, particularly for girls. This suggests that ability grouping (or school tracking) reinforces achievement differences by assigning the weakest students to schools that provide the least value-added. While students benefit from attending schools with brighter peers on average, the marginal effect is non-linear such that there are small benefits to attending …

Teaching Students And Teaching Each Other: The Importance Of Peer Learning For Teachers (With Elias Bruegmann), Clement (Kirabo) Jackson

C. Kirabo Jackson

Using student examination data linked to longitudinal teacher personnel data we document that a teacher’s students have larger test score gains when she experiences an improvement in the observable characteristics of her colleagues. Using within-school and within-teacher variation, we further show that a teacher’s students have larger test score gains when she has more effective colleagues (based on their own students’ achievement gains from an out-of-sample pre-period). A one standard deviation increase in average teacher peer quality is associated with an increase of 0.02 and 0.04 standard deviations in student test scores in reading and math respectively (about one third …