We test with Swiss data whether intergenerational educational mobility is affected by the time at which pupils are first streamed in secondary school. Late tracking significantly affects mobility and reduces the relative advantage of children of better educated parents
Students face four decision margins: (a) How many years to spend in school, (b) What to study. (c) How much effort to devote to learning per year and (d) Whether to disrupt or assist the learning of classmates. This paper reviews an emerging economic literature on the effects of and determinants of student effort and cooperativeness (c and d above) and how putting student motivation and behavior at center of one’s theoretical framework changes one’s view of how schools operate and how they might be made more effective. In this new framework students have a dual role. They are both (1) investors/consumers who choose which goals to focus on and how much effort to put into each goal and (b) workers getting instruction and guidance from their first-line supervisors, the teachers. I present a simple model where the behavior of students, teachers and administrators depends on the incentives facing them and the actions of the other actors in the system. The incentives, in turn, depend upon the cost and reliability of the information (signals) that is generated about the various inputs and outputs of the system. Our review of empirical research support many of the predictions of the model. Student effort, engagement and discipline vary a lot within schools, across schools and across nations and have significant effects on learning. Higher extrinsic rewards for learning are associated the taking of more rigorous courses, teachers setting higher standards and more time devoted to homework. Taking more rigorous courses and studying harder increase student achievement. Post World War II trends in study effort and course rigor are positively correlated with achievement trends. Even though, greater rigor improves learning, parents and students prefer easy teachers.They pressure tough teachers to lower standards and sign up for courses taught by easy graders. Curriculum-based external exit examinations improve the signaling of academic achievement to colleges and the labor market and this increases extrinsic rewards for learning. Cross section studies suggest that CBEEES result in greater focus on academics, more tutoring of lagging students, more homework and higher levels of achievement. Minimum competency examinations do not have significant effects on learning or dropout rates but they do appear to have positive effects on the reputation of high school graduates. As a result, students from MCE states earn significantly more than students from non-MCE states and the effect lasts at least eight years. Students who attend schools with studious well-behaved classmates learn more.Disruptive students generate negative production externalities and cooperative hard-working students create positive production externalities. Norms of student peer cultures often encourage student disruptions and harass nerds. In addition, learning is poorly signaled to employers and colleges. Thus, market signals and the norms of student peer culture do not internalize the externalities that are pervasive in school settings and as a result, students typically devote less effort to studying than the parents and the public would wish.
Economic research examining how educational intervention programs affect primary and secondary schooling focuses largely on test scores although the interventions can affect many other outcomes. This paper examines how an educational intervention, a voucher program, affected students' altruism. The voucher program used a lottery to allocate scholarships among low-income applicant families with children in K-8th grade. By exploiting the lottery to identify the voucher effects, and using experimental economic methods, we measure the effects of the intervention on children’s altruism. We also measure the voucher program’s effects on parents' altruism and several academic outcomes including test scores. We find that the educational intervention positively affects students' altruism towards charitable organizations but not towards their peers. We fail to find statistically significant effects of the vouchers on parents' altruism or test scores .
n.a.
Using data from 12 European countries and the variation across countries and over time in the changes of minimum school leaving age, we study the effects of the quantity of education on the distribution of earnings. We find that compulsory school reforms significantly affect educational attainment, especially among individuals belonging to the lowest quantiles of the distribution of ability. There is also evidence that additional education reduces conditional wage inequality, and that education and ability are substitutes in the earnings function.
When school quality increases with the educational standard set by schools, education before college need not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools. In our model, private schools can offer a lower educational standard at a positive price because they attract students with a relatively high cost of effort, who would find the high standards of public schools excessively demanding. We estimate the key parameters of the model and show that majority voting supports a system where private schools have higher quality in the US and public schools have higher quality in Italy.
Developed a zero-to-five index of the strength of accountability in 50 states based on the use of high stakes testing to sanction and reward schools and analyzed whether that index is related to student gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics test in 1996-2000. Findings show that students in high accountability states averaged greater NAEP gains. (SLD)
This paper studies a recent British reform that allowed public high schools to opt out of local authority control and become autonomous schools funded directly by the central government. Schools seeking autonomy had only to propose and win a majority vote among current parents. Almost one in three high schools voted on autonomy between 1988 and 1997, and using a version of the regression discontinuity design, I find large achievement gains at schools in which the vote barely won compared to schools in which it barely lost. Despite other reforms that ensured that the British education system was, by international standards, highly competitive, a comparison of schools in the geographic neighborhoods of narrow vote winners and narrow vote losers suggests that these gains did not spill over.
This paper analyses the relationship between school resources and school characteristics in compulsory schooling. We argue that it is inherently difficult to estimate a “cost function” that can predict how much it costs to deliver a given level of output in terms of student performance. The literature has not established a convincing positive relationship between school production and school financial resources. Instead, it is possible to estimate a reduced form model relating resource use per student to different school and student body characteristics, leaving aside school outputs from the model. By condition on school district fixed effects, effectively eliminating from the model variation in demand for education across school districts, this model can be interpreted as a within-district “allocation model” of school spending. We use data from Norway and find that resource use is diminishing within the whole range of school size observed. Further, the results clearly show that extra resources are allocated to minority students and students with special needs.
