Download or read book Three Essays on Education Policy written by Kari Dalane and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three essays in my dissertation each address topics in education policy. While they all address substantively different research questions, each provides insight into how schools are organized and run, and how this affects student experiences and outcomes. All three papers address policy-relevant questions in education related to equity. In my first essay, I focus on a recent policy development in the provision of free and reduced-price lunch called Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). CEP allows schools and districts with a certain proportion of students from low-income families to opt to provide free lunch to their entire student bodies. Using student-level administrative data from North Carolina, I find evidence that students with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) have lower levels of suspension and higher math and reading achievement in years they are enrolled in a school participating in CEP.In my second essay, I examine understudied questions in arts education in American public schools. Schools devote substantial time and resources to arts education, but little research examines how arts offerings in schools have changed over time, or which students have access to the arts. Even less credible research examines the question of how arts experiences in schools impact student outcomes. I provide insight into trends in arts education using national datasets (the Schools and Staffing Surve and the National Teacher and Principal Survey) and more detailed administrative data from one state, North Carolina. I then take up the question of how arts impacts student outcomes. The principal threat to any study of arts education is fundamental endogeneity of schools' arts curricula, and students' decisions to enroll in courses that are often elective. I estimate the impact of arts education on outcomes in a student-by-school fixed effects framework, comparing outcomes for students in years they are enrolled in arts courses to outcomes in years they are enrolled in no art courses while attending the same school. I find arts enrollment has positive impacts on attendance.In my third essay, my co-author Dave Marcotte and I examine within school segregation by income in schools in North Carolina. While recent research has examined between school income segregation, within school segregation has received relatively little attention. Since students experience school in classrooms, within school segregation is relevant to understanding how segregation overall impacts students. We generate dissimilarity indexes to measure how economically disadvantaged (ED) students and non-ED students are sorted into classrooms within schools. We then investigate whether a common policy lever, charter schools, impact levels of within school ED segregation. Traditional public school administrators could face heightened pressures to retain students when school choice options become available nearby. These pressures may encourage administrators to ramp up academic tracking or the introduce or expand specialized curricula such as gifted and talented programs. These changes could increase within school segregation. We find some evidence that within school ED segregation increases in grades 3 and 4 in traditional public schools located closest to charter schools, but little evidence of impacts in other grades.

Download or read book Three Essays on Education Policy written by Gregory R. Phelan and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of public policy on education can be substantial. This holds true whether we are considering students in primary and secondary schools, school administrators, or college students. Moreover, the effects of education policy may be greatest for groups of vulnerable or disadvantaged students. My research examines three pieces of education policy in Texas, and the impacts of these policies on students and school principals. The first essay evaluates the efficacy of a state-funded scholarship provided to low income college bound students that demonstrate a significant amount of academic promise. The second essay analyzes the role that school accountability ratings and performance information plays in the labor market outcomes of Texas school principals. The third essay characterizes the set of students that enroll in full-time online virtual schools in Texas that are publicly funded, but run managed by privately owned Education Management Organizations.

Download or read book Three Essays on Policies and Politics in Higher Education written by Curtis Lockwood Reynolds and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Futures of School Reform written by Jal Mehta and published by Harvard Education Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Futures of School Reform represents the culminating work of a three-year discussion among national education leaders convened by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Based on the recognition that current education reform efforts have reached their limits, the volume maps out a variety of bold visions that push the boundaries of our current thinking. Taken together, these visions identify the leverage points for generating dramatic change and highlight critical trade-offs among different courses of action. The goal of this book is not to present a menu of options. Rather, it is to surface contrasting assumptions, tensions, constraints, and opportunities, so that together we can better understand—and act on—the choices that lie before us.

