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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Teacher Quality At The High-School Level: The Importance Of Accounting For Tracks, C. Kirabo Jackson Sep 2014

Teacher Quality At The High-School Level: The Importance Of Accounting For Tracks, C. Kirabo Jackson

C. Kirabo Jackson

Unlike in elementary school, high-school teacher effects may be confounded with both selection to tracks and unobserved track-level treatments. I document sizable confounding track effects, and show that traditional tests for the existence of teacher effects are likely biased. After accounting for these biases, high-school algebra and English teachers have much smaller test-score effects than found in previous studies. Moreover, unlike in elementary school, value-added estimates are weak predictors of teachers’ future performance. Results indicate that either (a) teachers are less influential in high school than in elementary school, or (b) test scores are a poor metric to measure teacher …


Teacher Effects And Teacher Related Policies, C. Kirabo Jackson, Jonah Rockoff, Douglas Staiger Mar 2014

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 Dec 2013

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, …


Do College-Prep Programs Improve Long-Term Outcomes?, C. Kirabo Jackson Dec 2013

Do College-Prep Programs Improve Long-Term Outcomes?, C. Kirabo Jackson

C. Kirabo Jackson

This paper presents an analysis of the longer-run effects of a college-preparatory program implemented in inner-city schools that provided teacher training in addition to payments to eleventh- and twelfth- grade students and their teachers for passing scores on Advanced Placement (AP) exams. Affected students passed more AP exams, were more likely to remain in college beyond their first and second years, and earned higher wages. Effects are particularly pronounced for Hispanic students who experienced a 2.5-percentage-point increase in college degree attainment and an 11-percent increase in earnings. While the study is based on non-experimental variation, the results are robust across …