Helen F. Ladd | |
---|---|
Academic career | |
Institutions | Duke University Brookings Institution |
Field | Education economics |
Alma mater | Wellesley College London School of Economics Harvard University |
Website | https://sites.duke.edu/ericafield/ |
Helen F. Ladd is an education economist who currently works as the Susan B. King Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. [1] In recognition of her research on the economics of education, she has been elected to the National Academy for Education and the National Academy of Sciences.
Helen Ladd earned a B.A. from Wellesley College in 1967, a master's degree from the London School of Economics in 1968 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974, writing a thesis on the relationship between local public expenditures and the composition of the property tax base under Richard Musgrave and Martin Feldstein. After her Ph.D., Ladd worked as Assistant Professor of Economics at Wellesley College (1974–77) and then as Assistant Professor and later Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at Harvard University (1978–86) before moving to Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy in 1986. There, she has been a Professor of Public Policy and, since 1991, also a Professor of Economics, until her emeritation in 2017. Since 2014, she has been the Susan B. King Professor Emerita of Public Policy and Economics. Additionally, Ladd has held visiting appointments at the University of Wellington, University of Cape Town, University of Amsterdam and at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (London). In addition to her academic positions, she is affiliated with the Brookings Institution, [2] Learning Policy Institute, [3] National Bureau of Economic Research, [4] and Urban Institute, [5] and has repeatedly presided over the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Moreover, she has co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Education Finance from 1996 to 1999. Finally, she performs editorial duties for Regional Science and Urban Economics , Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis , and has done so in the past for Research on Urban Policy , Journal of the American Planning Association , Evaluation Review , and the National Tax Journal . [6]
Ladd is married to Edward Fiske. [7]
Ladd was one of the signees of a 2018 amici curiae brief that expressed support for Harvard University in the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit. Other signees of the brief include Alan B. Krueger, Robert M. Solow, George A. Akerlof, Janet Yellen, as well as numerous others. [8]
Ladd's research focuses on school finance, school accountability, teacher labour markets, school choice, and early childhood programmes. [9] Therein, she has frequently collaborated with Charles Clotfelter, Jacob Vigdor as well as with her husband and fellow educational researcher Edward Fiske. According to IDEAS/RePEc, she belongs to the top 5% of economists in terms of research output. [10]
Early in her research career, Ladd conducted extensive research on local public finance. She found that commercial property in Boston has a stronger impact on the demand for local education expenditures than industrial property and criticizes the use of total property tax base per pupil as a measure for local fiscal capacity for education. [11] Ladd has also contributed to the debate on how to optimize state aid in the U.S. in order to offset fiscal disparities (low resources or high costs) across communities (with Katharine Bradbury, Mark Perrault, Andrew Reschovsky and John Yinger). [12] Together with Yinger, Ladd has further expanded on the fiscal crisis of U.S. cities in the 1970s and early 1980s in her book America's Ailing Cities, wherein she explores how it affected cities' policies and disparities between them. [13] Researching local tax mimicking between neighbouring U.S. counties, Ladd finds evidence of it with regard to the burdens of total local taxes and property taxes but not of sales taxes. [14] Studying the relationship between public finances and local population growth in the U.S., Ladd finds a U-shaped relationship between spending and density and a positive relationship between local population growth and per capita public spending, with the effect mainly reflecting the higher population density and a larger share of local public spending, suggesting that established residents in fast-growing areas may experience declining quality in public services and/or rising local tax burdens. [15] [16]
Since the mid-1990s, Ladd has performed research on the topic of school accountability. In Dallas, she finds performance-based school accountability to increase the outcomes of Hispanic and Caucasian 7th-graders but not Afro-American students, and to decrease drop-out and principal turnover rates. [17] In the late 1990s, Ladd repeatedly criticized the implementation of value-added measures of school effectiveness, arguing based on her observations in e.g. North Carolina that these measures' lack of consideration for differences in schools' resources discouraged effective teachers and principals from working in schools with large shares of disadvantaged students and exacerbate educational inequality (with Randall Walsh and Arnaldo Zelli). [18] [19] In sum, she has argued, along with e.g. Eva Baker or Edward Haertel, that test scores should only be one part of teacher evaluation and not dominate decisions about teachers' compensation or promotion. [20]
