Education Commons^™

The Effects Of School Spending On Educational And Economic Outcomes: Evidence From School Finance Reforms, C. Kirabo Jackson

C. Kirabo Jackson

Teacher Effects And Teacher Related Policies, C. Kirabo Jackson, Jonah Rockoff, Douglas Staiger

C. Kirabo Jackson

The emergence of large longitudinal data sets linking students to teachers has led to rapid growth in the study of teacher effects on student outcomes by economists over the past decade. One large literature has documented wide variation in teacher effectiveness that is not well explained by observable student or teacher characteristics. A second literature has investigated how educational outcomes might be improved by leveraging teacher effectiveness through processes of recruitment, assignment, compensation, evaluation, promotion, and retention. These two lines of inquiry are closely tied; the first tells us about the importance of individual teachers, and the second tells us …

The Effect Of School Finance Reforms On The Distribution Of Spending, Academic Achievement, And Adult Outcomes, C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker C. Johnson, Claudia Persico

C. Kirabo Jackson

Since the Coleman report, many have questioned whether public school spending affects student outcomes. The school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused dramatic changes to the structure of K–12 education spending in the US. To study the effect of these school-finance-reform-induced changes in public school spending on long-run adult outcomes, we link school spending and school finance reform data to detailed, nationally-representative data on children born between 1955 and 1985 and followed through 2011. We use the timing of the passage of court-mandated reforms, and their associated type of funding formula change, …

A Little Now For A Lot Later: A Look At A Texas Advanced Placement Incentive Program, Clement (Kirabo) Jackson

C. Kirabo Jackson

The Texas Advanced Placement Incentive Program pays both students and teachers for passing grades on Advanced Placement (AP) exams. The program was implemented in schools serving primarily low-income, minority populations. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that program adoption is associated with increased AP course enrollment and AP exam taking. Moreover, the program is associated with an increase in students scoring above 1100/24 on the SAT/ACT, and an increase in students matriculating in college. I find no evidence that the rewards distorted behaviors in undesirable ways. I present empirical evidence that teachers and students were not simply aiming to maximize …

Do Students Benefit From Attending Better Schools?: Evidence From Rule-Based Student Assignments In 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, leading to large differences in the school environments to which students of differing initial levels of achievement are exposed. This paper uses instrumental variables based on the discontinuities created by the assignment mechanism, and exploits rich data which include the students’ test scores at entry and secondary school preferences to address self-selection bias. I find that attending a better school has large positive effects on examination performance at the end of secondary school. The effects are about twice as large for girls than …

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

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 score growth in reading and math respectively (about one …

Cash For Test Scores: The Impact Of The Texas Advanced Placement Incentive Program, Clement (Kirabo) Jackson

C. Kirabo Jackson

No abstract provided.