Dominic J. Brewer

University of Southern California | USC · Rossier School of Education

Much of compulsory education in the world is characterized as either public or private, the former implying that the government pays for and provides schooling services (usually for free), and the latter implying that private individuals (parents) pay for the schooling services of private providers. Although this dichotomy still characterizes much...

Academic journals are the primary mode of communication among researchers, and they playa central role in the creation, diffusion, and use of knowledge. This article updates previous attempts to identify a core set of journals that most education scholars would acknowledge as consequential sources. On the basis of nominations from a panel of expert...

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Several national and international assessments have demonstrated that there has been little improvement in the performance of American high school students in recent decades. High school students are increasingly underprepared for transition into college-level course-work. One new approach to high school redesign, “early college,” seeks to address...

Education vouchers and charter schools are two of the most prominent and far-reaching forms of family-choice policies currently in evidence in the nation's elementary and secondary schools. As such, they present important challenges to the traditional provision of public education in schools that are created, governed, funded, and operated by state...

Vouchers and charters are two of the most ambitious attempts to improve school performance through parental choice and privatization of governance. The updated edition of this book (which was first released in 2001) summarizes new empirical evidence on the achievement impacts of voucher programs and charter schools operating in various locations ac...

Incl. bibl.

A growing body of empirical evidence shows teacher quality to be the most important schooling factor predicting students' learning gains. Unfortunately, US public schools face difficulties attracting the best and brightest college graduates. Over the last several decades there has been a notable shift in the occupational choices of prospective teac...

The report analyzes an array of issues pertaining to student achievement, governance, operation, and accessibility of charter schools in California. Four specific research questions are investigated: (1) Is student achievement higher in charter schools than in conventional public schools? (2) What oversight and support do the chartering authorities...

Contents:Introduction, p.1Quasi-Experimental Studies, p.3Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Studies, p.15Why Does Class Size Matter? Inferences from Existing Research, p.20Implications of the Class-Size Findings, p.25References, p.26Appendix, p.29

In "Does Teacher Certification Matter? Evaluating the Evidence " (appearing in this issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis), Linda Darling-Hammond, Barnett Berry, and Amy Thoreson, comment on our earlier piece, "Does Teacher Certification Matter? High School Teacher Certification Status and Student Achievement" (Educational Evaluation...

We empirically test how 12th-grade students of teachers with probationary certification, emergency certification, private school certification, or no certification in their subject area compare relative to students of teachers who have standard certification in their subject area. We also determine whether specific state-by-state differences in tea...

Previous research on educational productivity has decomposed the variance in student test scores into school and class effects.In this paper, we extend this work to include differences attributable to teachers as well as to schools and classes. Using data drawn from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, we find that unobservable Scho...

We estimate the operational costs of nationwide class size reduction (CSR) programs under various policy alternatives, including the specified class size, flexibility in implementation, and whether the policy is targeted toward at-risk students. Depending on the specific options chosen, the estimated costs vary from about $2 billion per year to ove...

We examine data collected from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to determine whether students with unobserved characteristics correlated with achievement are more likely to apply to the voucher program. We first estimate probit models for application to the choice program, and then math and reading achievement models. By comparing students ran...

Two-year colleges are complex institutions offering a multitude of courses, programs, and degrees. Existence of such diverse programs and various missions is the focus of extensive debate. Some argue that multiple offerings improve educational opportunities for students, while others suggest that multiple missions and activities lead to a lack of c...

States use licensing to ensure that only qualified teachers can be hired, but loopholes often allow teachers to enter the classroom via alternate routes. Comparing the per-formance of students whose teachers hold standard certificates with students whose teachers have non-standard credentials is one way to gauge the efficacy of licensing. Using dat...

Although a substantial and rising labor market premium is associated with college attendance in general, little is known about how this premium varies across institutions of different types and across time. In this paper we explicitly model high school students' choice of college type (characterized by selectivity and control) based on individual a...

Much attention has recently focused on the rapidly rising costs of a college education, and whether the benefits of attending an elite private college have kept pace with the increasing costs. In this paper we analyze whether undergraduate college quality affects the likelihood that an individual attends graduate school. Using data on three cohorts...

Programs that incorporate work-based learning (WBL) experiences in connection with school activities are proliferating, yet we know very little about their quality as learning experiences for young people or the costs associated with participating in them. This article examines two programs operating in the same school district, where students rece...

Using data drawn from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, which allows students to be linked to particular teachers and classes, we estimate the impact of observable and unobservable schooling characteristics on student outcomes. A variety of models show some schooling resources (in particular, teacher qualifications) to be signifi...

Strengthening the linkages between educational institutions and the labor market is an important component of improving U.S. education and training system. In an effort to gather data on faculty linkages to their institutions, local labor markets, and communities, surveys were mailed to 3,500 academic and vocational faculty at community colleges ac...

Schools across the country are ending the practice of grouping students based on ability, in part, because of research indicating that tracking hurts low-ability students without helping students of other ability levels. Using a nationally representative survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, (NCES) we reexamine the impac...

While there is evidence of a substantial and rising labor market premium associated with college attendance, little is known about how this premium varies across institutions of different quality and across time. Previous research which has estimated the return to college quality has not taken into account that individuals likely select the type of...

U.S. public schools are often criticized as overly bureaucratic: administration is said to consume too great a share of educational resources, to the detriment of educational productivity. Despite this common assertion, remarkably little is known about the resource allocation patterns of school districts, how these vary across districts, and how th...

Conventional models predict that workers consider employment opportunities and monetary rewards expected over their lifetimes when making current period decisions such as whether to quit a job. This article tests the hypothesis that later career opportunities affect quit decisions by examining the relationship between teaching and school administra...

Although there is a general sense among educational researchers that the practice of ability grouping is widespread, national descriptive statistics on the subject are scarce. This note presents data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 that suggest a sizeable majority of 8th and 10th grade students are tracked. Also, it is found...

Enhancing opportunity to learn measures in NCES data

Our study uses a unique national longitudinal survey, the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), which permits researchers to match individual students and teachers, to analyze issues relating to how a teacher's race, gender, and ethnicity, per se, influence students from both the same and different race, gender, and ethnic groups....

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), the authors find that the match between teachers' race, gender, and ethnicity and those of their students had little association with how much the students learned, but in several instances it seems to have been a significant determinant of teachers' subjective evaluations...

Our paper reanalyzes data from the classic 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, or Coleman Report. It addresses whether teacher characteristics, including verbal ability and race, influenced “synthetic gain scores” of students (mean test scores of upper grade students in a school minus mean test scores of lower grade students in a school...

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), the authors find that the match between teachers' race, gender, and ethnicity and those of their students had little association with how much the students learned, but in several instances it seems to have been a significant determinant of teachers' subjective evaluations...

This paper uses data from the High School and Beyond longitudinal study. We estimate the extent to which school characteristics and teacher characteristics influence the probability that public school students drop out of high school between their sophomore and senior years and, for those who do not drop out, whether these characteristics influence...

This paper uses institutionally based data to estimate how universities would respond to increased federal support for graduate students. It demonstrates that doctorate-producing universities do respond to changes in the number of full-time science and engineering students supported on external funds by altering the number of students that they sup...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the effects of principals on public high school students' academic achievement, using High School and Beyond. Despite policy relevance, previous qualitative and quantitative research provides little systematic evidence on principal effects, at least for high schools. Principal characteristics and variabl...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

[Excerpt] When we ask whether class size matters for achievement, it is essential to ask also, how class size matters. This is important for three reasons. First, if we can observe not only achievement differences, but also the mechanisms through which the differences are produced, this will increase our confidence that the differences are real, an...