Ladd and Sheila Murray find no evidence of a direct effect of the share of elderly households on spending on education, though they may do so through their locational decision: as they tend to live in counties with low shares of children, the tax price of education is higher in other counties, which could decrease education spending in those counties. [21] With regard to school vouchers, Ladd has argued that the gains in student achievement from voucher programmes are likely to be small and to harm many disadvantaged students due to parents' tendency to judge schools by the characteristics of their students, with a slightly better case being made for means-tested vouchers. [22] In research with Robert Bifulco on charter schools in N.C., Ladd finds that students make substantially smaller gains in achievement in charter schools than in public schools and that these effects aren't due to positive impacts of charter schools on traditional public schools, though the high rates of student turnover at charter schools appear to account for a third of the difference. [23] Moreover, they find these charter schools to have raised the racial isolation of Afro-American and Caucasian students and widened their test-score gaps, in particular as students (and their families) tend to choose charter schools that are more racially isolated than students' previous schools, resulting in very few racially balanced charter schools. [24] Ladd has also performed research on school choice and school competition outside the U.S., e.g. analyzing the liberalization and decentralization of New Zealand's compulsory state education system during the 1990s, which yielded many cautionary lessons about the potential long-term consequences of market-based education reforms. [25]
Together with Clotfelter and Vigdor, Ladd has also conducted extensive research on teacher labour markets. In line with Ladd's research on North Carolina's school accountability system, Ladd, Clotfelter, Vigdor and Roger Aliaga Diaz find that this system strongly increased the turnover of high-quality teachers in schools serving low-performing students, though the extent of the decline in teacher quality at such schools remains unclear. [26] Later research by Ladd, Clotfelter, Vigdor and Justin Wheeler confirmed that the school personnel serving students in high-poverty schools in N.C. generally have lower qualifications than those in lower poverty schools.* [27] In further research in N.C., Ladd, Clotfelter and Vigdor find that the way how novice teachers are distributed by school administrators across schools and classrooms disadvantages Afro-American students [28] and that the generally positive returns to teacher experience in students' math and reading achievement are much larger with regard to math for socioeconomically advantaged students, possibly explaining why the most highly qualified teachers often teach the most advantaged students. [29] However, they (with Elizabeth Glennie) also find that offering higher salaries to teachers in high-poverty schools in N.C. was successful in substantially reducing these schools' teacher turnover rates, with experienced teachers displaying the strongest response. [30] They find that gaps between Caucasian and Afro-American student achievements are large and persistent, Hispanic and Asian students tend to gain on Caucasians over their schooling, with the racial gaps in math typically widening over time for high-performing students and closing for low-performing students. [31] Moreover, they also find that teacher credentials (e.g. licensure or certification systematically and substantially affect student achievement and that the unequal distribution of teacher credentials by race and socioeconomic status of high school students exacerbates gaps between demographic groups' educational achievement. [32] Finally, Ladd also observes that teachers' perceptions of their working conditions are good predictors of their transitions to other schools, with school leadership as the most salient dimension of working conditions. [33]
With regard to the economics of education, Ladd has contributed substantially to research on the relationship between poverty and education: Together with Jens Ludwig and Greg Duncan, Ladd evaluates the impact of the Moving to Opportunity programme of residential mobility, wherein volunteering low-income families were randomly assigned to either receive rental subsidies for housing in low-poverty areas as well as counseling and housing search assistance, to only receive unrestricted rental subsidies or to a control group, finding that assignment to the first group considerably raised elementary school children's performance in reading and math, though there is also some evidence that teens in both experimental groups experience increases in grade retentions, drop-out rates and disciplinary actions at school due to differences between the academic and behavioural standards between their new and old schools. [34] Moreover, in further research on the relationship between education and poverty, Ladd has strongly criticized