Essays in Education Policy: Accountability, Achievement, and Access

Over the past decade, education policy in America has received considerable media, academic, and political attention. This renewed attention has been brought on by the growing economic and social importance of education. With this increasing importance came closer scrutiny into how well students, teachers, and the system at large are performing. In this series of essays, I examine three questions in K-12 and higher education that inform this overarching concern. In the first essay, I explore whether the sanctions outlined in the most important piece of federal education legislation in the past quarter decade, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), improve students' academic performance. Using panel data on Maryland schools, I exploit the manner in which schools are flagged as failures to estimate the achievement impacts of a few specific consequences of failure. While I find that failure and the sanctions tied to poor performance have no or negative impacts on future school-level performance, the threat of possible failure derived from almost but not quite failing may motivate increased performance in passing schools. Second, I turn to educational inputs and examine the role of teacher absences in student performance as well as racial/ethnic achievement gaps at the high school level. I explore the learning impacts of both the marginal missed day as well as of higher levels of teacher absence. I also characterize the magnitudes of current gaps in math and reading performance across student racial/ethnic subgroups. I find evidence across schools that more teacher absences lead to lower student performance; yet, controlling for school quality severely diminishes these negative impacts. In the final essay, I describe the substantial increases in college tuition costs that took place over the past decade and a half. I then examine student enrollment response to exceptionally large year-to-year tuition increases. While I find some evidence that students respond in disproportionate ways to very large tuition increases, there is considerable heterogeneity across different types of public four-year institutions in this response. Finally, I use parameters estimated in this essay to predict the short- and long-run revenue implications of large tuition hikes for the average institution