Outside the United States, very little is known about long-run trends in school productivity. We present new evidence using two data series from Australia, where comparable tests are available back to the 1960s. For young teenagers (aged 13–14), we find a small but statistically significant...

Most public elementary and high school teachers are covered by health insurance provided by their employer while they are employed. In most cases, these health plans are managed at the state level. At retirement, teachers with sufficient years of service are allowed to remain in the health plan....

Despite increased requirements for high school graduation, almost one-third of the nation's college freshmen are unprepared for college-level math. The need for remediation is particularly high among students who are low income, Hispanic, and black. Female students are also less likely than...

How useful are “corporate brands” in markets? In theory, brands convey reliable information, providing consumers with shortcuts to time-consuming provider searches. We examine the usefulness of a corporate brand when parental school choice is expanded through K–12 tuition scholarships....

The No Child Left Behind Act imposes sanctions on schools if the fraction of students demonstrating proficiency on a high-stakes test falls below a statewide pass rate. While the motivation behind this system is improved public school performance, it also provides incentives for schools to focus...

We use data on students in grades 4–7 in the Canadian province of British Columbia to investigate the effect of having disabled peers on value-added exam outcomes. Longitudinal data for multiple cohorts of students are used together with school-by-grade-level fixed effects to account for...

This article provides an explicit framework for evaluating the expected benefit to college-bound students of courses offered by Advanced Placement (AP) versus concurrent enrollment programs (CEP). District personnel can use it to assess the relative merits of these programs, given the...

The impact of peers on student outcomes has important policy implications for how students are organized into classes and the overall impact of education interventions. But it is difficult to accurately measure peer effects because of the nonrandom sorting of students and teachers into...

Because of the rigid salary structure in the public teacher labor market, principals may have the incentive to align classes favorably for high-quality teachers as a form of nonmonetary compensation. This article tests whether higher-quality teachers, holding other characteristics constant, tend...

In this article, I examine the current policy of full inclusion of children receiving special education services in regular education classrooms. Specifically, I focus on the policy's effects on the classmates of children with special needs, with a particular focus on classmates of students with...