Bush- and Obama-era efforts to improve the U.S. education system for their ignorance of the growing performance gap between the achievement of students from advantaged and disadvantaged families and their lack of focus on the educational challenges of disadvantaged students. [35] Another area of research concerns the impact of technology on education, wherein Ladd, Vigdor and Erika Martinez confirm earlier findings of large gaps between different racial and socioeconomic groups' access and use of home computers and observe that the introduction of home computer technology and high-speed Internet access in households tends to modestly decrease students' math and reading test scores. [36] Furthermore, in another study outside the U.S., Ladd and Fiske have evaluated the post-Apartheid education reform in South Africa, concluding that while genuine equal treatment of races was at hand, equality in terms of educational opportunity or adequacy remained elusive. [37] Finally, in a much-cited study, Ladd finds strong evidence for discrimination in mortgage lending, most of which she attributes to profit-driven statistical discrimination, notably reflecting the fact that minority borrowers often display characteristics associated with lower creditworthiness. [38]
A school voucher, also called an education voucher in a voucher system, is a certificate of government funding for students at schools chosen by themselves or their parents. Funding is usually for a particular year, term, or semester. In some countries, states, or local jurisdictions, the voucher can be used to cover or reimburse home schooling expenses. In some countries, vouchers only exist for tuition at private schools.
School choice is a term for education options that allow students and families to select alternatives to public schools. It is the subject of fierce debate in various state legislatures across the United States.
Charter schools in the United States are primary or secondary education institutions that are public schools which are publicly funded and operate independently, rather than being overseen by local school districts. Charter schools have a contract with local school districts or other authorizing bodies that allow them to operate. These contracts, or charters, are how charter schools bear their name. They are funded with public tax dollars, though they also fundraise independently. Charter schools are subject to fewer rules than traditional state schools in exchange for greater accountability. Proponents argue that they are meant to serve underserved communities that wish to have alternatives to their neighborhood school. Charters are run as either non-profit or for-profit institutions. However, there are some for-profit management organizations that hold charters, though these are only allowed in Arizona. Only non-profit charters can receive donations from private sources, just the same as traditional public schools.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was a U.S. Act of Congress that reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; it included Title I provisions applying to disadvantaged students. It supported standards-based education reform based on the premise that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals could improve individual outcomes in education. The Act required states to develop assessments in basic skills. To receive federal school funding, states had to give these assessments to all students at select grade levels.
Tracking is separating students by academic ability into groups for all subjects or certain classes and curriculum within a school. It may be referred to as streaming or phasing in some schools.
Thomas Joseph Kane is an American education economist who currently holds the position of Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has performed research on education policy, labour economics and econometrics. During Bill Clinton's first term as U.S. President, Kane served on the Council of Economic Advisers.
Eric Alan Hanushek is an economist who has written prolifically on public policy with a special emphasis on the economics of education. Since 2000, he has been a Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an American public policy think tank located at Stanford University in California. He was awarded the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2021.
Charles T. Clotfelter is an economist and the Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy Studies and Professor of Economics and Law at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he has taught since 1979. He is also director of the Center for the Study of Philanthropy and Voluntarism at Duke and is a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. His primary research interests include the economics of education, the nonprofit sector, tax policy and public finance.
The racial achievement gap in the United States refers to disparities in educational achievement between differing ethnic/racial groups. It manifests itself in a variety of ways: African-American and Hispanic students are more likely to receive lower grades, score lower on standardized tests, drop out of high school, and they are less likely to enter and complete college than whites, while whites score lower than Asian Americans.
