Vouchers and the Cleveland Scholarship Program: little progress so far

Voucher programs are intended to raise the academic achievement of students, but, unfortunately, so far the evidence suggests that Cleveland’s voucher students perform no better than their counterparts in public schools.Educational vouchers ; School choice

Should Ohio invest in universal preschooling?

A growing body of evidence shows that quality preschooling is associated with a host of benefits to students, schools, and society at large. These benefits can have a positive impact on a state’s budget, too: Children who attend preschool are not only more successful throughout their school careers, they also graduate and go on to college more often, commit fewer crimes, and earn higher wages once they enter the workforce. Research suggests that making public pre-schooling available to all children would be a cost-effective way to improve academic performance. This Commentary explains why making public preschooling available to all children in the state would be a wise investment for Ohio.Education - Ohio

Education vouchers and the Cleveland Scholarship Program

Educational vouchers

Unions, Training, and Firm Performance

The present paper uses a combination of workplace and linked employee-workplace data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey and the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey to examine the impact of unions on training incidence, training intensity/coverage, and training duration. It also examines the impact of unions and training on earnings and a measure of establishment labour productivity. In addition, the implications of training for the firm’s bottom line are evaluated. Union effects on training emerge as fairly subtle, and are more positive when using individual rather than plant-wide training data. A positive impact of training on earnings is detected in both the individual and plant-wide wage data, albeit only for the earlier survey. Consistent with other recent findings, the effects of union recognition on earnings are today rather muted, while union-training interaction effects vary greatly. Instrumenting training provides positive results for the labour productivity outcome and, in the case of the earlier survey, for the financial performance indicator as well. However, some negative effects of unions are now also detected.earnings, training duration, training intensity/coverage, training Incidence, employer-provided training, bargaining structure, union recognition, financial performance, labour productivity

Early childhood development and social mobility

Steven Barnett and Clive Belfield examine the effects of preschool education on social mobility in the United States. They note that under current policy three- and four-year-old children from economically and educationally disadvantaged families have higher preschool attendance rates than other children. But current programs fail to enroll even half of poor three-and four-year olds. Hispanics and children of mothers who drop out of school also participate at relatively low rates. The programs also do little to improve learning and development. Barnett and Belfield point out that preschool programs raise academic skills on average, but do not appear to have notably different effects for different groups of children, and so do not strongly enhance social mobility. In such areas as crime, welfare, and teen parenting, however, preschool seems more able to break links between parental behaviors and child outcomes. Increased investment in preschool, conclude Barnett and Belfield, could raise social mombility. Program expansions targeted to disadvantaged children would help them move up the ladder, as would a more universal set of policies from which disadvantaged children gained disproportionately. Increasing the educational effectiveness of early childhood programs would provide for greater gains in social mobility than increasing participation rates alone. The authors observe that if future expansions of preschool programs end up serving all children, not just the poorest, society as a whole would gain. Benefits would exceed costs and there would be more economic growth, but relative gains for disadvantaged children would be smaller than absolute gains because there would be some (smaller) benefits to other children.early childhood education; social mobility; benefit/cost analyses; income disparity; disadvantaged children

Unions, training and firm performance

"This paper uses data from two British workplace surveys to examine the impact of unions on several training measures. It also evaluates the impact of unions and training on earnings and two measures of firm performance. Union effects on training emerge as fairly subtle, and are more positive when using individual rather than plant-wide training data. A positive impact of training on earnings is detected in individual and plant-wide wage data, albeit for one of the datasets. Union influence on wages is also muted and union-training interaction effects vary greatly. However, instrumenting training provides positive results for labour productivity and, again for one survey, for financial performance as well." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en)) Additional Information Kurzfassung (deutsch) Executive summary (English)betriebliche Weiterbildung, Gewerkschaftspolitik - Auswirkungen, Lohnhöhe, Unternehmenserfolg, Großbritannien

The Economic Value of National Service

In this report we calculate social and taxpayer benefits of national service using current data and including a wider array of gains across a range of different programs. We use national datasets and existing studies of the association between service, education, and long-term impacts to calculate the economic value of national service programs

An Economic Analysis of Pre-K in Louisiana

A number of recent studies have shown that pre-k education is one of the most cost effective investments that a state can make. This report indicates that Louisiana has much to gain from such an investment. Overall, for every $1 invested in pre-k, the state would recoup$2.25 in benefits. In the Department of Education alone, every dollar invested in pre-k would be offset by a savings of 77 cents over children's 13 years in K-12. These calculations show that pre-k expansion would be a strong investment, yielding high returns to Louisiana

The Costs of Inadequate Education for New York State

This paper calculates the economic consequences for the state of New York from failing to ensure that all students graduate from high school. The analyses in this report indicate that there are substantial economic benefits from raising the rate of high school graduation for New York state. These benefits can therefore be interpreted as the maximum amount that could be spent by federal and state/local governments on educational programs to improve the graduation rate

Should Ohio Invest in Universal Pre-Schooling?

Ohio has almost 150,000 three-year old children; however, fewer than 41,000 are covered by publicly supported preschooling programs, and the majority of these are in special education or Head Start programs. Preschooling is associated with a plethora of positive outcomes, from higher test scores, graduation rates, and college progression to reductions in special education, grade repetition, and crime. One might wonder why it isn’t made available to every child. At issue is whether the benefits would outweigh the costs of providing pre-school programs to a larger proportion of children. Currently two states, Georgia and Oklahoma, offer universal preschooling, but many others are considering expanding their coverage. Should Ohio make publicly funded preschooling programs available to all children across the state