School Resources

Although there is intense policy interest in improving educational outcomes around the world, there is much greater uncertainty about how to accomplish this. The primary governmental decisions often relate to the resources that are devoted to schooling, but the research indicates little consistent relationship between resources to schools and student achievement. Much of the research considers how resources affect student achievement as measured by standardized test scores. These scores are strongly related to individual incomes and to national economic performance, making them a good proxy for longer run economic impacts. But, the evidence - whether from aggregate school outcomes, econometric investigations, or a variety of experimental or quasiexperimental approaches - suggests that pure resource policies that do not change incentives are unlikely to be effective. Importantly, the results appear similar across both developed and developing countries.class size, achievement, experimental evidence, economic growth

Preface

education

Teacher Quality

Improving the quality of instruction is a central component to virtually all proposals to raise school quality. Unfortunately, policy recommendations often ignore existing evidence about teacher labor markets and the determinants of teacher effectiveness in the classroom. This chapter reviews research on teacher labor markets, the importance of teacher quality in the determination of student achievement, and the extent to which specific observable characteristics often related to hiring decisions and salary explain the variation in the quality of instruction. The evidence is applied to the comparison between policies that seek to raise quality by tightening the qualifications needed to enter teaching and policies that seek to raise quality by simultaneously loosening entry restrictions and introducing performance incentives for teachers and administrators.teacher salaries, incentives, teacher experience, teacher education, teacher test scores

The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit institutional variation that does not exist within countries; draw on much larger variation than usually available within any country; reveal whether any result is country-specific or more general; test whether effects are systematically heterogeneous in different settings; circumvent selection issues that plague within-country identification by using system-level aggregated measures; and uncover general-equilibrium effects that often elude studies in a single country. The advantages come at the price of concerns about the limited number of country observations, the cross-sectional character of most available achievement data, and possible bias from unobserved country factors like culture. This chapter reviews the economic literature on international differences in educational achievement, restricting itself to comparative analyses that are not possible within single countries and placing particular emphasis on studies trying to address key issues of empirical identification. While quantitative input measures show little impact, several measures of institutional structures and of the quality of the teaching force can account for significant portions of the large international differences in the level and equity of student achievement. Variations in skills measured by the international tests are in turn strongly related to individual labor-market outcomes and, perhaps more importantly, to cross-country variations in economic growth.Human Capital; Cognitive Skills; International Student Achievement Tests; Education Production Function

Historical Perspectives on Racial Differences in Schooling in the United States

In this chapter we present an overview of the history of racial differences in schooling in the United States. We present basic data on literacy, school attendance, educational attainment, various measures of school quality, and the returns to schooling. Then, in the context of a simple model of schooling attainment, we interpret the fundamental trends in an "analytic narrative" that illuminates change over time. Although some of the data presented in the tables carry the story to the late twentieth century, the evidence and narrative we develop focus on the period before 1954, the year of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. A theme of convergence is central to the narrative. Slaves were typically forbidden to learn how to read and write, and others were typically forbidden to teach them. Just after the Civil War, more than 80 percent of African Americans over the age of nine were illiterate (compared to 12 percent of whites). After Emancipation, black children continued to face many obstacles in acquiring education. In addition to their relative poverty and their parents' relatively low levels of literacy (on average), society and its educational institutions were overtly racist. The negative implications for black children's schooling were significant and lasted well into the twentieth century. Nonetheless, successive generations of black children did manage to narrow the racial gap in schooling and educational attainment. By 1930, only 12 percent of African Americans were illiterate - finally attaining the level that whites had registered 60 years earlier. The pace of change was not constant, however, and there were some periods of short-run divergence between blacks and whites in educational attainment. The long-term process of convergence, moreover, has yet to fully run its course, and the remaining racial gaps in schooling have proven quite stubborn to eliminate.slavery, literacy, education, Brown v. Board, discrimination

Women in Finance

Across countries, banks have less gender diverse boards than other firms. Bank board diversity is particularly low in countries with greater gender gaps in PISA math scores and lower average math scores. We find similar results using state-level NAEP math scores in the United States. The influence of math scores appears to transcend standard cultural explanations. Female directors are more likely to have an MBA in banks, especially in countries with greater gender gaps in math scores. Our evidence suggests that differences in educational outcomes for boys and girls may have long-lasting implications for their career development