The Long Run Importance of School Quality

The role of schooling and school quality in the economy has become very confused, in part because of attempts to argue different positions on educational policy. Research demonstrates that school quality has a strong impact on individual earnings, on the distribution of income, and on overall economic growth. In contrast to these long run factors, today's school quality has little to do with current business cycles or unemployment rates. This paper emphasizes the importance of school quality -- measured by math and science test scores -- on economic growth. While U.S. growth has been strong over the 20th century, it has not been the result of high quality schooling relative to that in other countries. Instead other factors such as open labor markets and high quality colleges and universities appear to have masked the mediocre performance by U.S. students.

Choice, charters, and public-school competition

School choice

Non-labor-supply responses to the income maintenance experiments

Income distribution ; Public welfare

Choice, charters, and public school competition

In the last century, public schools changed in ways that dramatically reduced the control that parents have over their local schools. Regaining that control is one key to improving the quality of our schools, and giving students a choice of schools is one way of increasing the influence that parents have over the way schools are run. Several types of school choice have arisen in recent years, including magnet and charter schools. But when these are reviewed in terms of outcomes and incentives, charter schools are found to have a much better chance of providing the competitive pressure necessary to improve the quality of public schools.School choice

The toughest battleground: schools

Over four decades ago, Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman 1962). This insightful little book traveled across a broad range of important topics collected around the theme of how government can best operate within a free society. The message was expanded two decades later in Free to Choose (Friedman and Friedman 1980). At the time, the battle of the ideas introduced by these books was being waged by nations, nations that were willing to contemplate war over how societies should be organized. As we look back on how the world has changed since then, I wonder if anybody guessed that changing the schools would be the most difficult subject taken on. It is useful to look at what progress has been made, what evidence exists on the topic, and what the future might hold in the area of education. The simple question is: Why are the schools tougher to crack than the walls of the Communist bloc?Education ; School choice

Some Simple Analytics of School Quality

Most empirical analyses of human capital have concentrated solely on the quantity of schooling attained by individuals, ignoring quality differences. This focus contrasts sharply with policy considerations that almost exclusively consider school quality issues. This paper presents basic evidence about the impact of school quality on individual earnings and on economic growth. The calculations emphasize how benefits relate to both the magnitude and the speed of quality improvements. It then considers alternative school reform policies focused on improvements in teacher quality, identifying how much change is required. Finally, teacher bonus policies are put into the context of potential benefits.

Conclusions and controversies about the effectiveness of school resources

Although a majority of parents, educators, and policymakers report that their own schools are doing well, many believe that the U.S. education system as a whole is in trouble. The author points out that in the past decade an increasing amount of resources have been devoted to education, but U.S. students have continued to underperform students in other countries. To improve the effectiveness of spending, the author advocates radically different incentives for students and school personnel and better measures of student performance.Education

Quality-Consistent Estimates of International Returns to Skill

Returns to education are traditionally estimated in a Mincer wage equation from the variation in schooling for a cross-section of individuals of different ages. Because individuals receive education at different time periods, when the quality of their education may not be identical, this method leads to an over- or under-estimation of the return to education of a given quality depending on how education quality evolves over time. This quality issue interacts with ability bias from self-selection into schooling and is particularly problematic when comparing returns across different countries. Using microdata from the International Adult Literacy Survey, we construct quality adjusted measures of schooling attained at different time periods and use these along with international literacy test information to estimate returns to skills for 13 countries. Estimated returns to quality-adjusted education are considerably higher than the traditional estimate for most countries, but these are offset to varying degrees by selection biases on ability. The combined corrections alter significantly the pattern of returns to schooling and skill seen from naive Mincer wage equations.