Schooling as an institution — funding, teacher quality and school choice, where evidence often defies the politics.
10 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Role of Government in Education
Milton Friedman · 1955
Proposes that government fund schooling through vouchers parents can spend at any qualifying school rather than by owning and running the schools…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Equality of Educational Opportunity
James S. Coleman et al. · 1966
The largest survey of American schooling ever conducted at the time found school resources explained far less of the achievement gap than family…
+6 more at this level
11 works
Milton Friedman
Proposes that government fund schooling through vouchers parents can spend at any qualifying school rather than by owning and running the schools itself, arguing competition would serve families better than a public monopoly.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ken Robinson (TED)
Argues that school systems rank subjects in a hierarchy inherited from nineteenth-century industrial need, and so train children out of the willingness to be wrong that originality requires.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Michael Barber & Mona Mourshed
Argues the highest-performing school systems converge on the same few levers regardless of culture or spending level: who becomes a teacher, how they are trained, and ensuring every child gets excellent instruction.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Bank
Argues that expanding school enrolment in developing countries has not produced a matching rise in what children actually learn, and that measuring and acting on learning outcomes, not attendance, is the unfinished task.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James S. Coleman et al.
The largest survey of American schooling ever conducted at the time found school resources explained far less of the achievement gap than family background, unsettling the assumption that money alone closes it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alan B. Krueger
Reanalyses Tennessee's STAR experiment, in which pupils and teachers were randomly assigned to classes of different sizes, and finds smaller classes produced lasting achievement gains, especially for disadvantaged pupils.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James J. Heckman
Argues, from long-run follow-ups of early intervention programmes, that the economic return on skill investment is highest in the earliest years of childhood and falls steadily afterward, making preschool the most efficient point to intervene.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sean F. Reardon
Documents that the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families has grown roughly 40% since the 1960s and now dwarfs the black-white gap, tracking rising income inequality rather than race.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Eric A. Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann & Lei Zhang
Comparing workers across countries over their careers, finds vocational education eases the initial transition into work but leaves workers more exposed to unemployment later as their specific skills age, relative to a general education.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman & Jonah E. Rockoff
Shows teacher value-added estimates are not driven by sorting bias and that students assigned higher value-added teachers go on to earn more as adults, giving a quasi-experimental basis for judging teacher quality.
link checked 17 Sept 2026C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker C. Johnson & Claudia Persico
Using court-ordered school finance reforms as natural experiments, finds sustained increases in per-pupil spending raise poor children's educational attainment and adult earnings, against the older view that money doesn't matter.
link checked 17 Sept 2026