Download or read book Three Essays on Education Outcomes and Institutions written by Cristelle A. A. Kouame and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, in the standard three-essay format, covers three loosely connected topics that focus on education outcomes and the quality of a country's institutions in facilitating access to sanitation in Africa. Chapter 1 attempts to estimate peer effects on student effort. I present a structural model of friendship networks in which I introduce a student grade point average (GPA) as a positive function of the student's effort and their own characteristics. I show that my model is functionally different from the standard model as it captures heterogeneity based on whether students have friends or not. I estimate peer effects using the first wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and by applying the generalized method of moments (GMM) approach. I find that on average, a one-point increase in the mean GPA of student's peers induces the student to increase their effort that in turn increase their own GPA by 0.856 points. I also find that the estimated endogenous peer effect coefficient is significantly larger than the estimated coefficient obtained under the standard model. Furthermore, I consider an alternative specification by controlling for network endogeneity. I find that the size of the estimated peer effect does not change much. My results are robust and provide a consistent and efficient measure of peer effects, which can inform the efficiency of network-targeted public policies. Chapter 2 examines whether expansion in institutional quality broadens access to improved sanitation in Sub-Sahara Africa. This is a published paper with two co-authors. This paper employs a dynamic panel-data model and data from 44 Sub-Sahara African countries over the period 2002-2015 to estimate the direct effect of institutional quality on access to sanitation. The estimation techniques control for potential endogeneity of regressors and country-specific effects. The results indicate that institutional quality promotes access to improved sanitation with control of corruption, regulatory quality, and voice and accountability playing the most significant roles. The results also show a dichotomy between rural and urban areas in which aspects of institutions increase access to sanitation. Specifically, in urban areas, the populace's ability to participate in selecting government and expressing freedom through associations and free media drives access to sanitation. In contrast, efficient curbing of corruption, increasing rule of law, and enhancing the capacity of governments to formulate and implement sound policies facilitate access to sanitation in rural areas. This dichotomy generates important policy implications as countries move towards achieving the Sustainable Development goal, universal access to improved sanitation.Finally, Chapter 3 estimates partial correlation of teacher quality and language of instruction on student learning deprivation. I use a unique primary school-level dataset on standardized test scores of Senegalese and Mauritanian grade 4 students and teachers (cross-sectional data). Learning deprivation is a dichotomous variable that takes the value 1 if a student reading test score falls below the minimum reading proficiency level, and 0 if otherwise. An instrumental-variable probit model controls to some extent for the endogeneity of teacher quality due to unobserved school-specific factors correlated with both teacher quality and learning deprivation. After controlling for a range of student, socioeconomic, school, district and regional related variables, I find that a decrease of one in the average teacher test score at the school level (teacher quality) is associated with an increase of the likelihood of a student's being learning deprived by 6.05 percentage points. I also show that the learning deprivation of a student who is taught in French is 98 percentage points higher than that of a student who is taught in a familiar language, (i.e., Arabic). The results suggest that policymakers in developing countries should focus on teachers' subject knowledge in teacher recruitment, training, and compensation policies. They also shed light on the importance of using a familiar language.

