Richard J. Murnane

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Graduate School of Education

This commentary explains how changing labor market conditions have made it more important for schools to attract and retain skilled teachers and yet more difficult to do so. This is important context for considering the contributions of the five papers on teacher pensions in this special issue. I describe and comment on the evidence that defined be...

Many states use high-school exit examinations to assess students’ career and college readiness in core subjects. We find meaningful consequences of barely passing the mathematics examination in Massachusetts, as opposed to just failing it. However, these impacts operate at different educational attainment margins for low-income and higher-income st...

A survey targeting education researchers conducted in November 2020 provides forecasts of how much achievement gaps between low- and high-income students in U.S elementary schools will change as a result of COVID-related disruptions to in-class instruction and family life. Relative to a pre-COVID achievement gap of 1.00 SD, respondents’ median fore...

Income inequality has increased steadily over the past 40 years. We briefly review the nature and causes of this increase and show that income‐based gaps in children's academic achievement and attainment grew as well. To probe whether the increasing income gaps may have played a role in producing the growing achievement and attainment gaps, we summ...

We use data from multiple national surveys to describe trends in private elementary school enrollment by family income from 1968 to 2013. We find several important trends. First, the private school enrollment rate of middle-income families declined substantially over the past five decades while that of high-income families remained quite stable. Se...

Increases in family income inequality in the United States have translated into widening gaps in educational achievement and attainments between children from low- and high-income families. We describe the mechanisms that have produced this disturbing trend. We argue that the three dominant policy approaches states and the federal government have u...

Compared with their higher-income counterparts, children growing up in low-income families in the United States typically complete less schooling, report worse health, and work and earn less in adulthood. Moreover, changes in the American economy over the last 40 years have raised the level of skills and qualifications that children need to obtain...

Students receive abundant information about their educational performance, but how this information affects future educational-investment decisions is not well understood. Increasingly, results from state-mandated standardized tests are an important source of information. Students receive a score and a label that summarizes their performance on the...

In this article, we reviewed and interpreted the evidence from 223 rigorous impact evaluations of educational initiatives conducted in 56 low- and middle-income countries. We considered for inclusion in our review all studies in recent syntheses that have reached seemingly conflicting conclusions about which interventions improve educational outcom...

We report results from our long-standing research partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. We make two primary contributions. First, we illustrate the wide range of informative analyses that can be conducted using a state longitudinal data system and the advantages of examining evidence from multiple coho...

Considering a program for cross-disciplinary research between computer scientists and economists studying the effects of computers on work.

In the second of a two-part series the authors focus on solutions to the effects of growing income inequality on the education and thus life chances of low-income students. Their report comes from the second part of their book, Restoring Opportunity: The Crisis of Inequality and the Challenge for American Education (Harvard Education Press, 2014)....

The first of two articles in consecutive months describes the origins and nature of growing income inequality, and some of its consequences for American children. It documents the increased family income inequality that's occurred over the past 40 years and shows that the increased income disparity has been more than matched by an expanding gap bet...

We examine whether barely failing one or more state-mandated high school exit examinations in Massachusetts affects the probability that students enroll in college. We extend the exit examination literature in two ways. First, we explore longer term effects of failing these tests. We find that barely failing an exit examination, for students on the...

I survey the evidence on patterns in U.S. high school graduation rates over the period 1970-2010 and report the results of new research conducted to fill in holes in the evidence. I begin by pointing out the strengths and limitations of existing data sources. I then describe six striking patterns in graduation rates. They include stagnation over th...

As the current recession ends, many workers will not be returning to the jobs they once held--those jobs are gone. In The New Division of Labor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane show how computers are changing the employment landscape and how the right kinds of education can ease the transition to the new job market. The book tells stories of people...

Advanced literacy is a prerequisite to adult success in the twenty-first century. By advanced literacy we do not mean simply the ability to decode words or read a text, as necessary as these elementary skills are. Instead we mean the ability to use reading to gain access to the world of knowledge, to synthesize information from different sources, t...

To document wiki usage in U.S. K–12 settings, this study examined a representative sample drawn from a population of nearly 180,000 wikis. The authors measured the opportunities wikis provide for students to develop 21st-century skills such as expert thinking, complex communication, and new media literacy. The authors found four types of wiki usage...

This white paper (adapted from a blog post at the EdTechResearcher website) provides a summary of the first scholarly publication from Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project: “The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K-12 Schools: Leveraging Web 2.0 Data Warehouses to Assess Quality and Equality in U.S. K-12 Schools.” The article was publish...