School segregation in the United States was the segregation of students based on their ethnicity. Where they were not prohibited from schools and denied an education, various minorities were barred from schools for whites. The U.S. Supreme Court rules Blacks were not and could never be U.S. citizens and overturned the 1875 Civil Rights Act, passed by Republicans during the Reconstruction era, in 1883. Segregation laws were dismantled in the late 1960s by the U.S. Supreme Court. Segregation was practiced in the north and segregation continued longstanding exclusionary policies in much of the South after the Civil War. School integration in the United States took place at different times in different areas and often met resistance. Jim Crow laws codified segregation. These laws were influenced by the history of slavery and discrimination in the US. Secondary schools for African Americans in the South were called training schools instead of high schools in order to appease racist whites and focused on vocational education. After the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, which banned segregated school laws, school segregation took de facto form. School segregation declined rapidly during the late 1960s and early 1970s as the government became strict on schools' plans to combat segregation more effectively as a result of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County. Voluntary segregation by income appears to have increased since 1990. Racial segregation has either increased or stayed constant since 1990, depending on which definition of segregation is used. In general, definitions based on the amount of interaction between black and white students show increased racial segregation, while definitions based on the proportion of black and white students in different schools show racial segregation remaining approximately constant.
Public schools in the United States of America provide basic education from kindergarten until the twelfth grade. This is provided free of charge for the students and parents, but is paid for by taxes on property owners as well as general taxes collected by the federal government. This education is mandated by the states. With the completion of this basic schooling, one obtains a high school diploma as certification of basic skills for employers.
Unequal access to education in the United States results in unequal outcomes for students. Disparities in academic access among students in the United States are the result of several factors including: government policies, school choice, family wealth, parenting style, implicit bias towards the race or ethnicity of the student, and the resources available to the student and their school. Educational inequality contributes to a number of broader problems in the United States, including income inequality and increasing prison populations. Educational inequalities in the United States are wide-ranging, and many potential solutions have been proposed to mitigate their impacts on students.
Paul William Glewwe is an economist and Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include economic development and growth, the economics of the public sector, and poverty and welfare. He formerly was the Director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy and served as co-chair of the education programme of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).
Thomas S. Dee is an American economist and the Barnett Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, where he also directs the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities.
Educational inequality has existed in the Southeast Michigan area of the United States since the birth of institutional, urban schooling in the US. Inequality between lower and higher class districts have perpetuated divisions in educational opportunities and outcomes between Michigan communities, especially areas in and around Detroit, the state's largest city. According to a report by the Kerner Commission from 1967, "spending per pupil in Detroit suburbs was 27% greater than in the city and that spending since World War II had risen more in the suburbs than in the city. ." More recently, the economic decline of Detroit culminating in the 2013 Detroit bankruptcy has aggravated the educational tensions.
Susanna Loeb is an American education economist and director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. She was previously the Barnett Family Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where she also served as founding director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA). Moreover, she directs Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE). Her research interests include the economics of education and the relationship between schools and educational policies, in particular school finance and teacher labor markets.
Martin Carnoy is an American labour economist and Vida Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education as well as of the International Academy of Education. Professor Carnoy has graduated nearly 100 PhD students, a record at Stanford University.
Brian Aaron Jacob is an American economist and a professor of public policy, economics and education at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy of the University of Michigan. There, he also currently serves as co-director of the Education Policy Initiative and of the Youth Policy Lab. In 2008, Jacob's research on education policy was awarded the David N. Kershaw Award, which is given by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management and honours persons who have made a distinguished contribution to the field of public policy analysis and management before the age of 40. His doctoral advisor at the University of Chicago was Freakonomics author Steven Levitt.
Jonah E. Rockoff is an American education economist and currently works as Professor of Finance and Economics at the Columbia Graduate School of Business. Rockoff's research interests include the economics of education and public finance. His research on the management of public schools has been awarded the 2016 George S. Eccles Research Award in Finance and Economics by Columbia Business School.
James H. Wyckoff is a U.S.-American education economist who currently serves as Memorial Professor of Education and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, where he is also the Director of the Center for Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness. His research on the impact of teacher compensation on teacher performance has been awarded the Raymond Vernon Memorial Award of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management in 2015.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)