Download or read book Three Essays in the Economics of Education written by Pierre Edward Mouganie and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation introduces three essays on the short and long run consequences of educational choices. In the first essay "Conscription and the Returns to Education: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity" we use a regression discontinuity design to first identify the effect of peacetime conscription on education and labor market outcomes. Results indicate that conscription eligibility induces a significant increase in years of education, which is consistent with conscription avoidance behavior. However, this increased education does not result in either an increase in graduation rates, or in employment and wages. Additional evidence shows conscription has no direct effect on earnings, suggesting that the returns to education induced by this policy was zero. In the second essay "Quality of Higher Education and Earnings: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from the French Baccalaureate", we use a regression discontinuity design to examine the returns to quality of postsecondary education. We compare the outcomes of students who marginally pass and fail the first round exams of the French Baccalaureate, a degree that students must earn to graduate from secondary school. Marginally passing increases the likelihood of attending a higher quality university and a STEM major. Threshold crossing also increases earnings by 13.6 percent at the age of 27 to 29. After ruling out other channels that could affect earnings, we conclude that increased access to higher quality postsecondary education leads to a significant earnings premium. In the third and final essay "Better or Best? High School Quality and Academic Performance" we look at the effects of attending a higher quality high school on the academic performance and college outcomes of young Chinese students. Specifically, in our analysis, we draw a distinction between going to a better school, regardless of tier, and going to a top-tier school. We find that college entrance exam test score gains and improved college outcomes are only realized for individuals attending the most elite set of high schools. These results are mainly driven by males as we find no significant effects on academic performance for females. Finally, we provide evidence suggesting that these academic gains are mostly due to variation in teacher quality. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/155600.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Education written by Riley Acton and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1: Effects of Reduced Community College Tuition on College Choices and Degree CompletionRecent efforts to increase college access concentrate on reducing tuition rates at community colleges, but researchers and policymakers alike have expressed concern that such reductions may not lead to long-run college completion gains. In this chapter, I use detailed data on students' college enrollment and completion outcomes to study how community college tuition rates affect students' outcomes across both public and private colleges. By exploiting spatial variation in tuition rates, I find that reducing tuition at a student's local community college by $1,000 increases enrollment at the college by 3.5 percentage points (18%) and reduces enrollment at non-local community colleges, for-profit institutions, and other private, vocationally-focused colleges, by 1.9 percentage points (15%). This shift in enrollment choices increases students' persistence in college, the number of credits they complete, and the probability that they transfer to and earn bachelor's degrees from four-year colleges.Chapter 2: Community College Program Choices in the Wake of Local Job LossesDeciding which field to study is one of the most consequential decisions college students make, but most research on the topic focuses on students attending four-year colleges. In this chapter, I study the extent to which community college students' program choices respond to changes in local labor market conditions in related occupations. To do so, I exploit the prevalence of mass layoffs and plant closings across counties, industries, and time, and create occupation-specific layoff measures that align closely with community college programs. I find that declines in local employment deter students from entering closely related community college programs and instead induce them to enroll in other vocationally-oriented programs. Using data on occupational skill composition, I document that students predominantly shift enrollment between programs that require similar skills. These effects are strongest when layoffs occur in business, health, and law enforcement occupations, as well as when they take place in rural counties.Chapter 3: Do Health Insurance Mandates Spillover to Education? Evidence from Michigan's Autism Insurance Mandate (with Scott Imberman and Michael Lovenheim)Social programs and mandates are usually studied in isolation, but interaction effects could create spillovers to other public goods. In this paper, we examine how health insurance coverage affects the education of students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the context of state-mandated private therapy coverage. Since Medicaid benefits under the mandate were far weaker than under private insurance, we proxy for Medicaid ineligibility and estimate effects via triple-differences. We find little evidence of an overall shift in ASD identification, but we do find substantial crowd-out of special education services for students with ASD from the mandate. The mandate led to increased mainstreaming of students in general education classrooms and a reduction in special education support services like teacher consultants. There is little evidence of changes in achievement, which supports our interpretation of the service reductions as crowd-out.

Download or read book Three Essays on Education and Its Impact on Economic Growth and Development written by Juan-Pedro Garces and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation we explore different aspects of the relationship between education (as one of the main components of human capital) and economic productivity. In the first chapter, we measure the factors that contribute to the quality of education, following Hanushek and Woessmann (2007). An empirical research is carried out for the case of Chile, a country which implemented a very unique educational system in the mid-1980s, with a strong participation of the private sector in the provision of educational services. Amongst other factors, we study the influence of the public/private divide, the socio-economic level of the students and the pupil/teacher ratio. The quality of education is measured by the performance of students in standardised national tests administered to all schools in Chile. The second chapter explores the effects of population density on productivity and the synergetic impact of educational attainment and population density on the causation of technological progress and economic growth, following Becker et al. (1999). We devise a simple theoretical model to explain the channels through which education and density affect productivity, and we test it for a wide sample of developed and developing countries. Our empirical results confirm the positive impact of both population density—broadly defined—and the interaction of education and density on economic productivity. Finally, the third chapter of the dissertation examines the ongoing controversy about the roles of education and institutions as main contributing factors of economic growth. To try to establish a balanced view, we first assume as a premise that good institutional governance is indeed an important factor in promoting economic growth, as has been shown repeatedly in the literature. But at the same time, we investigate the causes of good institutional governance, and find out that educational attainment is one of the main factors contributing to most of the aspects of good governance.

