General Audience Articles
It is widely believed that a good principal is the key to a successful school. Yet until very recently there was little rigorous research demonstrating the importance of principal quality for student outcomes, much less the specific practices that cause some principals to be more successful than others. This study provides new evidence on the importance of school leadership by estimating individual principals’ contributions to growth in student achievement. Our results indicate that highly effective principals raise the achievement of a typical student in their schools by between two and seven months of learning in a single school year; ineffective principals lower achievement by the same amount.
Education Next, Winter 2013
The rewards to improving our schools are very, very large, but the policies that are needed are politically difficult. Nonetheless, we have to change the direction of our schools in order to improve student outcomes.
To find out whether the United States is narrowing the international education gap, we compare learning gains over the period between 1995 and 2009 for 49 countries from most of the developed and some of the newly developing parts of the world. We extend this comparison to 41 states within the United States, allowing us to compare each to these states to the 48 other countries. In absolute terms, the performance of U.S. students in 4th and 8th grade on the NAEP in math, reading, and science improved noticeably between 1995 and 2009. Yet when compared to gains made by students in other countries, progress within the United States is middling, not stellar.
Education Next, Fall 2012
To find out the extent of U.S. progress toward closure of the international education gap, we provide estimates of learning gains over the period between 1995 and 2009 for the United States and 48 other countries from much of the developed and some of the newly developing parts of the world. We also examine changes in student performance in 41 states within the United States, allowing us to compare these states with each other as well as with the 48 other countries.
At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. Despite high unemployment rates, firms are experiencing shortages of educated workers, outsourcing professional-level work to workers abroad, and competing for the limited number of employment visas set aside for highly skilled immigrants. As President Barack Obama said in his 2011 State of the Union address, “We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time.
At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. Despite high unemployment rates, firms are experiencing shortages of educated workers, outsourcing professional-level work to workers abroad, and competing for the limited number of employment visas set aside for highly skilled immigrants. As President Barack Obama said in his 2011 State of the Union address, “We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time.
For some time, we have recognized that the academic achievement of schoolchildren in this country threatens, to borrow President Barack Obama’s words, “the U.S.’s role as an engine of scientific discovery” and ultimately its success in the global economy. The low achievement of American students, as reflected in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011), will prevent them from accessing good, high-paying jobs.
In Vancouver last winter, the United States proved its competitive spirit by winning more medals—gold, silver, and bronze—at the Winter Olympic Games than any other country, although the German member of our research team insists on pointing out that Canada and Germany both won more gold medals than the United
States. But if there is some dispute about which Olympic medals to count, there is no question about American math performance: the United States does not deserve even a paper medal.
There is a simple story that describes our schools and that on the surface just does not make sense. It goes like this: teachers are the most important element of schools; we value high quality schools, and we want to improve their performance; and we are unwilling to permit the pay of teachers to keep up with pay elsewhere in the economy. This piece will build on the salient parts of this history in order to discuss a range of policy options that have been proposed.
-3.gif)
An underlying principle of U.S. social policy is that education is the key policy lever for addressing poverty. In the United States and around the world, education is almost always heavily subsidized by government. The justifications for government involvement vary, but increasingly rely on the suggestion that expanded educational investments both strengthen the national economy and improve the societal distribution of income and welfare. Education, for example, had a prominent role in the U.S. "War on Poverty," with many of the programs developed in the 1960s continuing through today.
Maintaining our innovative edge in the world depends importantly on developing a highly qualified cadre of scientists and engineers. To realize that objective requires a system of schooling that produces students with advanced math and science skills. To see how well the U.S. as a whole, each state, and certain urban districts do at producing high-achieving math students, the percentage of U.S.
The United States is built on the idea that all individuals should be free to reach their full potential – the “pursuit of happiness” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence as one of the “unalienable rights” all Americans share. And a natural corollary is that society has the responsibility to provide at least the basic tools individuals need to pursue this goal effectively. While many aspects are involved in the accomplishing this goal, our schools clearly have a key role. But it is also clear that the schools have not been doing as much as they could to ensure that all Americans have the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the twenty-first century. As a result, school reform is a topic on many people’s minds today – as it should be.
Proposals to reauthorize No Child Left Behind seek to ensure “equitable” access to effective teachers. The U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top fund rewards state plans for “ensuring equitable distribution of effective teachers and principals” and for “ambitious yet achievable annual targets to increase the number and percentage of highly effective teachers…in high-poverty schools.” These objectives pose a number of challenging questions. How readily can we identify effective teachers?
This article reviews the role of education in promoting economic growth, with a particular focus on the role of educational quality. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population – rather than mere school attainment – are powerfully related to long-run economic growth. The relationship between skills and growth proves extremely robust in empirical applications. The effect of skills is complementary to the quality of economic institutions.
While many nations express a commitment to improved educational quality, education often slips down on the policy agenda when pressures on budgets or other issues arise. Because the benefits of educational investments are seen only in the future, it is possible to underestimate the value and the importance of improvements. This paper uses recent economic modeling to relate cognitive skills – as measured by PISA and other international instruments – to economic growth.
