Improving America's Schools: The Role of Incentives (1996)
Chapter: Front Matter
NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS
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NOTICE: The conference from which the papers in this publication were drawn was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members come from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the board responsible for the project were chosen for their special competences and with regard for appropriate balance.
This publication was supported by the Kellogg Endowment of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Improving America's schools : the role of incentives / edited by Eric A. Hanushek and Dale W. Jorgenson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-309-05436-2 (alk. paper)
1. School management and organization—United States. 2. Educational change—United States. 3. School improvement programs—United States. I. Hanushek, Eric Alan, 1943- . II. Jorgenson, Dale Weldeau, 1993- .
LB2805.I434 1996
371.2\00973—dc21 96-44606
CIP
Cover: The emblem appearing on the cover of this publication is an illustration of the bronze medallion in the floor of the Great Hall in the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, D.C. the medallion is the wellhead placed in the floor when the spectroscopic case over which the Foucault pendulum swings is lowered below floor level. The design is based on a map of the solar system published in 1661 by Andreas Cellarius Palatinus. The array of the planets is the Copernican system as known to Galileo.
Copyright 1996 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
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Harvard University
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Stanford University
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Lazard Freres
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Contents
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Introduction |
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Research-Based School Reform: The Clinton Administration's Agenda |
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Outcomes, Costs, and Incentives in Schools |
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Changes in the Structure of Wages |
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The Effects of School-Based Management Plans |
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Management Decentralization and Performance-Based Incentives: Theoretical Considerations for Schools |
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Signaling, Incentives, and School Organization in France, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States |
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Public School Partnerships: Community, Family, and School Factors in Determining Child Outcomes |
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Using Student Assessments for Educational Accountability |
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Value-Added Indicators of School Performance |
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Economics of School Reform for At-Risk Students |
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Staffing the Nation's Schools with Skilled Teachers |
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Preface
With the exception of the Introduction, the papers in this volume were presented at a conference, "Improving the Performance of America's Schools: Economic Choices," held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on October 12 and 13, 1994, with the support of the Kellogg Endowment Fund of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This conference was organized under the auspices of the Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) of the National Research Council, by a committee that I chaired and that included Eric A. Hanushek, professor of economics and public policy at Rochester University, and Stephen A. Merrill, executive director of the board.
The STEP board was established in 1991 as a long-delayed response to a decision by the National Academy of Sciences to admit economists as members almost three decades ago. The principal objective of the new board was to harness the interests and abilities of economists, industrial technologists, and scientists in advising policymakers on issues of science, technology, and economic policy.
The first report of the STEP Board, Investing for Productivity and Prosperity, was published in June 1994. It called for policies that foster investment in the nation's future economic capacity. The main focus of the report was the taxation of income from capital. The principal recommendation was to shift the base for taxation from income to consumption. This recommendation and the rationale presented in the board's report proved to be important harbingers of the recent revival of interest in consumption-based tax reform.
The conference on "Improving the Performance of America's Schools: Economic Choices" was the STEP board's second effort to articulate policies to
enhance investment in human capital, in the economic jargon now fashionable among policymakers. The point of departure for the conference was the nearly contemporaneous publication of a report by a group of 13 economists, the Panel on the Economics of Education Reform (PEER), supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts and headed by Eric Hanushek. The intention of the PEER group's report, Making Schools Work: Improving Performance and Controlling Costs,1 was to initiate a serious intellectual debate over education policy by supplying a new, and previously absent, economic dimension. The chapters in this publication explore several aspects of that dimension, including the relationship of education to future earnings, the effects of school organization and management, school and community influences on student outcomes, measuring student achievement and school performance, and recruiting and retaining skilled teachers.
Dale W. Jorgenson
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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1 |
Eric A. Hanushek et al., 1994, Making Schools Work: Improving Performance and Controlling Costs, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 1994. |
| Improving America's Schools |
