Tracking refers to the practice of dividing students by ability or achievement. Students may be tracked within schools by placing them into different classrooms based on achievement, which is the typical practice in countries such as the United States or Canada. Alternatively, students could be streamed into different schools, with either vocational or academic emphases, as has been practiced commonly in Europe. Proponents of tracking argue that tracking can increase the efficiency of schooling by focusing on the needs of distinct groups of students. Opponents' main concerns relate to perpetuating and aggravating inequality. Evaluating effects of tracking on average student achievement and the distribution of achievement is difficult, in part because of variations from study to study and from country to country in the characteristics of the tracking system. Early work, largely in the United States and Britain, used variation across and within schools, and often found that tracking increased inequality in achievement. But more recent work in the United States has questioned these findings, suggesting that careful attention to endogenous placement of students into classrooms and endogenous use of tracking across schools changes results dramatically. Experimental studies on within-school tracking in the United States have produced mixed results, and one experiment in Kenya suggests that tracking can boost the achievement of both low-achieving and high-achieving students. A large body of work now uses geographical variation across regions, countries, grades, and time to identify the effects of tracking. These studies for the most part suggest that tracking aggravates inequality in outcomes. These results are fairly strong, and may be identifying the more dramatic effects that obtain when students are separated into vocational schools and more academically oriented schools, as opposed to the effects of within-school tracking. The paper concludes with an outline of how future research might better categorize and rigorously evaluate the real-world nuances of tracking.
International evidence on school choice largely focuses on educational voucher or voucher-like systems. The research to date primarily focuses on two complementary questions: what are the effects of school choice on students who exercise school choice? and what are the effects of school choice on the overall System that allows choice? In this chapter, we review the educational voucher focusing on these two research questions. We primarily focus on educational voucher programs in Chile, Colombia, and Sweden. We discuss each of these programs and the accompanying literature in depth. We briefly discuss research from other countries, especially ongoing research in India, which may provide key insights into voucher and school-choice debates. Although there are a number of similarities between research on school choice in the United States and abroad, research on school choice abroad presents an entirely different set of political circumstances, institutions, and funding schemes. We discuss these issues and their impact on generalizeability of international research. We also recommend future directions for voucher research, particularly, in identifying key components of voucher systems that have led to the observed effects to date.
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.
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School accountability—the process of evaluating school performance on the basis of student performance measures—is increasingly prevalent around the world. In the United States, accountability has become a centerpiece of both Democratic and Republican federal administrations' education policies. This chapter reviews the theory of school-based accountability, describes variations across programs, and identifies key features influencing the effectiveness and possible unintended consequences of accountability policies. The chapter then summarizes the research literature on the effects of test-based accountability on students and teachers, concluding that the preponderance of evidence suggests positive effects of the accountability movement in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s on student achievement, especially in math. The effects on teachers and on students' long-run outcomes are more difficult to judge. It is also clear that school personnel respond to accountability in both positive and negative ways, and that accountability systems run the risk of being counter-productive if not carefully thought out and monitored.
America's public schools should be the best in the world. Per-student expenditures have historically exceeded those of every other country, yet students coming out of America's elementary and secondary schools fare poorly in head-to-head competition with students from other parts of the world. Despite ever-rising school budgets, student performance has stagnated. Parents, educators, and policymakers generally agree that something must be done to improve schools, but the consensus ends there. The myriad of reform documents and policy discussions that have appeared over the past decade have not helped to pinpoint exactly what should be done. Many believe the easiest solution is to increase spending, as if money alone will cure the ails of American education. Making Schools Work shows that improvement of schools today depends more on better use of resources than on provision of added funds.This book is the culmination of extensive discussion among a panel of economists led by Eric A. Hanushek. The authors conclude that although the case for investment in education is in large measure an economic one--schooling improves productivity and earnings of individuals and promotes stronger economic growth--economic considerations have been entirely absent from the development of educational policies.The book outlines a unique plan to improve school performance without increasing expenditures. The authors call for more efficient use of resources, greater performance incentives, and continuous learning and adaptation. Rather than concentrating on spending more, schools must learn to consider trade-offs among programs and operations and must evaluate performance and eliminate programs that are not working. America's future depends on the quality of its schools. This book shows how educators, policymakers, parents, and students can work together to improve the system. Panel on the Economics of Educational Reform (PEER)
The General Educational Development (GED) credential is issued on the basis of an eight-hour subject-based test. The test claims to establish equivalence between dropouts and traditional high school graduates, opening the door to college and positions in the labor market. In 2008 alone, almost 500,000 dropouts passed the test, amounting to 12% of all high school credentials issued in that year. This chapter reviews the academic literature on the GED, which finds minimal value of the certificate in terms of labor market outcomes and that only a few individuals successfully use it as a path to obtain post-secondary credentials. Although the GED establishes cognitive equivalence on one measure of scholastic aptitude, recipients still face limited opportunity due to deficits in noncognitive skills such as persistence, motivation, and reliability. The literature finds that the GED testing program distorts social statistics on high school completion rates, minority graduation gaps, and sources of wage growth. Recent work demonstrates that, through its availability and low cost, the GED also induces some students to drop out of school. The GED program is unique to the United States and Canada, but provides policy insight relevant to any nation's educational context.
