During the 2020-2021 academic year, the U.S. Department of Education reported teacher shortages in nearly every state, and within key subject areas, nationwide. Indeed, a recent national survey found that two-thirds of school districts report significant teacher shortages across math, science,...

The recent development of the Early Learning Outcome Measure (ELOM), a culturally appropriate test for children aged 50 to 69 months for all eleven South Africa’s official languages, offers benchmarks against which children’s development can be tested. This paper compares the programme gains...

Although education has always existed at the epicenter of the battle for civil rights, federal and state law and policy fail to protect education as a civil right. This collective failure harms a wide array of our national interests, including our foundational interests in an educated democracy...

Education has long stood at the epicenter of the battle for civil rights. More than half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially segregated schools unlawful in Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunity and achievement gaps based on race, national origin, class, and...

Even in school districts with relatively permissive approaches to defining and embodying gender, the identities of transgender and gender variant students are often governed by complex regulatory protocols. Ensuring that a student is able to live their gender at school can involve input from a...

Many personal and policy decisions turn on perceptions of school effectiveness, defined here as the causal effect of attendance at a particular school or set of schools on student test scores and other outcomes. Widely-disseminated school ratings frameworks compare average student achievement...

This dissertation consists of four distinct empirical essays that address various aspects of the economics of education. Chapters 2 and 3 show that patience and risk-taking as intertemporal preferences are closely related to differences in student achievement across and within countries. Chapter...

Most U.S. high school courses separate classrooms into standard and honors tracks. This paper characterizes the efficiency and distributional impact of changing the share of students enrolling in honors classrooms. Using a sorting model where students choose tracks by course but schools...

Education and training are a high priority for Costa Rica that devotes to them more than 6.5% of GDP, one of the highest spending shares among OECD countries. However, educational outcomes remain poor and firms struggle to fill their vacancies, particularly in technical and scientific positions,...

With the federal judiciary continuing its virtual withdrawal from adjudicating school finance controversies, the process of vindicating a child’s right to education has once again been left to state and local officials to resolve. As this Article demonstrates, however, states and localities...