Volume 14, Number 3 (Summer) 1979
Hanushek, Eric A. 1979. "Conceptual and Empirical Issues in the Estimation of Educational Production Functions." Journal of Human Resources 14(3):351-388.
Measuring educational performance and understanding its determinants are important for designing policies with respect to such varying issues as teacher accountability, educational finance systems, and school integration. Unfortunately, past analyses of student achievement and educational production relationships have been plagued by both a lack of conceptual clarity and a number of potentially severe analytical problems. As a result, there is considerable confusion not only about what has been learned, but also about how such studies should be conducted and what can be learned. This review considers each of these issues and also relates knowledge from these studies to research about areas other than just school operations and performance.
The author is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Director, Public Policy Analysis Program, University of Rochester. This paper benefited from helpful comments on previous versions by Charles Bidwell, May Curran, Henry Levin, Richard Murnane, Edward Pauly, John Quigley, James Rosenbaum, and especially Richard Nelson. The research was largely done while the author was at Yale University.
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