Education Commons^™

Worker Signals Among New College Graduates: The Role Of Selectivity And Gpa, Brad J. Hershbein

Brad J. Hershbein

Recent studies have found a large earnings premium to attending a more selective college, but the mechanisms underlying this premium have received little attention and remain unclear. In order to shed light on this question, I develop a multidimensional signaling model relying on college grades and selectivity that rationalizes students’ choices of effort and firms’ wage-setting behavior. The model is then used to produce predictions of how the interaction of the signals should be related to wages, namely that the return on college GPA should fall the more selective the institution attended. Using five data sets that span the early …

Relying On The Private Sector: The Income Distribution And Public Investments In The Poor, Katrina Kosec

Katrina Kosec

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 Second Look At Enrollment Changes After The Kalamazoo Promise, Brad Hershbein

Brad J. Hershbein

While previous research has documented how the Kalamazoo Promise, the most prominent and generous place-based college scholarship program, increased enrollment in Kalamazoo Public Schools, this paper qualifies and quantifies the characteristics of students who were induced to enter—or stay—in the district. In particular, it analyzes the origins and destinations, socioeconomic composition, and school-level sorting behavior associated with student flows around the time of the Promise announcement. These dimensions are more subtle than changes in the volume of students or measures of their individual success, but they are equally important to understand for communities exploring the feasibility of place-based scholarships as …

On Estimating The Effects Of Increased Aid To Education, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Richard P. Chaykowski

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, of the National Commission on Excellence in Education decried the state of public education in the United States and suggested a number of reforms. Among their recommendations was increased federal aid for education. The view was that this would lead to desirable outcomes such as reduced class sizes and higher teacher salaries, with the latter aiding in the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers. Somewhat surprisingly, previous research on the economics of education provides us with very few insights about what the effects of such proposals might be. For example, while there …

The Social Security Student Benefit Program And Family Decisions, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

In 1965 Congress established the Social Security Student Benefit Program which provided benefits for children of deceased, disabled or retired workers, who were enrolled in college full—time and were not married, up until the semester they turned age 22. The program grew to be a major financial aid program; at its peak in FY 81 it represented about 20% of all federal outlays on student assistance for higher education. The program was terminated for students newly entering college as of May 1, 1982. Somewhat surprisingly, in contrast to the debate that accompanies most social programs, debate over the student benefit …

My Life And Economics, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Age 51 is a bit early to be writing a retrospective about one's career as an economist and one's life. This is especially true for me since I am not on track to win a Nobel Prize, to be admitted to the National Academy of Science, or even to be elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Nonetheless, as I write this essay during the fall of 1997, I look back on the 28 years I have spent as a PhD economist and see a record of accomplishment of which I am proud and a number of messages worth …

Role Models In Education (Symposium Introduction), Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

It is our hope that by assembling these papers in one place, the Review will contribute to future policy debate on the importance of role models in education. Moreover, the papers' findings may have even broader importance. In many respects, the relationship between teachers and students can be viewed as analogous to the relationship between supervisors and employees. If the race, gender, and ethnicity of teachers "matter," so may the race, gender, and ethnicity of supervisors in the employment relationship. These papers thus suggest analogous types of research that could be profitably undertaken that relate to the employment relationship.

Do Teachers’ Race, Gender, And Ethnicity Matter? Evidence From The National Education Longitudinal Study Of 1988, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Daniel D. Goldhaber, Dominic J. Brewer

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), the authors find that the match between teachers' race, gender, and ethnicity and those of their students had little association with how much the students learned, but in several instances it seems to have been a significant determinant of teachers' subjective evaluations of their students. For example, test scores of white female students in mathematics and science did not increase more rapidly when the teacher was a white woman than when the teacher was a white man, but white female teachers evaluated their white female students more highly than …

Educational Progress And Economic Development, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] Many development agencies seek to channel economic assistance to those less-developed countries (LDCs) and activities that will help the poor to achieve a better life (this phraseology is from the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act as amended in 1975). Education is an important indicator of countries' performance. This chapter examines the suitability of alternative education indicators as guides for planning and evaluating countries' progress and commitment toward increasing the participation of the poor in development.

Education And Income Distribution In Developing Countries: A Review Of The Literature, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] This paper is a survey of the available literature on education and income distribution in developing countries. Education may affect the distribution of income in a variety of ways: by raising the level of income; by changing, for better or worse, the dispersion of income; by opening up new opportunities for the children of the poor and thereby serving as a vehicle for social mobility and/or, by limiting participation to the children of the well-to-do, transmitting intergenerational inequality; by offering greater access to favored segments of the population (boys, city-dwellers, certain racial groups); by rewarding differently the education received …

Can Health Insurance Reduce School Absenteeism?, Ryan Yeung

Ryan Yeung

Enacted in 1997, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) represented the largest expansion of U.S. public health care coverage since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid 32 years earlier. Although the program has recently been reauthorized, there remains a considerable lack of thorough and well-designed evaluations of the program. In this study, we use school attendance as a measure of the program’s impact. Utilizing state-level data and the use of fixed-effects regression techniques, we conclude that SCHIP has had a positive and significant effect on state average daily attendance rates, as measured by both SCHIP participation and eligibility rates. …

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 …

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

C. Kirabo Jackson

No abstract provided.

Rationalising The Economic Metaphor, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Contemporary critique of the developing trend towards education institutions being run as businesses, and for students to be treated as economic units.

Dope Is Death, Amilcar Shabazz

Amilcar Shabazz

"Dope is Death" started as a study document for revolutionary nationalist cadres in the 1980s at the height of the Crack Wars and Reaganomics. It was later published in the September/October 1987 issue of "By Any Means Necessary!" newspaper published by the New Afrikan People's Organization. The version seen here is the 1988 pamphlet edition.