British secondary schools moved from a system of extensive and early selection and tracking in secondary schools to one with comprehensive schools during the 1960s and 70s. Before the reform, students would take an exam at age eleven, which determined whether they would attend an academically...

This paper analyzes the effect of school vouchers on student sorting — defined as a flight to private schools by high-income and committed public-school students — and whether vouchers can be designed to reduce or eliminate it. Much of the existing literature investigates sorting in cases...

This paper examines the effects of two different education financing systems: a foundation system and a state system on the level and distribution of resources devoted to education in the presence of private schools. We use political economy approach where households differ in their level of...

I develop a model of competition between charter schools and traditional public schools and estimate the model using administrative data from North Carolina. I use the model to quantify how existing charter schools have affected test scores for both charter and public school students and...

The nation's largest charter management organization is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). KIPP schools are emblematic of the No Excuses approach to public education, a highly standardized and widely replicated charter model that features a long school day, an extended school year, selective...

We evaluate a program that aims to improve children's reading skills by providing classes with age-appropriate reading material and incentivizing children to read through a 31 day read-a-thon. During the read-a-thon, the program significantly increases the propensity of children to read, causing...

Quantitative school performance measures (QPMs) are playing an ever larger role in education systems on both sides of the Atlantic. In this paper we outline the rationale for the use of such measures in education, review the literature relating to several important problems associated with their...

As global migration flows increase, so do the number of migrant students in host country schools. Yet migrants' achievement scores lag well behind those of their nativeborn schoolmates. Performance gaps are explained largely by differences in migrant parents' socio-economic background, cultural...