Funding Formulas, School Choice, and Inherent Incentives

An array of school choice options now exists across the U.S., including: charter schools, voucher and private schools, interdistrict and intradistrict choice, and home schooling. These options can be contrasted with local public schools, where places are allocated primarily based on residency. This paper examines how these options might be funded and the challenges associated with including them in funding formulas. The primary difficulty is that local public schools and school choice options are not easily compared. Public schools and choice options differ in terms of: (1) mission; (2) regulations; (3) resources provided (staffing and buildings, for examples); and (4) cost of resources provided. They also differ in the characteristics of their student bodies. Consequently, deciding how much funding to allocate is difficult. The result is that states have adopted varied funding approaches to educational choice and created varied incentive structures. This study offers examples of such variety across the Great Lakes states, surveying each choice form but focusing particularly on charter schools, where the evidence is greatest

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

Measuring Efficiency in the Community College Sector

Community colleges are increasingly being pressed to demonstrate efficiency and improve productivity even as these concepts are not clearly defined and require a significant set of assumptions to determine. This paper sets out a preferred economic definition of efficiency: fiscal and social cost per degree. It then assesses the validity of using IPEDS data to calculate efficiency for the community college system. Using IPEDS, I estimate the fiscal cost per associate degree at $52,900 for comprehensive community colleges and$42,740 for vocational colleges (in 2008 dollars); the social costs per degree are $71,610 and$56,930, respectively. The community college sector has become more efficient over time: fiscal and social costs per degree are lower in real terms in 2008 than they were in 1987. However, two issues are important to the validity of IPEDS: the ability to adjust for differences in student ability and the way that transfer patterns are incorporated. This paper addresses both of them

Weathering the Great Recession With Human Capital? Evidence on Labor Market Returns to Education From Arkansas

The Great Recession was one of the sharpest economic downturns of the past century, with significant impacts across the United States labor market. Over past decades, one key feature of the United States labor market has been the high and stable returns to education. This paper estimates the returns to education for large samples of young workers in Arkansas over the period before, during, and after the Great Recession, using linked education and Unemployment Insurance earnings data on almost 1 million individuals within the state. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses show very modest effects of the Great Recession on the earnings gaps of workers with different levels of education. Over the period 2001 to 2012, there were large and stable returns to postsecondary education relative to high school completion, and these gaps were largely unaffected by the Great Recession. There were employment shocks that differed by education level: For persons without a college education, employment shocks were stronger, and they persisted beyond the end of the recession. Adjusting for these employment shocks, earnings gaps by education level increased over the period after 2007. Those who graduated from college during the Great Recession gained less than those who graduated before 2007. As with earlier recessions, postsecondary education served as an effective buffer against labor market shocks

The Labor Market Returns to Math in Community College: Evidence Using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (A CAPSEE Working Paper)

This paper examines the returns to math courses relative to those in courses in other subjects for students who started their postsecondary education at community college. The limited available evidence presumes that college-level math is valuable in the labor market relative to other coursework. Using data on college transcript and earnings from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, I estimate the relative effects of college-level math on attainment and earnings in early adulthood. I find clear attainment effects: college-level math is more strongly associated with receiving a college award than is college-level coursework in other disciplines. However, when controlling for attainment, there is little evidence that math courses are associated with increased earnings. The overall effect of math coursework on earnings is therefore modestly positive or close to zero. I also find that high school math and college-level math are positively correlated: failure to control for college-level math leads to an upward bias in estimating the effects of high school math on earnings. Finally, it is worth noting that, given high student transfer rates, it is important to have transcript information for all colleges attended by a given student when conducting this kind of analysis. The amount of college-level math coursework completed by community college students is almost doubled in the current study when accounting for math courses at all colleges attended by each student

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

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

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