Evaluation of the efficacy of school policies requires measures of student performance across schools and states, but conventional approaches to constructing the relevant data can be very misleading. This paper develops an approach to estimating marginal school effects at the state level. It...

This paper is an exploratory attempt to view the role that social experiments in general, and the income maintenance experiments and work/welfare demonstrations in particular, have played in the policy process through the lens provided by the knowledge ...

Persistent increases in spending on elementary and secondary schools have gone virtually undocumented. Real expenditure per student increased 3½ percent per year over the period 1890-1990. Decomposition of the spending growth shows that it resulted from a combination of falling pupil-staff...

Measuring educational performance and understanding its determinants are important for designing policies with respect to such varying issues as teacher accountability, educational finance systems, and school integration. Unfortunately, past analyses of student achievement and educational...

There are three distinct research traditions in the analysis of individual earnings determination: human capital, or earnings function, analyses; aggregate wage analyses; and labor demand analyses. An important and incongruous aspect of each is the treatment of geographical differences in labor...

Many school districts experience difficulties attracting and retaining teachers, and the impending retirement of a substantial fraction of public school teachers raises the specter of severe shortages in some public schools. Schools in urban areas serving economically disadvantaged and minority...