Download or read book School Choice School Quality and Human Capital written by Christopher R. Walters and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays covering topics in the economics of education. Two common threads connect these essays: first, a focus on the inputs and practices driving variation in effectiveness across educational programs; and second, an interest in the relationships between students' preferences, characteristics, and returns to human capital investment. In the first chapter, I develop and estimate a structural model of school choice that links students' decisions to apply to and attend charter schools in Boston, Massachusetts to their potential achievement test scores in charter schools and public schools. This chapter is motivated by a growing literature that uses randomized entrance lotteries to show that urban charter schools, including those in Boston, substantially increase test scores and close racial achievement gaps among their applicants. A key policy question is whether charter expansion is likely to produce similar effects on a larger scale. To address this question, I use the structural model to predict the effects of charter expansion for the citywide achievement distribution in Boston. Estimates of the model suggest that charter applicants are negatively selected on achievement gains: low-income students and students with low prior achievement gain the most from charter attendance, but are unlikely to apply to charter schools. This form of selection implies that lottery-based estimates understate gains for broader groups of students, and that charter schools will produce substantial gains for marginal applicants drawn in by expansion. Simulations suggest that realistic expansions are likely to reduce the gap in math scores between Boston and the rest of Massachusetts by up to 8 percent, and reduce racial achievement gaps by roughly 5 percent. Nevertheless, the estimates also imply that perceived application costs are high and that most students prefer traditional public schools to charter schools, so large expansions may leave many charter seats empty. These results suggest that in the absence of significant behavioral or institutional changes, the potential gains from charter expansion may be limited as much by demand as by supply. The second chapter, written jointly with Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak, seeks to explain differences in effectiveness across charter schools. Using a large sample of lotteried applicants to charter schools throughout Massachusetts, we show that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. We then explore student-level and school-level explanations for this difference. In an econometric framework that isolates sources of charter effect heterogeneity, we show that urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond that of urban public school students, while non-urban charters reduce achievement from a higher baseline. Student demographics explain some of these gains since urban charters are most effective for non-whites and low-baseline achievers. At the same time, non-urban charter schools are uniformly ineffective. Our estimates also reveal important school-level heterogeneity within the urban charter sample. A non-lottery analysis suggests that urban charters with binding, well-documented admissions lotteries generate larger score gains than under-subscribed urban charter schools with poor lottery records. Using a detailed survey of school practices and characteristics, we link charter impacts to inputs such as instructional time, classroom techniques and school philosophy. The relative effectiveness of urban lottery-sample charters is accounted for by these schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to urban education, a package of policies that includes strict discipline, increased instructional time, selective teacher-hiring, and a focus on traditional skills. In the third chapter, I use data from the Head Start Impact Study (HSIS), a nationwide randomized trial of the Head Start program, to study the relationship between site-level treatment effects and educational inputs within Head Start. Studies of small-scale, intensive early-childhood programs, including the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project, show that such programs can have transformative effects on human capital and economic outcomes. Evidence for larger-scale programs like Head Start is more mixed. I use the HSIS data to ask whether Head Start centers using practices more similar to successful model programs produce larger short-run effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. My results show that while there is significant variation in effectiveness across Head Start centers, centers that are more similar to the Perry Preschool Project on observed dimensions are not more effective. Specifically, Head Start centers using the High/Scope curriculum, the centerpiece of the Perry experiment, do not produce larger gains relative to other centers. Other inputs often cited as essential to the success of the Perry Project, including teacher education, teacher certification, teacher/student ratios, instructional time, and frequency of home visiting, are also unrelated to effectiveness in Head Start. These results suggest that replicating the success of small-scale programs may be difficult, as the effectiveness of such programs may be due to idiosyncratic, unmeasured inputs. JEL Classification: 121, C51, J24