Students receive abundant information about their educational performance, but how this information affects future educational-investment decisions is not well understood. Increasingly common sources of information are state-mandated standardized tests. On these tests, students receive a score and a label that summarizes their performance. Using a...

We ask whether failing one or more of the state-mandated high-school exit examinations affects whether students graduate from high school. Using a new multi-dimensional regression-discontinuity approach, we examine simultaneously scores on mathematics and English language arts tests. Barely passing both examinations, as opposed to failing them, inc...

The recent scholarly attention to the regression-discontinuity design has focused exclusively on the application of a single assignment variable. In many settings, however, exogenously imposed cutoffs on several assignment variables define a set of different treatments. In this paper, we show how to generalize the standard regression-discontinuity...

As the incomes of affluent and poor families have diverged over the past three decades, so too has the educational performance of their children. But how exactly do the forces of rising inequality affect the educational attainment and life chances of low-income children? In "Whither Opportunity?" a distinguished team of economists, sociologists, an...

As the incomes of affluent and poor families have diverged over the past three decades, so too has the educational performance of their children. But how exactly do the forces of rising inequality affect the educational attainment and life chances of low-income children? In Whither Opportunity? a distinguished team of economists, sociologists, and...

for answering many questions about data collection procedures. Participants in the May 1, 2008

In this article, we describe teachers' views of the behavioral responses the No Child Left Behind legislation has elicited and the extent to which research reveals evidence of these responses and their effects on the distribution of student achievement. We focus on teachers' reactions to three aspects of NCLB that are particularly relevant to them:...

This study capitalizes on a natural experiment that occurred in California between 2000 and 2002. In those years, the state offered a competitively allocated $20,000 incentive called the Governor's Teaching Fellowship (GTF) aimed at attracting academically talented, novice teachers to low-performing schools and retaining them in those schools for a...

In specifying a minimum passing score on examinations that students must pass to obtain a high school diploma, states divide a continuous performance measure into dichotomous categories. Thus, students with scores near the cutoff either pass or fail despite having essentially equal skills. The authors evaluate the causal effects of barely passing o...

The growing prominence of high-stakes exit examinations has made questions about their effects on student outcomes increasingly important. We take advantage of a natural experiment to evaluate the causal effects of failing a high-stakes test on high school completion for the cohort scheduled to graduate from Massachusetts high schools in 2006. With...

Resumen Los autores estudian los efectos del ausentismo de los maestros en la instrucción, basándose en datos de tres cursos académicos que abarcan a 285 maestros y a 8.631 alumnos —la mayoría pertenecientes a familias modestas— de un distrito escolar urbano de los Estados Unidos. Comprueban la hipótesis de que las ausencias de los maestros son en...

Résumé Partant de données relatives à 285 professeurs et 8 631 élèves d'un district scolaire économiquement désavantagé des Etats‐Unis, les auteurs testent l'hypothèse selon laquelle les absences des enseignants sont souvent discrétionnaires et réduisent leur productivité, mesurée par les résultats des élèves à un examen de mathématiques. Comme cel...

This article studies the impact of teacher absences on education. Using data spanning three academic years about 285 teachers and 8,631 predominantly economically disadvantaged students from a United States urban school district, it tests assumptions that a substantial portion of teachers' absences is discretionary and that these absences reduce pr...

For a variety of reasons described in the paper, improving the performance of urban school districts is more difficult today than it was several decades ago. Yet economic and social changes make performance improvement especially important today. Two quite different bodies of research provide ideas for improving the performance of urban school dist...

We decompose black-white achievement gap trends between 1971 and 2004 into trends in within- and between-school differences. We show that the previous finding that narrowing within-school inequality explains most of the decline in the black-white achievement gap between 1971 and 1988 is sensitive to methodology. Employing a more detailed partition...

In an attempt to improve the quality of educational research, the US Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences has provided funding for 65 randomized controlled trials of educational interventions. We argue that this research methodology is more effective in providing guidance to extremely troubled schools about how to make some pro...

Richard Murnane observes that the American ideal of equality of educational opportunity has for Years been more the rhetoric than the reality of the nation's political life. Children living in poverty. he notes, tend to be concentrated in low-performing schools staffed by ill-equipped teachers. They are likely to leave school without the skills nee...

Richard Murnane and Jennifer Steele argue that if the United States is to equip its young people with the skills essential in the new economy, high-quality teachers are more important than ever. In recent years, the demand for effective teachers has increased as enrollments have risen, class sizes have fallen, and a large share of the teacher workf...

