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The Effect Of School Finance Reforms On The Distribution Of Spending, Academic Achievement, And Adult Outcomes, C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker C. Johnson, Claudia Persico
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, …
Ability Grouping And Academic Inequality: Evidence From Trinidad And Tobago, Clement (Kirabo) Jackson
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 …