This chapter describes an economic approach to understanding education policy implementation. Economists helped establish policy analysis as a field of study in the middle of the last century and economic methods long have been brought to bear on examinations of various policy processes essential to education outcomes from Congressional voting behavior to education productivity (Becker, 1993; Hanushek, 1986, 1997). However, explicit discussions of the relationship between economic methods and education policy implementation are rare. Economists seldom use the term “implementation” when addressing policy processes and outcomes, not defining it as a separate field of inquiry from policy analysis. Yet, recent trends in education policy bring to light the utility of economic methods for education policy implementation studies. For example, economic constructs fit well with assumptions about various incentives imbedded in accountability policies and alternative wage policies to increase teacher workforce supply and quality.

Many large urban school districts are rethinking their personnel management strategies, often giving increased control to schools in the hiring of teachers, reducing, for example, the importance of seniority. If school hiring authorities are able to make good decisions about whom to hire, these reforms have the potential to benefit schools and students. Prior research on teacher transfers uses career history data, identifying the school in which a teacher teaches in each year. When this data is used to see which teachers transfer, it is unclear the extent to which the patterns are driven by teacher preferences or school preferences, since the matching of teachers to schools is a two-sided choice. This study uses applications-to-transfer data to examine separately which teachers apply for transfer and which get hired and, in so doing, differentiates teacher from school preferences. We find that teachers with better pre-service qualifications (certification exam scores; college competitiveness) are more likely to apply for transfer, while teachers whose students demonstrate higher achievement growth are less likely. On the other hand, schools prefer to hire higher quality teachers across measures that signal quality. The results suggest not only that more effective teachers prefer to stay in their school, but that when given the opportunity schools are able to identify and hire the best candidates.

Educational decision making involves value judgments. As decision makers aim for improvements, they need standards that tell them what counts as an improvement. However, they typically lack a rich and sophisticated language for talking about values and articulating trade-offs. Our main purpose in this paper is to enrich the language available to educational decision makers, and to the researchers whose work informs their deliberation, by offering a framework for thinking about the goals of education. The values (or range of values) commonly held in Western countries today clearly are not the same as those held in all other countries and at all other times. As a result, our framework has broad, but may not have universal, relevance. We have coined the term educational goods to refer to the knowledge, skills, attitudes and dispositions that children develop both for their benefit and for the benefit of others. These goods are varied, including cognitive skills, the ability to work with others, and appreciation of beauty, among many others. We offer a way of thinking with some detail and precision about the educational goods that educators should aim for in schools. Defining educational goods is the first goal of this paper. Decision makers typically care not only about the average level of educational goods that students acquire but also about how these goods are distributed across children. Their evaluation of a policy will depend on how the policy affects the overall distribution of educational goods in combination with the importance that they place on different distributive principles. One decision maker may place substantial weight on equalizing educational goods, while another may focus more on improving the educational goods of those with the least. The second goal of the paper is to lay out clearly the distributive considerations commonly relevant to education policy choices.

We document measurable, lasting gains in student achievement caused by a change in teachers’ evaluation incentives. A short-lived rule created a discontinuity in teachers’ incentives when allocating effort across their assigned students: students who failed an initial end-of-year test were retested a few weeks later, and then only the higher of the two scores was used when calculating the teacher’s evaluation score. One year later, long after the discontinuity in incentives had ended, retested students scored 0.03σ higher than non-retested students. Otherwise identical students were treated differently by teachers because of evaluation incentives, despite arguably equal returns to teacher effort.

Teacher strikes have gained national attention with the “#RedforEd” movement. Such strikes are polarizing events that could serve to elevate education as a political priority or cast education politics in a negative light. We investigate this empirically by collecting original panel data on U.S. teacher strikes, which we link to congressional election campaign advertisements. Election ads provide a useful window into political discourse because they are costly to sponsors, consequential for voter behavior, and predictive of future legislative agendas. Using a differences-in-differences framework, we find that teacher strikes dramatically increase education issue salience, with impacts concentrated among positively-framed ads. Effects are driven by strikes lasting only a few days and occurring in battleground areas with highly-contested elections.

Would public meetings incite more civic engagement if they were structured in ways that are simply more engaging? I addressed this question by conducting an original survey with an oversample of racial and ethnic minorities and individuals from low-income households. The survey featured a randomized experiment in which each study participant was shown a short clip of an actual school board meeting that was (1) a standard meeting with no public participation, (2) a meeting with public participation, or (3) a meeting with deliberation (public participation followed by a reasoned response from the school board). The experience of viewing the more participatory and deliberative school board meetings led to increased trust in local officials and a stronger willingness to attend school board meetings in the future. This study has significant implications for civic engagement, local politics, and public school governance.

More than half of U.S. children fail to meet proficiency standards in mathematics and science in fourth grade. Teacher professional development and curriculum improvement are two of the primary levers that school leaders and policymakers use to improve children’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning, yet until recently, the evidence base for understanding their effectiveness was relatively thin. In recent years, a wealth of rigorous new studies using experimental designs have investigated whether and how STEM instructional improvement programs work. This article highlights contemporary research on how to improve classroom instruction and subsequent student learning in STEM. Instructional improvement programs that feature curriculum integration, teacher collaboration, content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and how students learn all link to stronger student achievement outcomes. We discuss implications for policy and practice.