This paper estimates a general equilibrium model of school quality and household residential and school choice for economies with multiple public school districts and private (religious and nonsectarian) schools. The estimates, obtained through full-solution methods, are used to simulate two large-scale private school voucher programs in the Chicago metropolitan area: universal vouchers and vouchers restricted to nonsectarian schools. In the simulations, both programs increase private school enrollment and affect household residential choice. Under nonsectarian vouchers, however, private school enrollment expands less than under universal vouchers, and religious school enrollment declines for large nonsectarian vouchers. Fewer households benefit from nonsectarian vouchers. (JEL H75, I21, I22)
This paper investigates the effects of California’s billion-dollar class-size-reduction program on student achievement. It uses year-to-year differences in class size generated by variation in enrollment and the state’s class-size-reduction program to identify both the direct effects of smaller classes and related changes in teacher quality. Although the results show that smaller classes raised mathematics and reading achievement, they also show that the increase in the share of teachers with neither prior experience nor full certification dampened the benefits of smaller classes, particularly in schools with high shares of economically disadvantaged, minority students.
The D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program dramatically changed college prices for District of Columbia residents, allowing them to pay in-state tuition at public institutions around the country. Between 1998 and 2000, the number of D.C. residents attending public institutions in Virginia and Maryland more than doubled; when public institutions in other states were added, this number again nearly doubled. The impact was largest at nonselective public four-year colleges, particularly predominantly black institutions. The total number of financial aid applicants, Pell Grant recipients, and college entrants from D.C. also increased by 15 percent or more.
In 1994 the city of Tel Aviv replaced its existing school integration program based on inter-district busing, with a new program that allowed students to choose freely between schools in and out of district. This paper explores the impact of this program on high school outcomes while distinguishing the effect of choice on individual students from general equilibrium effects on affected districts. The identification is based on a regression discontinuity design that yields comparison groups drawn from untreated tangent neighborhoods in adjacent cities and on instrumental variables. The results suggest that the choice program had significant general equilibrium effects on high school dropout rates, matriculation rates and program of study. The gains are more pronounced among disadvantaged children but not among students who took advantage of the option to attend out of district schools with higher mean outcomes. Based on these results and on other evidence on the behavioral responses of schools and students to the program suggest that the positive impact of the program relates mainly to better matching between students and schools and to the productivity effect of choice and competition among schools.
Choice and competition in education have found growing support from both policy makers and academics in the recent past. Yet, evidence on the actual benefits of market-oriented reforms is at best mixed. Moreover, while the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear, in existing work there is rarely an attempt to distinguish between the two concepts. In this paper, we study whether pupils in Primary schools in England with a wider range of school choices achieve better academic outcomes than those whose choice is more limited; and whether Primary schools facing more competition perform better than those in a more monopolistic situation. In simple least squares regression models, we find little evidence of a link between choice and achievement, but uncover a small positive association between competition and school performance. Yet, this could be related to endogenous school location or pupil sorting. In fact, an instrumental variable strategy based on discontinuities generated by admissions district boundaries suggests that the performance gains from greater school competition are limited. Only when we restrict our attention to Faith autonomous schools, which have more freedom in managing their admission practices and governance, do we find evidence of a positive causal link between competition and pupil achievement.
We provide a measure of equality of educational opportunity in 54 countries, estimated as the effect of family background on student performance in two international TIMSS tests. We then show how organizational features of the education system affect equality of educational opportunity. Our model predicts that late tracking and a long pre-school cycle are beneficial for equality, while pre-school enrollment is detrimental at low levels of enrollment and beneficial at higher levels. Using cross-country variations in education policies and their interaction with family background at the student level, we provide empirical evidence supportive of these predictions.
Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered by omitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences. This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen states share the same language and legal system, but pursue different education policies. Education production function models are estimated using state-level PISA-E data, where possible pooling three subjects and three waves to obtain up to 138 test-score observations. The same results found previously across countries holdwithin Germany:Higher mean student performance is associated with central exams, private school operation, and socio- economic background, but not with spending, while higher equality of opportunity is associated with reduced tracking. In models that pool German states with OECD countries and combine up to 54 state and country observations, these institutional determinants do not differ significantly between the sample of German states and the sample of OECD countries, indicating that the existing cross-country evidence is not substantially biased by unobserved countryspecific factors.
This article reviews evidence from four international student achievement tests on the effects on student performance of competition from privately managed schools, schools' freedom to make autonomous decisions, and accountability introduced by external exit exams. The multivariate cross-country regressions are performed at the level of individual students and control for extensive family and school background information. The results reveal that students perform better in countries with more competition from privately managed schools, in countries where public funding ensures that all families can make choices, in schools that have freedom to make autonomous process and personnel decisions, where teachers have both freedom and incentives to select appropriate teaching methods, where parents take interest in teaching matters, and where school autonomy is combined with external exams that provide an information basis allowing for well-informed choices and holding schools accountable for their autonomous decisions.
Evidence using micro data from four international student achievement tests shows that institutional features that ensure competition, autonomy and accountability in school systems are key to high student performance. The lessons that education policy can learn from the cross-country evidence include that students perform better (a) in countries with more competition from privately managed but publicly funded schools, (b) in schools with autonomy in process and personnel decisions, (c) if teachers have both incentives and powers to select appropriate teaching methods, (d) if parents take interest in teaching matters and (e) if students and schools are held accountable by external examinations.
© 2004 European Expert Network on Economics of Education This e-mail address is protected against spambots. Please activate JavaScript in order to see them. | Home | Site Map | Contacts | Impressum | Printversion
