Early research on literacy development usually focuses on children in preschool or kindergarten. Few studies have examined the early literacy of bilingual children. This study examines its relationship with different family learning environments (e.g. book availability), and family learning...

A number of studies have shown that childhood speech disorders such as stuttering are associated with lower test scores and educational attainment. However, it is unclear whether these associations are causal in nature or whether they can be explained by difficult-to-measure heterogeneity at the...

The High Schools That Work school improvement initiative is the nation's largest comprehensive school reform model with over a thousand schools adopting its framework. The initiative's premise is that all students can meet the demands of a college preparatory curriculum if provided the right...

We identify the effect of individual high school principals on graduation rates and English exam scores using an administrative data set of grade 12 students in BC Canada. Many principals were rotated across schools by districts, permitting isolation of the effect of principals from the effect...

Modern societies would potentially reap large benefits from upgrading low skilled's education. However, this is difficult to put into practice because employers are reluctant to train low skilled and because low skilled are unwilling to participate. To circumvent this potential market...

As schools and districts seek to recruit teachers, individuals in non-teaching professions are an appealing possible pool. These potential teachers come with work experience and may have expertise that would serve them well in the classroom. While there has been substantial rhetoric assailing...

Two-year colleges are an important part of the higher education system in the United States but there are concerns as to how attendance at these institutions affects educational attainment and labor market outcomes. This paper uses data from a nationally representative survey to examine the...

In most elementary schools, teachers are responsible for several subjects. Various personnel policies, such as evaluating teachers based on value-added estimates aggregated across subjects or departmentalizing teachers, implicitly make assumptions about how closely teacher effectiveness is...

Professional competencies are a key factor in gauging how employable a graduate is. This paper demonstrates that individuals who have best developed the competencies which firms feel to be most important are more likely to be in a position to obtain a job. To this end, we have developed an...

We assess the relevance of formal education on the productivity of the self-employed, distinguishing between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to...