The Lives of Soldiers in World War II

An examination of soldiers\u27 quality of life during World War II. This is done through comparing and contrasting the letters of two different soldiers

What All Americans Should Know About Islamic Feminism

The concept of Islamic feminism depicts the history of Muslim women seeking gender equality on the basis of religion. Through rooting gender equality in the texts and practices of the Qur\u27an, Muslim women demand acknowledgement in society based on Islamic teachings. A common theme persists in American society, which perpetuates the misconception that Muslim women lack agency. In reality, numerous Muslim women have actively worked to ensure their rightful place alongside men in society, which is evident in the cases of both Egypt and Iran

Informing Students about Their College Options: A Proposal for Broadening the Expanding College Opportunities Project

Most high-achieving, low-income students do not even apply to selective colleges despite being highly qualified for admission and success at these institutions. Because they do not apply, these students forgo the generous academic resources, increased financial aid, and better collegiate and career opportunities that selective schools offer. To increase opportunities and improve outcomes for these students, we propose building on the success of an innovative intervention, the Expanding College Opportunities (ECO) Project. At a relatively low cost of about $6 per student contacted, ECO sent the following to high-achieving, low-income students: targeted and personalized information on their college options, information on the process for applying, and details of the financial information relevant to their situations. The intervention had a profound effect on their college application behavior, leading to a substantial increase in their propensity to apply to more-selective colleges commensurate with their academic achievements. Not only did students apply to more-selective schools, but they were accepted and matriculated at such schools in greater numbers, and early evidence points to their academic success in these programs. The promising results of this low-cost program suggest that ECO should be expanded. This paper proposes steps to expand and improve ECO to reach more low-income, high-achieving students across the country by partnering with respected third-party organizations such as the College Board and ACT. ECO can also serve as a model for designing and applying this type of intervention to other populations of students. The success of the ECO Project highlights the importance of researchers being able to access relevant government data to design targeted and effective programs and polici

Is There an Equity-Efficiency Trade-Off in School Finance? Tiebout and a Theory of the Local Public Goods Producer

New empirical work shows the degree of competition among public providers of local public goods or between public and private providers of local public goods matters. This evidence needs a theory of the local public goods producer. Tiebout's hypothesis spawned a literature that gives local public economics a useful theory of the consumer which can generate a theory of the local public goods producer. This potential has remained largely undeveloped apart from Tiebout's vision of the local public goods producer as an entrepreneur, which is unrealistic because local public goods are nonverifiable. The Tiebout mechanism does not operate in alternative models of the local public goods producer, such as bureaucracy and agenda models. None of these models is useful for predicting how local public goods producers react to policies that change the structure of local public finance. This paper builds a theory of the producer that draws upon Tiebout's mechanism and the theory of incentives for regulation. I find that Tiebout's mechanism generates information that can be used in regulatory schemes to achieve lower costs for any given provision of local public goods. Thus, we face a fundamental trade-off between promoting equitable consumption of the public good and promoting efficiency in production of the public good. This trade-off exists even when equity in consumption generates positive externalities, as is often suggested of the consumption of schooling. I present evidence that when the Tiebout mechanism for schools is weakened by state-level school funding, per-pupil costs rise and the growth of educational attainment falls. This implies that losses from inefficient production generally outweigh gains from equalized consumption.

The Productivity of Schools and Other Local Public Goods Providers

I construct an agency model of local public goods producers with special reference to public schools. The model assumes that households make Tiebout choices among jurisdictions, but it has more realistic assumptions about information and the cost of residential mobility. I examine producers' effort and rent under local property tax finance and centralized finance. I show that, if there are a sufficient number of jurisdictions to choose among, conventional local property tax finance substantially reduces the agency problem and associated loss of productivity. Specifically, I demonstrate that local property tax finance can attain about as much productivity as a social planner with centralized finance can, even if the social planner is armed with more information that a real social planner could plausibly have. The key insight is that decentralized Tiebout choices make some information the social planner would need verifiable and other information unnecessary.

Competition Among Public Schools: A Reply to Rothstein (2004)

Rothstein has produced two comments, Rothstein (2003) and Rothstein (2004), on Hoxby "Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers," American Economic Review, 2000. In this paper, I discuss every claim of any importance in the comments. I show that every claim is wrong. I also discuss a number of Rothstein's innuendos--that is, claims that are made by implication rather than with the support of explicit arguments or evidence. I show that, when held up against the evidence, each innuendo proves to be false. One of the major points of Rothstein (2003) is that lagged school districts are a valid instrumental variable for today's school districts. This is not credible. Another major claim of Rothstein (2003) is that it is better to use highly non-representative achievement data based on students' self-selecting into test-taking than to use nationally representative achievement data. This claim is wrong for multiple reasons. The most important claim of Rothstein (2004) is that the results of Hoxby (2000) are not robust to including private school students in the sample. This is incorrect. While Rothstein appears merely to be adding private school students to the data, he actually substitutes error-prone data for error-free data on all students, generating substantial attenuation bias. He attributes the change in estimates to the addition of the private school students, but I show that the change in estimates is actually due to his using erroneous data for public school students. Another important claim in Rothstein (2004) that the results in Hoxby (2000) are not robust to associating streams with the metropolitan areas through which they flow rather than the metropolitan areas where they have their source. This is false: the results are virtually unchanged when the association is shifted from source to flow. Since 93.5 percent of streams flow only in the metropolitan area where they have their source, it would be surprising if the results did change much. The comments Rothstein (2003) and Rothstein (2004) are without merit. All of the data and code used in Hoxby (2000) are available to other researchers. An easy-to-use CD provides not only extracts and estimation code, but all of the raw data and the code for constructing the dataset.

The Cost of Accountability

Discussions of school accountability focus on two issues: poor test administration and the expense of accountability. Up to this point, researchers have focused on test quality and simply assumed that the programs are expensive enough to crowd out other policies, such as class size reduction or higher teacher salaries. Researchers have also assumed that it is so expensive to have a good accountability program (which includes good comprehensive tests, well-defined standards, an effective report card system, and safeguards that prevent cheating and teaching the test) that only poor accountability systems will be affordable. In this paper, I present the facts about how much accountability costs. The facts are, fortunately, highly knowable because costs show up both as expenditures on government budgets and as revenues on companies' (mainly test makers') accounts. Moreover, it turns out that worrying about measurement error in the cost data is pointless. The costs of accountability programs are so tiny that even the most generous accounting could not make them appear large, relative to the cost of other education programs. The 'most expensive' programs in the United States generally cost less than one quarter of 1 percent of per pupil spending, and most of these are only as costly as they are because a state is in the 'expensive' and temporary phase of developing its own comprehensive tests.