Rates of employee absences and the effects of absences on productivity are topics of conversation in many organizations in many countries. One reason is that high rates of employee absence may signal weak management and poor labor-management relations. A second reason is that reducing rates of employee absence may be an effective way to improve pro...

Insurers use catastrophe risk models to estimate loss exceedance probabilities for a range of different hazard events. The 2003 wildfires in Southern California caused over $2 billion in insured losses and increased insurer's interest in developing risk models for wildfire in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). The three main parts of a catastrophe...

Incl. bibl., abstract. A growing number of school districts in the United States are introducing formative assessment systems to measure student skills in core subjects throughout the year. The underlying logic is that providing teachers with timely information on student skills will enable them to improve instruction and better prepare students to...

While struggling with the current pressures of educational reform, some educators will ask whether their efforts make economic sense. Questioning the future makeup of the nation's workforce, many wonder how the educational system should be tempered to better prepare today's youth. This chapter answers educators' and parents' questions around the ef...

THE GAPS BETWEEN THE average academic achievement of black and white children have been persistent features of American life. Until quite recently, obvious differences in the school resources provided to children of different races explained substantial portions of these achievement gaps. For example, in 1920 more than one-quarter of the racial gap...

Extreme weather and climate events provide dramatic content for the news media, and the past few years have supplied plenty of material. The 2004 and 2005 Atlantic hurricane seasons were very active; the United States was struck repeatedly by landfalling major hurricanes. A five-year drought in the southwestern United States was punctuated in 2003...

Two recent trends have rekindled interest in questions about the impact of technological change on the skills that workers use at their jobs and the wages these skills command. The first is the increase in education-related earnings inequality. Between 1980 and 1998 the college-high school wage differential rose from 48 to 75 percentage points, a 5...

This chapter examines the major shifts in the global marketplace, and advocates more widespread and diverse training in higher-level skills. It looks at the impact of globalization and the computerization of work on labour markets, addressing the role of computerized work in substituting human work and identifying the educational implications of to...

The relatively poor average performance of German students on the recent PISA international evaluations of 15- and 16-year-olds' literary skills (2000) and mathematical skills (2003) and the wide variation in performance, with low-income students scoring particularly poorly, have led to calls for reforms of the German educational system. Understand...

The student-assessment results that schools must report to satisfy No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requirements could be useful in pinpointing strengths and weaknesses in instructional programs and students' skills. However, many school staffs lack the expertise to learn from assessment results. We describe lessons learned from a yearlong workshop aime...

Data from national surveys show the dramatic changes that have taken place in the US wage structure over the past three decades. However, these data provide only very limited information about the complex reasons why those changes have occurred and why there is significant variation in the wages of workers with similar education levels employed in...

Many countries use tax revenues to subsidize private schools. Whether these policies meet social objectives depends, in part, on the relative quality of education provided by the two types of schools. We use data on elementary school students and their teachers in Bogot�, Colombia to examine difference in resource mixes and differences in the relat...

As part of standards-based educational reform efforts, more than 40 states will soon require students to achieve passing scores on standardized exams in order to obtain a high school diploma. Currently, many states are struggling with the design of their examination systems, debating such questions as which subjects should be tested, what should be...

About 27.5 million Americans-nearly 24 percent of the labor force-earn less than $8.70 an hour, not enough to keep a family of four out of poverty, even working full-time year-round. Job ladders for these workers have been dismantled, limiting their ability to get ahead in today's labor market. Low-Wage America is the most extensive study to date o...

How can schools use assessment data to improve student achievement? In mid-March, Harrison High School's1 instructional leadership team took its first look at scores on the district-mandated writing samples that students had completed the previous October and January. The purpose of the writing sample assessments was to help teachers gauge their st...

This paper examines the labor market value of the General Educational Development (GED) credential for females, questioning two implicit assumptions that have been employed in earlier studies. We show that providing access to work experience may be a critical mechanism through which education credentials impart labor market value and that the labor...

We apply an understanding of what computers do to study how computerization alters job skill demands. We argue that computer capital (1) substitutes for workers in performing cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules; and (2) complements workers in performing nonroutine problem-solving and complex communication...

We apply an understanding of what computers do to study how computerization alters job skill demands. We argue that computer capital (1) substitutes for workers in performing cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules; and (2) complements workers in performing nonroutine problem-solving and complex communication...

Inequality has social costs: it may engender political divisions, aggravate crime, and lead low-income families into poverty from which they or their children may not emerge. Dramatic shifts in relative well-being therefore demand attention. In the late 1980s, economists discovered that the earnings of high- and low-wage workers were rapidly diverg...