The national educational challenge was most forcefully articulated by the nation’s governors in 1989. As they met in Charlottesville, Virginia, they felt the need of the nation to improve the performance of students—a need articulated a half decade previously in A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983). And they declared that the United States should be first in the world in mathematics and science by the turn of the century (National Education Goals Panel 1991).
Questions of educational adequacy and school spending have long been a point of contention in school reform.Amid the recent economic turmoil and gaping state budget shortfalls, questions of whether court-ordered funding remedies have delivered—and why they have or have not—have taken on particular import. This forum offers two sharply different takes on our experiences to date, and what lessons they offer going forward.
Even before and certainly ever since the 1983 release of A Nation at Risk by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, national economic competitiveness has been offered as a primary reason for pushing school reform.The commission warned,“If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all—old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority.”Responding to these urgent words, the National Governors Association, in 1989, pledged that U.S.
At the same time, the translation of what is known about teacher quality into effective policy is far from being institutionalized. The simplest summary of research into teacher quality is that some teachers are dramatically more effective than others but that common measures of quality are largely uncorrelated with true quality. Thus, for example, we continue to face problems of insufficient numbers of high quality teachers, or shortages of math and science teachers, and of “out of field” teachers.
Access to education is one of the highest priorities on the development agenda. High-profile international commitment to progress—such as the second Millennium Development Goal of achieving universal primary education—has helped galvanize policy-makers into action. Significant results have already been achieved in school enrollment. Yet care must be taken that the need for simple, measurable goals does not lead to ignoring the fact that it ultimately is the degree to which schooling fosters cognitive skills and facilitates the acquisition
Lawsuits aimed at compelling legislatures to increase school funding have been filed in some 42 states. Courts have found for the plaintiffs in more than half of the cases on the grounds that schools are not “adequately” funded (see Figure 1). These decisions have, in effect, changed the way education appropriations are made, moving decision making from legislatures to the courts.
Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin examine how salary and working conditions affect the quality of instruction in the classroom. The wages of teachers relative to those of other college graduates have fallen steadily since 1940. Today, average wages differ little, however, between urban and suburban districts. In some metropolitan areas urban districts pay more, while in others, suburban districts pay more.
Because they are products of circumstance, ideas often become dated. As circumstances change, many ideas lose currency and relevance. Others, however, pick up momentum with time. School choice is among the latter. Over a long period of time, various philosophers, writers, and policymakers have discussed how schools should be organized and financed, but perhaps no idea about schooling is as directly linked to a single individual as school choice is to Milton Friedman.
The recent movement to hold schools accountable for student performance has highlighted a simple fact: Many students are not achieving at desired levels.This simple fact has led people with widely varying reform perspectives to enter into the fray with plans and solutions. And a natural follow-on question is invariably “what will it cost?” To answer this important question, a series of very misleading methods for estimating the costs of an improved education have evolved, but the problems with these methods are generally unrecognized (or ignored) in the public and judicial debate.
Perhaps the most important change in policy discussions about school finance was the introduction of court decision making into the determination of funding schemes. Following the California court case of Serrano v. Priest, begun in the late 1960s, most states had legal actions designed to change the method of funding local schools. This book provides relevant data for the consideration of adequacy court cases. The design is to bring together a series of important “data points” that highlight issues in assessing the adequacy of school finance.
It is becoming broadly recognized that quality teachers are the key ingredient to a successful school. Yet standard policies do not ensure that quality teachers are recruited and retained in the profession. Finding solutions to this problem is particularly important in Florida, where huge numbers of new teachers must be hired over the next few years.
Most people who read the headlines last February were stunned to learn that New York City schools were being shortchanged by $5.6 billion per year, or more than $5,000 per student. The 43 percent court-ordered budget increase, from around $13 billion in operating expenditures to something approaching $19 billion (not including some $9 billion over five years for building improvements), is the largest school finance “adequacy” judgment ever awarded. Of course, most people do not have a good grasp on either the economics or the performance of New York City schools.
All governments of the world assume a substantial role in providing education for their citizens. A variety of motivations lead societies to provide such strong support for schooling – some of which come from pure economics and others of which come from ideas of improved political participation, of social justice, and of general development of society. No matter what the motivation, the fundamental question remains of ‘how much should society invest?’ Public investment in education comes at the expense of other public and private uses of the funds.
It is difficult these days to ignore the message that education matters. Governments everywhere in the world have assumed a substantial role in educating their citizens, and "providing education for all" is a central pillar of the Millennium Development Goals. A variety of motivations lead societies to provide strong support for schooling. Some are purely economic, while others are driven by ideas of using education to improve political participation, social justice and, more generally, develop society.
The argument for federal involvement in accountability is clear-and falls directly in line with traditional places for centralized governmental policies. School quality is undeniably important for the nation with future economic success depending directly on the quality of our schools. Not only individual incomes but also the future growth of GDP are related directly to the knowledge and skills of the overall population. Moreover, the skills observed to count in the marketplace are the ones forming the basis for school accountability.
