Volume 32, Number 3 (Summer) 1997

Goldhaber, Dan D., and Dominic J. Brewer. 1997. "Why Don't Schools and Teachers Seem to Matter? Assessing the Impact of Unobservables on Educational Productivity." Journal of Human Resources 32(3):505-523.

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 signifi­cant in influencing tenth-grade mathematics test scores. Unobservable school, teacher, and class characteristics are important in explaining stu­dent achievement but do not appear to be correlated with observable variables in our sample. Thus, our results suggest that the omission of unobservables does not cause biased estimates in standard educational production functions.

Dan D. Goldhaber is a research analyst at The CNA Corporation, 4401 Ford Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22302. Dominic J. Brewer is an associate economist at RAND, P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica. CA 90407-2138. Brewer received funding from RAND for this research. The authors thank numerous col­leagues around the country and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper which was presented at the Econometric Society Meetings, San Francisco, January 1996. In particular, they thank Eric Hanushek, Richard Murnane, Deborah Anderson, Richard Buddin, and Daniel Rees for their suggestions. The data used in this paper are restricted; permission must be obtained from the National Center for Education Statistics.

 

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