Selective high schools are a polarizing topic in education policy, despite only having a small presence in some Australian states. These schools perform exceptionally well when their students' educational and career outcomes are considered, but this is perhaps unsurprising because admission is...

This paper investigates if better access to secondary education increases enrolment in primary schools among children in the 6-10 age group. Using a household-level longitudinal survey covering 43 villages in a poor state in India, we find support for the hypothesis that better access to...

Charter schools have been pushed as a way to reform education. This article is my experience in one charter school. The structural freedom provided charter schools do not necessarily mean an improvement in education practices. Convention, tradition, and banking education may persist....

Instruction time varies among schools, subjects, pupils and grades. This variation is positively associated with test scores and has been used to identify modest positive causal effects for instruction hours in certain grades. We exploit administrative data on delivered and timetabled...

Do students perform better on statewide assessments in years in which they have more school days to prepare? We explore this question using data on math and reading assessments taken by students in the 3rd, 5th and 8th grades since 1994 in Maryland. Our identification strategy is rooted in the...

In this study, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to compute efficiency scores for a sample of Italian schools, by employing OECD-PISA2006 data aggregated at school-level. Efficiency has been defined as the ability to transform inputs (resources, students’ background, etc.) into outputs...

We employ a combination of school fixed effects and IV estimation to estimate the effect of class size on student performance in 18 countries. Using the random part of the class-size variation between two adjacent grades within individual schools allows us to identify causal class-size effects....

This paper uses extensive student-level micro databases of three international student achievement tests to estimate heterogeneity in the effect of external exit exams on student performance along three dimensions. First, quantile regressions show that the effect tends to increase with student...

Previous work by the authors suggested that during the 1970s and 1980s, a person?s early cognitive ability became a less important determinant of his or her eventual educational achievement. Furthermore, over the same time period, family background started to have a greater impact on a person?s...