Experienced teachers are, on average,more effective at raising student performance than those in their early years of teaching. This gives rise to the concern that too many teachers leave the profession after less than a full career and that too many leave troubled inner-city schools for suburban ones. Until now, the roots of these problems have not been well understood.
Accountability has been a central feature of educational policy in a number of states since the 1990s. In part because of the perceived success of accountability in the states where it was initially tried, federal law introduced mandatory reporting and accountability through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Yet not everybody is happy with school accountability. Its opponents continue to aggressively search for evidence that testing and accountability do not work—or, better, that they are actually harmful.
The report authored by Arizona State University researchers Audrey Amrein and David Berliner purported to examine student-performance trends on national exams in states where legislators have attached "high stakes" to test scores. The controversial nature of testing has led to the hurried release and dissemination of research that lacks scientific rigor, of which the Amrein and Berliner study is one of the more egregious examples.
Much of the research on the economic impact of education has properly concentrated on the role of school attainment—that is, the quantity of schooling.This focus is natural.The revolution in the United States during the 20th century was the universal provision of a basic education. Moreover, years of schooling are easily measured, and data on years attained, both over time and across individuals, are readily available. Yet today’s policy concerns revolve around issues of quality much more than of quantity.
The early 1990s saw the height of the east Asian miracle. The economies of Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, and other countries of the region were expanding at rates that dwarfed those of the United States and the mostly European nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The so-called “Asian tigers” were projected to surpass the U.S.economy in the not-sodistant future. In the national soul-searching that ensued, new attention was focused on the U.S.education system.
The ideas ventured by A Nation at Risk, though prescient in many respects, have distorted the nation’s understanding of the relationship between education and the economy for two decades now. Written during a recession, A Nation at Risk implied that the general state of the economy could be directly traced to the current performance of a nation’s education system. The economic trends of the eighties and early nineties reinforced this interpretation.
School reform is a topic on many people’s minds today, and the air is full of advice and recommendations. Unlike many policy areas, the vast majority of people have strongly held opinions, mostly arising from their own personal experiences in school. As a result, much of policy making involves walking a line between research findings and popular views. Unfortunately, these popular views frequently are not the best guide for decision making. This discussion begins with some evidence about the importance of teacher quality and moves to ideas about how the quality of teachers can be improved.
Much is uncertain about the total effects of a broad voucher program on education. The United States has relatively limited experience with choice in general and vouchers in particular, and that experience has occurred in rather narrowly prescribed experiments. It is therefore difficult to project the results of a broader voucher program by simply expanding on past experience with such a program. On the other hand, considerable experience relates to various aspects of schools that have been highlighted as potentially important.
Although many states and districts are moving forward with accountability schemes, they are likely to run into real problems that compromise and distort these programs’ impact. Though it seems natural to measure outcomes and hold schools responsible for them, the mechanics of how to do that appropriately are complicated. Creating effective accountability schemes will require a deeper understanding of how these programs alter incentives in schools and in turn the dynamics of accountability.
In the summer of 2000, perfectly timed to shape the election debate over education reform, came a new RAND study that claimed to contradict the conventional research wisdom on the connection between school expenditures and class size on the one hand and student achievement on the other. “Our results certainly challenge the traditional view of public education as ‘unreformable,’” the study’s director, David Grissmer, said in an accompanying press release. “But the achievement of disadvantaged students is still substantially affected by inadequate resources.
Various important policy decisions, fund allocations, and contractual provisions rely on the calculation of price differences, implying that the estimation and use of different price adjustment mechanisms have serious repercussions. Accordingly, controversies about the best way to proceed also exist. A simple but powerful example is the recent debates about the accuracy of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). There are not only technical disagreements but also political disputes owing to the important uses of the CPI in both public programs and private contracts.
I begin with some overall observations and conclusions. The subsequent discussion will provide some of the relevant evidence and references to support my conclusions. As a starting point, educational investments are very important to the U.S. economy, a fact that suggests there is much value in an aggressive human capital investment strategy. The U.S. economy has been built up largely by using a skilled labor force and has capitalized on the presence of skills, making human capital investments very important to the success of the overall economy.
Economic analysis of education and schooling has progressed considerably over the past few decades, and this essay attempts to put a few key issues into perspective. I look at the field from the particular vantage point of an economist with an interest in how school resources are used and how student performance can be improved. This perspective at least as applied-may be a bit narrow, although I think it is central to much of the policy discussion in education.
The production of school reform reports is a big business in the United States. The current trend of reform was started by A Nation at Risk, the 1983 official government report that detailed the decline of America’s schools. Since then, new reports have been institution not to have its own report and position on reform. Yet, it is startling how little any of the reform reports, and the reform movement itself, draw upon economic principles in formulating new plans.
Part of the glue holding together the membership of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management is a concern about the character and path of public policies. Embedded in this is the professional opinion that analysis will improve the outcomes of policy deliberations. This issue-the relationship between policy analysis and policy development-has been the subject of a long-standing debate that has recently been revived.
