Tuckman, Howard P. 1971. "High School Inputs and Their Contribution to School Performance." Journal of Human Resources 6(4):490-509.

This paper examines the effects of a change in the mix of education inputs on several measures of high school performance, including both the proportion of students completing high school and the proportion continuing their education. About 83 percent of the variation in the former measure and 52 percent of the variation in the latter can be explained using a linear regression model. Inclusion of interaction terms in the model increases explained variation to 93 percent and 58 percent, respectively, and leads to statistically different regression coefficients. The results also suggest that high schools reinforce the performance of students from middle class homes and that teachers affect school performance.

The author is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and a Research Associate in the Institute for Social Research, Florida State University. The author would like to thank B. Herriott for making the data available and for many worthwhile discussions, V. Steeb for his research assistance, and J. Chang and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments. K. Kumar, J. Gwartney, H. Levin, S. Michelson, and S. Bowles commented on earlier drafts of this paper. Partial support of computational costs was rendered by National Science Foundation grant GJ-367.

© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

US ISSN 0022-166X

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