The most frequently asked questions about school choice are: Do public schools respond constructively to competition induced byschool choice, by raising their own productivity? Does students’ achievement rise when they attend voucher or charter schools? Do voucher and charter schools end up with a selection of the better students (“cream-skim”)? I review the evidence on these questions from the United States, relying primarily on recent policy experiments. Public schools do respond constructively to competition, by raising their achievement and productivity. The best studies on this question examine the introduction of choice programs that have been sufficiently large and long-lived to produce competition. Students’ achievement generally does rise when they attend voucher or charter schools. The best studies on this question use, as a control group, students who are randomized out of choice programs. Not only do currently enacted voucher and charter school programs not cream-skim; they disproportionately attract students who were performing badly in their regular public schools. This confirms what theory predicts: there are no general results on the sorting consequences of school choice. The sorting consequences of a school choice plan depend strongly on its design.
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared school voucher programs constitutional, the many unanswered questions concerning the potential effects of school choice will become especially pressing. Contributors to this volume draw on state-of-the-art economic methods to answer some of these questions, investigating the ways in which school choice affects a wide range of issues. Combining the results of empirical research with analyses of the basic economic forces underlying local education markets, The Economics of School Choice presents evidence concerning the impact of school choice on student achievement, school productivity, teachers, and special education. It also tackles difficult questions such as whether school choice affects where people decide to live and how choice can be integrated into a system of school financing that gives children from different backgrounds equal access to resources. Contributors discuss the latest findings on Florida's school choice program as well as voucher programs and charter schools in several other states. The resulting volume not only reveals the promise of school choice, but examines its pitfalls as well, showing how programs can be designed that exploit the idea's potential but avoid its worst effects. With school choice programs gradually becoming both more possible and more popular, this book stands out as an essential exploration of the effects such programs will have, and a necessary resource for anyone interested in the idea of school choice.
This paper marshals available evidence from both the U.S. and other countries on the effects of private schools, peer effects, and competition to demonstrate that that any gains in overall student achievement from a large scale voucher program are at best likely to be small. Moreover, given the tendency of parents to judge schools in part by the characteristics of a school's students, a universal voucher system would undoubtedly harm large numbers of disadvantaged students. Although the case for a small means tested voucher program is somewhat stronger, it will do little to improve education for low-performing students.
As vouchers become a more significant part of education policy debates, the time is right to consider what we know and do not know about the likely effects of adopting various voucher schemes. In the balance of this paper, the author describes both empirical and theoretical work on education that speaks to this topic. He argues that we cannot confidently predict the outcomes that would result from various voucher schemes, and he also stresses that debates over vouchers per se are not informative. Details concerning funding, targeting and discretion in the use of vouchers should greatly affect the outcomes associated with any
The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act is the most important legislation in American education since the 1960s. The law requires states to put into place a set of standards together with a comprehensive testing plan designed to ensure these standards are met. Students at schools that fail to meet those standards may leave for other schools, and schools not progressing adequately become subject to reorganization. The significance of the law lies less with federal dollar contributions than with the direction it gives to federal, state, and local school spending. It helps codify the movement toward common standards and school accountability. Yet NCLB will not transform American schools overnight. The first scholarly assessment of the new legislation, No Child Left Behind? breaks new ground in the ongoing debate over accountability. Contributors examine the law’s origins, the political and social forces that gave it shape, the potential issues that will surface with its implementation, and finally, the law’s likely consequences for American education.
This paper reviews empirical evidence, especially from Europe, on how education and training policies can be designed to advance both efficiency and equity. Returns to educational investments tend to decrease over the life cycle. Moreover, they seem to be highest for children from disadvantaged families at early stages and for the well-off at late stages of the life cycle. This creates complementarities between efficiency and equity at early stages and trade-offs at late stages. The paper goes on to discuss specific policies for efficiency and equity at each educational stage, ranging from early childhood education and schools over vocational and higher education to training and lifelong learning. The available evidence suggests that both efficiency and equity can be enhanced by output-oriented reforms properly designed to each stage, where the state generally sets a regulatory framework that ensures accountability and funding and uses the forces of choice and competition to deliver best results. Designed this way, education and training systems can advance efficiency and equity at the same time.
This book presents a thorough economic analysis of both the determinants and the consequences of international differences in schooling quality. It is shown that cross-country differences in quality-adjusted human capital can account for a substantial part of the international variation in economic development. However, large increases in per-student spending over recent decades were not matched by increases in student achievement in most countries. In a simple principal-agent model, the book stresses the importance of institutional features of the schooling system such as central examinations, school autonomy, and private-sector competition. Microeconometric estimations based on data for more than a quarter of a million students reveal that international differences in these institutions, rather than differences in resources, can explain the large international differences in schooling quality.
Education is a fundamental determinant of individuals’ and societies’ economic performance. This gives vital importance to the question of how high educational performance can be achieved. Economists like to think about the process which generates educational performance as a production process. This is not a disregard of humanistic views of the specific value of each human being. Instead, with all esteem for the dignity of each individual, thinking in terms of educational production can help to understand, and hopefully ultimately improve, how education systems work and how student learning might be furthered. Thus, think of how the “output” of the education process – students’ learning achievement – is “produced” by several “inputs” in the education process – e.g., the students’ family background, class sizes and teacher characteristics.
Accountability, autonomy, and choice are now the watchwords of education reformers around the globe. This book provides new evidence from the international PISA test on whether students perform better in school systems with such institutional measures in place. It also provides a theoretical framework for considering such reforms and summarizes previous international evidence. The results confirm that various policies promoting accountability, autonomy, and choice are strongly associated with higher achievement for students from both disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds. In particular, choice through public funding for private schools is associated with both higher performance overall and higher equality of opportunity.
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