In an earlier session of this conference, one participant asked the panelists what advice they would give to an audience of union leaders representing teachers from urban public schools. In response to that question, I offer seven suggestions. Following my explanations of those suggestions, I conclude with slightly different versions that I believe...

Assessing the differing impacts of a new computer technology on skills and pay in two departments of a large bank.

Many studies document a positive correlation between workplace computerization and employment of skilled labor in production. Why does this correlation arise? The authors posit that improvements in computer-based technology create incentives to substitute machinery for people in performing tasks that can be fully described by procedural or "rules-b...

In this paper, we focus on the roles that race, ethnicity, and academic skills play in predicting whether high school students persist along each of the various steps of the path into teaching. We show that the challenge of creating a racially and ethnically diverse teaching force is not primarily one of influencing the occupational decisions of mi...

In this paper, we focus on the roles that race, ethnicity, and academic skills play in predicting whether high school students persist along each of the various steps of the path into teaching. We show that the challenge of creating a racially and ethnically diverse teaching force is not primarily one of influencing the occupational decisions of mi...

This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine whether measures of the skills of male teenagers predict their wages at ages 27 and 28. Three types of skills are examined: academic skills, skill at completing elementary mental tasks quickly and accurately, and self-esteem. Psychological literature supports the positio...

Young female dropouts may make several kinds of educational investments, all of which enhance earned income markedly; for the average woman, however, the increase in earnings is not enough to lift a family out of poverty.

How important are teenagers' cognitive skills in predicting subsequent labor market success? Do cognitive skills pay off in the labor market only for students who go to college? Does college benefit only students who enter with strong basic skills? These questions are often parts of current policy debates about how to improve the earnings prospects...

Does the labor market reward cognitive skill differences among those with the fewest educational attainment-high school dropouts? This paper explores this question using a data set that provides information on the universe of dropouts who last attempted the GED exams in Florida and New York in 1989 and 1990. This sample reduces variation in unmeasu...

In this paper, we develop an econometric model to estimate the impacts of Electronic Vehicle Management Systems (EVMS) on the load factor (LF) of heavy trucks using data at the operational level. This technology is supposed to improve capacity utilization by reducing coordination costs between demand and supply. The model is estimated on a subsampl...

This paper tests the labor market signaling hypothesis for the General Educational Development (GED) equivalency credential. Using a unique data set containing GED test scores and Social Security Administration (SSA) earnings data, we exploit variation in GED status generated by differential state GED passing standards to identify the signaling val...

This paper examines the value of the GED credential and the conventional high school diploma in explaining the earnings of 27-year-old males in the early 1990s. The data base is the High School and Beyond sophomore cohort. We replicate the basic findings of prior studies that implicitly assume the labor market value of the GED credential does not...

The authors use longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to investigate whether the wage trajectories of male high school dropouts are affected by the acquisition of the General Educational Development (GED) credential, by postsecondary education, and by training. The authors show that acquisition of the GED results in wage...

The role of race and ethnicity in predicting who becomes a teacher was the subject of a study that used data from the sophomore cohort of the High School and Beyond study, a longitudinal survey that interviewed participants in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, and 1992. The focus was on the impact of academic skills into entry into teaching. Four dichotomous...

The role of race and ethnicity in predicting who becomes a teacher was the subject of a study that used data from the sophomore cohort of the High School and Beyond study, a longitudinal survey that interviewed participants in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, and 1992. The focus was on the impact of academic skills into entry into teaching. Four dichotomous...

Over the last eighteen years, changes in the American economy have dramatically increased the skills workers need to earn a middle-class living. However, almost half of American students now leave high school without the requisite skills. The mismatch between the growing skill demands of employers and the skills of graduating students creates a nee...

This study analyzes the effects of right-wing extremism on the well-being of immigrants based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1984 to 2006 merged with state-level information on election outcomes. The results show that the life satisfaction of immigrants is significantly reduced if right-wing extremism in the nativ...

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth for the years 1979-91, the authors investigate how school dropouts' acquisition of a General Educational Development certificate (GED) affected the probability that they would obtain training, post-secondary education, or military service. The authors use the longitudinal data to estimate pr...

This study analyzes the effects of right-wing extremism on the well-being of immigrants based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1984 to 2006 merged with state-level information on election outcomes. The results show that the life satisfaction of immigrants is significantly reduced if right-wing extremism in the nativ...

It is human nature to search for "magic bullets" that promise to improve performance without painstaking effort - but choice plans, charter school programs, and school-based management initiatives are not magic bullets, Messrs. Murnane and Levy warn. These approaches will contribute to better schooling only if they stimulate change based on the Fiv...