I identify the effects of class size on student achievement using longitudinal variation in the population associated with each grade in 649 elementary schools. I use variation in class size driven by idiosyncratic variation in the population. I also use discrete jumps in class size that occur when a small change in enrollment triggers a maximum or minimum class size rule. The estimates indicate that class size does not have a statistically signi�cant effect on student achievement. I rule out even modest effects (2 to 4 percent of a standard deviation in scores for a 10 percent reduction in class size). I.

In this paper we estimate the effect of actual class size on student achievement. Once we address the endogeneity induced by the correlation between class size and the ‘‘ability’ ’ of the class, we find that larger classes have a significant and negative effect on test scores. Further, since race�ethnicity is correlated with assignment to compensatory education classes, measures of class size that vary only at the school level obscure the true mean racial�ethnic differences in the class sizes. We find that racial�ethnic differences in class size potentially account for a substantial portion of the racial�ethnic differences in test score gains. � 2001 Academic Press I.

Do higher salaries raise the quality of teaching? Many influential reports and proposals advocate substantial salary increases as a means of attracting and retaining more talented teachers in the public schools and of encouraging harder work by current teachers. Salary policies have also been cited as important for offsetting changes in demands outside of schools and for dealing with the potentially unattractive working conditions often identified in central city schools. The empirical evidence on the link between teacher quality and pay is, however, decidedly mixed— raising doubts that there is a strong relationship between the two. Direct analyses of student achievement, for example, provide limited evidence of any systematic relationship. Two explanations have emerged in response to this evidence. On the one hand, some argue that the true relationship between teacher quality and salaries is quite strong, but methodological and data problems have impeded the identification of salary effects. Others take a less sanguine position, arguing that the evidence captures accurately the weak performance incentives in the public schools that lead administrators to make hiring and retention decisions that are not strongly linked with teacher quality. 1 The evidence is quite strong on one point: teacher quality is an important determinant of achievement (e.g., Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 1998). There are four main methodological problems that impede the estimation of the true relationship

The literature on educational standards suggests that an increase in graduation requirements heightens inequality, since achievement rises only for the best students. The paper derives a different conclusion based on a model featuring workers with heterogeneous abilities. Higher educational standards, while increasing inequality, can increase the earnings of both the most able and the least able workers. Thus an egalitarian social planner may set higher standards than an income-maximizing social planner. The egalitarian planner may prefer more strict standards because they come closer to creating a pooling equilibrium. The results mitigate the concern that higher standards are necessarily inegalitarian. JEL Codes: I20, J24, J31 1 The Impact of Educational Standards on the Level and Distribution of Earnings In recent years, the role of standards in improving the quality of public education has received considerable attention from economists. Recent examples include Robert M. Costrel...

While calls to reduce class size in school have considerable popular appeal, the related discussion of the scientific evidence has been limited and highly selective. The evidence about improvements in student achievement that can be attributed to smaller classes turns out to be meager and unconvincing. In the aggregate, pupil-teacher ratios have fallen dramatically for decades, but student performance has not improved. Explanations for these aggregate trends, including more poorly prepared students and the influence of special education, are insufficient to rationalize the overall patterns. International comparisons fail to show any significant improvements from having smaller pupil-teacher ratios. Detailed econometric evidence about the determinants of student performance confirms the general lack of any achievement results from smaller classes. Finally, widely cited experimental evidence actually offers little support for general reductions in class size. In sum, while policies to re...

Using the rich data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we show that several dimensions of college quality have substantial positive impacts on young men’s wages. This finding is robust to a wide array of alternative specifications. Controlling for ability reveals that sorting of more able persons into better colleges accounts for only a modest portion of the unconditional quality effect. We find that young black men reap larger gains to quality than do young white men. Our results also indicate that attending a college with a racially diverse student body increases the later earnings of both white and black men.

When a family with school-age children looks for a house to buy, the quality of the local public schools is often a major consideration. Real estate agents respond to this concern by identifying the school district and sometimes the local elementary school in the information sheet they provide on houses for sale. They also report the property taxes on the house, most of which are used to finance local public schools. The press responds to the interest in the quality of local schools by periodically publishing *Ted Crone is a vice president and head of the Regional Economics section in the Research Department of the Philadelphia Fed. available information on per pupil expenditures, teacher-student ratios, average class sizes, and test scores by school district and often by individual school. For example, in September 1997, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a special section of the Sunday paper containing this information for schools in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Does the availability of such information and home-buyers ’ concerns for high quality schools result in higher house prices in neighborhoods with better schools? And to what extent are the policies of the local school districts responsible for differences in school quality and, therefore, for any school premium in house prices? A large 3 BUSINESS REVIEW SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1998 number of statistical studies support the common assumption that differences in the quality of local schools are reflected in house prices. There is less agreement, however, on the extent to which school district policies determine school quality as measured by student performance.

Research and Improvement, U. S. Department of Education. The findings and opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the position or policies of the Office of Educational Research and

This paper investigates differences across UK universities in 1993 life sciences students' degree performance using individuallevel data from the Universities' Statistical Record (USR). Differences across universities are analysed by specifying and estimating a subject-specific educational production function. Even after including a wide range of controls for the quality of students, significant differences emerge across universities in students' degree performance. We apply a two-stage estimation procedure and find evidence that a large part of `university effects' cannot be explained by the kind of institutional inputs commonly used in the literature on school quality. Finally, we compare the unadjusted ranking of universities based on the proportion of `good' (first and upper second class honours) degrees awarded with that based on the estimated probability of a `good' degree obtained from the microeconometric model and find significant differences between the two indicators of universities' performance.

This paper tests the importance of human capital in explaining convergence across states of the United States after 1880. Human capital levels are found to matter not only to a state's income level but also to its growth rate through technological diffusion. The South's low human capital levels immediately after the Civil War, combined with its active resistance in the Post-Bellum period to educating its population, both white and black, played an important role in reducing the speed of Southern conditional convergence toward the rest of the nation after the Civil War.