Download or read book Three Essays in Higher Education Policy written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters examining issues relevant to current higher education policy debates. In the first chapter, I use surveys, in-depth interviews, and administrative records from a sample of Wisconsin Pell Grant recipients who chose among Wisconsin public colleges and universities to explore whether students' initial college choices affected their early college experiences and to examine how this was associated with their persistence and achievement in college. After controlling for a robust set of observed characteristics, students attending their first choice college have similar levels of early academic and social integration into college life and similar academic outcomes when compared to students who did not attend their first choice college. In the second chapter, I use a form of cost-effectiveness analysis to estimate institutional performance and compare the results to popular college rankings, which generally reward colleges for attracting stronger students and spending more money. I use data from IPEDS, College InSight, and the Delta Cost Project for nearly 1,300 colleges and universities to estimate value-added to one important outcome: college graduation. I then adjust for two different types of costs for different audiences: the net price of attendance and per-student educational expenditures. All of the methods provide different results from the popular college rankings, suggesting that adjusting for costs and inputs yield a different set of high-performing institutions. In the third chapter, I address concerns about the timing of the current financial aid system, in which students from low-income families receive concrete information about the cost of college too late to academically and financially prepare for college. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I conduct a simulation of the effects of using a simplified eligibility process to make an early commitment of the full Pell Grant to eighth graders from needy families. The simulation of the estimated fiscal effects suggests that Pell program costs would grow by approximately $1.5 billion annually and the benefits would exceed the costs by approximately $600 million.

Download or read book Can education reduce social inequality and improve employment written by Nela Dojcinovic and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Education of Underserved Populations written by Matthew Scott Farber and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines how current targeted accountability and funding provisions under federal guidelines impact the academic outcomes of the country's more underserved populations.The first chapter demonstrates that accountability at the race level leads to increased reading and math achievement for students. I investigate the impact of school-level accountability on racial subgroups within a school, using a regression-discontinuity design with student-level Texas panel data on third through eighth graders from 2004 through 2011. The targeted incentives increase passing rates by 1-2 percentage points and the scores by .03 standard deviations in both math and reading. These results persist for two to three years after intervention, but fade out by the fourth year. Furthermore, students outside the targeted group are not hindered, with no effect on passing rates and scores. A deeper analysis suggests that schools are not focusing on high-leverage students but rather implementing wide-ranging interventions. I also find that the majority of gains are due to gains among Black students, though it is not clear whether this is due to racial targeting. In the second chapter, I analyze the impact of federally designed and funded interventions on student achievement, both of targeted students and non-targeted students. Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act of 2001, schools with less than 40% low-income students use federal Title I funds for a Targeted Assistance Program, where schools above 40% are free to use those same funds as general school money. This paper uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity design around the 40% threshold with student-level Texas panel data on third through eighth graders from 2004 through 2011 to investigate. The evidence suggests that there is no difference in student outcomes, on the whole or among subsamples, between the methods of using the federal funding. The third chapter of my dissertation shows that the impact of Title I funding on student achievement is complex, benefiting certain subgroups of students while impacting others negatively. I use an instrumental variable research design in order to estimate impacts while keeping external validity through exploiting the large data set available, which includes student-level panel data on Texas public school students from the years 2004 through 2011. Title I funding increases math passing rates by 3 percentage points and has no impact on neither reading passing rates nor standardized scores for either subject. Elementary school students are impacted negatively by Title I funding in both math and reading, while lower-performing and low-income middle school students show large, though insignificant, effects of the funding on both math and reading exams. Unfortunately, this study cannot speak to the impacts on high school students.

Download or read book Three Essays on Institutional and Economic Development written by Kevin Sylwester and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Critical Race Theory in Education written by Gloria Ladson-Billings and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2021-09-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important volume brings together key writings from one of the most influential education scholars of our time. In this collection of her seminal essays on critical race theory (CRT), Gloria Ladson-Billings seeks to clear up some of the confusion and misconceptions that education researchers have around race and inequality. Beginning with her groundbreaking work with William Tate in the mid-1990s up to the present day, this book discloses both a personal and intellectual history of CRT in education. The essays are divided into three areas: Critical Race Theory, Issues of Inequality, and Epistemology and Methodologies. Ladson-Billings ends with a postscript that looks back at her journey and considers what is on the horizon for other scholars of education. Having these widely cited essays in one volume will be invaluable to everyone interested in understanding how inequality operates in our society and how race affects educational outcomes. Featured Essays: 1. Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education with William F. Tate IV 2. Critical Race Theory: What It Is Not! 3. From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Inequality in U.S. Schools 4. Through a Glass Darkly: The Persistence of Race in Education Research and Scholarship 5. New Directions in Multicultural Education: Complexities, Boundaries, and Critical Race Theory 6. Landing on the Wrong Note: The Price We Paid for Brown 7. Racialized Discourses and Ethnic Epistemologies 8. Critical Race Theory and the Post-Racial Imaginary with Jamel K. Donner

