Schools and student achievement: more evidence from the Milwaukee parental choice program

Using math and reading test score gains, the author compares the achievement of students in the nonsectarian private schools participating in Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program with the achievement of students in a wide range of Milwaukee's public schools. Her results point to the need for a better understanding of what makes a school successful.Education

New Evidence on Workplace Education

This paper presents an analysis of the impact of a workplace education program that was administered by a community college at two companies. One of the companies we study is in the manufacturing sector and the other is in the service sector. The analysis relies on longitudinal administrative data and cross-sectional survey data. We examine a broad range of outcome variables, including workers' earnings, performance awards, job attendance, and subjective performance measures. Our main finding is that the program had a small, positive impact on earnings at the manufacturing company, but an insignificant impact at the service company. We also find that the training program had a positive association with the incidence of job bids, upgrades, performance awards, and job attendance. At the manufacturing company, occupational courses, such as blue print reading, had the largest impact.

Returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

We examine the determinants of returning to New Orleans within 18 months of Hurricane Katrina. Our theoretical framework predicts the probability of returning is positively associated with less hurricane damage and greater pre-hurricane levels of location-specific capital. We test these implications using data from a study of low-income parents—mainly African American women. We find that flood exposure is the most important factor in determining the decision to return. Among those who did not experience flooding, those who did not own homes or lived in the homes of relatives or friends were less likely to return.

Intraschool Variation in Class Size: Patterns and Implications

Economists attempting to explain the widening of the black-white wage gap in the late 1970's by differences in school quality have been faced with the problem that recent data reveal virtually no gap in the quality of schools attended by blacks and whites using a variety of measures. In this paper, we reexamine racial differences in school quality by considering the effects of using the pupil-teacher ratio, rather than the school's average class size,in an education production function since the pupil-teacher ratio is a rough proxy, at best. We find that while the pupil-teacher ratio and average class size are correlated, the pupil-teacher ratio is systematically less than or equal to the average class size. Part of the difference is due to intraschool allocation of teachers to classes. While the pupil-teacher ratio shows no black-white differences in class size, measures of the school's average class size suggest blacks are in larger classes. Also, the two measures lead to differing estimates of the role of class size in an education production function. We also conclude that school level measures may obscure important within-school variation in class size due to the small class sizes for compensatory education and a kind of aggregation bias results. Not only are blacks in schools with larger average class sizes but they are also in larger classes within schools, conditional on class type. The intraschool class size patterns suggest that using within-school variation in education production functions is not a good solution to aggregation problems due to non-random assignment of students to different sized classes. But once the selection problem has been addressed,smaller classes at the 8th grade lead to larger test score gains from 8th to 10th grade and differences in class size can explain approximately 15% of the black-white gap in educational achievement.

The changing value of education

Why has the economic value of education stopped rising over the past ten years? The most likely explanation seems to be that the booming economy of the late 1990s helped to increase the average earnings of all workers, including those at the low end of the skills distribution.Education - Economic aspects ; Labor market

Do returns to schooling differ by race and ethnicity?

Using data from the U.S. Decennial Census and the National Longitudinal Surveys, we find little evidence of differences in the return to schooling across racial and ethnic groups, even with attempts to control for ability and measurement error biases. While our point estimates are relatively similar across racial and ethnic groups, our conclusion is driven in part by relatively large standard errors. ; That said, we find no evidence that returns to schooling are lower for African Americans or Hispanics than for non-minorities. As a result, policies that increase education among the low-skilled have a good possibility of increasing economic well-being and reducing inequality. More generally, our analysis suggests further research is needed to better understand the nature of measurement error and ability bias across subgroups in order to fully understand potential heterogeneity in the return to schooling across the population.Education ; Employees, Training of

Constrained After College: Student Loans and Early Career Occupational Choices

In the early 2000s, a highly selective university introduced a "no-loans" policy under which the loan component of financial aid awards was replaced with grants. We use this natural experiment to identify the causal effect of student debt on employment outcomes. In the standard life-cycle model, young people make optimal educational investment decisions if they are able to finance these investments by borrowing against future earnings; the presence of debt has only income effects on future decisions. We find that debt causes graduates to choose substantially higher-salary jobs and reduces the probability that students choose low-paid "public interest" jobs. We also find some evidence that debt affects students' academic decisions during college. Our estimates suggest that recent college graduates are not life-cycle agents. Two potential explanations are that young workers are credit constrained or that they are averse to holding debt. We find suggestive evidence that debt reduces students' donations to the institution in the years after they graduate and increases the likelihood that a graduate will default on a pledge made during her senior year; we argue this result is more likely consistent with credit constraints than with debt aversion.

Returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina displaced approximately 650,000 people and destroyed or severely damaged 217,000 homes along the Gulf Coast. Damage was especially severe in New Orleans, and the return of displaced residents to this city has been slow. The fraction of households receiving mail (which, in the absence of reliable population estimates, is a good indicator for returns) was 49.5 percent in August 2006, and 66.0 percent in June 2007 (Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, 2007). Low-income minority families appear to have been slower than others to return (William H. Frey and Audrey Singer, 2006). In this paper, we examine the determinants of returning to New Orleans in the 18 months after the hurricane. The data come from a study of low-income parents—mainly African American women—who were enrolled in a community college intervention prior to the hurricane. Although the sample is not representative of the pre-Katrina population of the city, it nonetheless is of great interest. The relatively slow return of low income, primarily African American, residents is a politically charged issue. One (extreme) view is that the redevelopment plans are designed to discourage low-income minority residents from returning. A quite different view is that members of this group have found better opportunities outside of New Orleans, and do not want to return. Because few data sets trace individuals from before to after the hurricane, this debate has taken place largely without the benefit of evidence.

Causality, causality, causality: the view of education inputs and outputs from economics

Educators and policy makers are increasingly intent on using scientifically-based evidence when making decisions about education policy. Thus, education research today must necessarily be focused on identifying the causal relationships between education inputs and student outcomes. In this paper we discuss methodologies for estimating the causal effect of resources on education outcomes; we also review what we believe to be the best evidence from economics on a few important inputs: spending, class size, teacher quality, the length of the school year, and technology. We conclude that while the number of papers using credible identification strategies is thin, the body of credible research on causal relationships is growing, and we have started to gather evidence that some school inputs matter while others do not.Education - Economic aspects ; Technology - Economic aspects

School vouchers and student achievement: recent evidence, remaining questions

In this article, we review the empirical evidence on the impact of education vouchers on student achievement, and briefly discuss the evidence from other forms of school choice. The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero. Further, what little evidence exists regarding the potential for public schools to respond to increased competitive pressure generated by vouchers suggests that one should remain wary that large improvements would result from a more comprehensive voucher system. The evidence from other forms of school choice is also consistent with this conclusion. Many questions remain unanswered, however, including whether vouchers have longer-run impacts on outcomes such as graduation rates, college enrollment, or even future wages, and whether vouchers might nevertheless provide a cost-neutral alternative to our current system of public education provision at the elementary and secondary school level.Educational vouchers