Children's program.

The NBER's Program on Children, directed by Research Associate Jonathan Gruber of MIT, met m Cambridge on April 1. They discussed these papers:

Brian A. Jacob, NBER and Harvard University, and Lars Lefgren, Brigham Young University, "An Investigation of Objective and Subjective Performance Measure: New Evidence from the Education Sector"

Susan Dynarski, NBER and Harvard University, "Can States Increase their Stock of College Graduates?"

Byron F. Lutz, MIT, "Post Brown vs. The Board of Education: The Effects of the End of Court Ordered Desegregation"

Jens Ludwig, Georgetown University, and Douglas L. Miller, University of California, Davis, "Does Head Start Improve LongTerm Outcomes? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Designs"

Eric V. Edmonds, NBER and Dartmouth College, and Salil Sharma, Dartmouth College, "investments in Children Vulnerable to Bondage"

Jacob and Lefgren examine the relationship between objective and subjective measures of performance in the education sector. Specifically, they ask three questions: Can principals identify effective teachers, defined as those who produce the largest improvement on standardized exams? Do principals discriminate against teachers with certain characteristics? How do principals form assessments of teachers? To answer these questions, they combine a rich set of administrative data linking student achievement scores to individual teachers with a survey of principals. They find that principals can identify the best and worst teachers in their schools fairly well, but have less ability to distinguish between teachers in the mid die of the ability distribution. In all cases, however, objective value-added measures are better able to predict actual effectiveness than principal reports. There is also some evidence that principals discriminate against male and untenured teachers and in favor of teachers with whom they have a closer personal relationship. Finally, the authors find that in forming their assessments, principals focus disproportionately on the recent experience of the teacher and are imperfect Bayesians, failing to appropriately account for the noisy performance signals they receive.

Half of college students drop out before completing a degree. While there is strong evidence that financial aid can increase college entry, there is little evidence that it increases degree completion or even years of completed schooling. This is an important evidentiary gap, since it is completed schooling that is rewarded by the labor market. Dynarski exploits the introduction of two large state financial aid programs to estimate the impact of aid on completed schooling. She finds that the aid programs increase the share of the population that completes a college degree by 3.7 percentage points and the share that attempts any education beyond high school by 2 percentage points. There are sharp decreases in the share of students completing only a year or two of college. The effects are strongest among women, especially nonwhite and Hispanic women. While her estimation strategy cannot separately identify the effect of aid on entry and persistence, she establishes fairly tight bounds on the persistence effect, concluding that the aid programs reduce the college dropout rate by 7 to 14 percent.

Nearly 40 years after Brown v. the Board of Education, three Supreme Court decisions dramatically altered the legal environment for court-ordered desegregation in the early 1990s. Lower courts have released numerous school districts from their desegregation plans as a result. Over the same period racial segregation increased in public schools--a phenomenon which has been termed resegregation. Using a unique dataset, Lutz finds that dismissal of a court-ordered desegregation plan results in a gradual, moderate increase in racial segregation and an increase in black dropout rates and black private school attendance. There is no evidence of any effect on white attendance patterns, school expenditures, or property values.

Ludwig and Miller exploit a new source of variation in Head Start funding to identify, the program's long-term effects. In 1965 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties in the United States to develop Head Start funding proposals, but did not provide similar assistance to other counties. The authors show that the result is a substantial difference in Head Start funding and participation rates in those counties just above and below OEO's poverty-rate cutoff for technical assistance, differences that seem to have persisted through at least the 1970s. This discontinuity in Head Start funding and participation is associated with discontinuities in educational attainment.

A fundamental question in the human capital literature is whether property rights over human capital influence investments in children. Empirical work in this area has proven difficult, because it is a challenge to identify variation in property rights in the data. Edmonds and Sharma consider the importance of the ability to appropriate returns on investments in children by examining how vulnerability to debt-bondage affects education, child labor, and fertility. They observe substantially more child labor, lower schooling attendance and attainment, and significantly elevated fertility in families vulnerable to debt-bondage in the plains of Nepal. They argue that the fact that bondage is inherited coupled with the intrinsic risk of bondage among the vulnerable population creates insecurity in property rights over human capital that are important in understanding these increases in child quantity and declines in quality.