Download or read book Understanding Education written by Jeremy Clayton Luallen and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dataset in Chapter 3 uses survey data from the ''Schools and Staffing Survey'' and includes over 17,000 teachers. The high-powered nature of this dataset allows me to identify specific details, such as teacher salary incentives, individual network strength and union membership. Ultimately I conclude that teacher networks are an integral part of a teacher's transfer decision and have a sizable impact on intra-district teacher mobility.

Download or read book Three Essays on Educational Success written by Katie Lynn Raynor and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unifying theme of this dissertation is the empirical analysis of the determinants of educational success. The first essay asks whether high school time use affects the probability that a high school graduate attends college. These effects may be due to acceptance decisions by colleges or because different time uses actually change the amount of educational attainment an individual desires. Three types of high school time use are considered: doing homework outside school, participating in extracurricular activities, and working for pay. The data used for this essay, as well as for the other two essays, are from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS:88). Instrumental variables analysis suggests that the time spent on homework outside school may be the most important type of time use, and it may have a very large positive effect on four-year college attendance. The second essay identifies how high school time use affects college GPA for individuals attending their first year at four-year colleges, using the same three types of high school time use as in the previous essay. College time use is imputed using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) since this information is not available in the NELS:88. The results indicate that high school time use is important in determining GPA during the first year of college, where part of this effect is due to the fact that spending more time on homework during high school increases an individual's ability level, which later increases college GPA. The purpose of the third essay is to analyze whether living at home with one's parents will affect a college student's gradepoint average. For students from higher income families, college GPA's will be significantly higher if they live away from home. However, living at home during college does not negatively affect GPA for those from lower income families.

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Education written by Hwanoong Lee and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation comprises three essays on the Economics of Education. Its ultimate focus is to understand how different agents in the education market respond to releasing information about teacher and school performance and how public interventions influence human capital accumulation. The first essay "The Effect of Releasing Teacher Performance Information to Schools: Teachers' Response and Student Achievement" examines the effects of releasing teacher value-added (VA) information on student performance in two settings; in the first, VA data was released to all potential employers within the district, while in the second, only the current employer received the data. I find that student achievement increased only in the district where the VA scores were provided to all potential employers. These effects were driven solely by improved performance among ex-ante less-effective teachers; the null effects in the other setting, however, were driven by moderate declines in performance among ex-ante highly-effective teachers and small improvements among less-effective teachers. These results highlight the importance of understanding how the design features of VA disclosure translate into the productivity of teachers. The second essay "The Role of Credible Threats and School Competition within School Accountability Systems: Evidence from Focus Schools in Michigan" studies the impact of receiving accountability labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of Focus (schools with the largest achievement gaps) labels and find that schools receiving the Focus label improved the performance of low-achieving students relative to their barely non-Focus counterparts, and they did so without hurting high-achieving students. The positive achievement effects for Focus schools were entirely driven by Title 1 Focus schools that faced financial sanctions associated with being labeled the following year. There is no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine heterogeneous effects by looking at the number of alternative nearby schooling options. I find that when schools are exposed to a competitive choice environment, receiving the Focus label increased math test scores across the scoring distribution, while schools located in an uncompetitive choice environment improved the test scores of low achievers only. This evidence may suggest the importance of incorporating credible sanctions and school choice options into the school accountability system to maximize the effectiveness of the system on student achievement. Finally, the third essay "The Effects of School Accountability Systems Under NCLB Waiver: Evidence from Priority Schools in Michigan" investigates the impact of receiving Priority labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of the Priority (schools with the lowest performance) label and find no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine whether assigning the Priority label induced the changes in the composition of students. I define several key measures of student composition and find no evidence that the Priority designation influenced the student composition of schools.