High School Graduation in the Context of Changing Elementary and Secondary Education Policy and Income Inequality: The Last Half Century

Nora Gordon ()

No 19049, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Goldin and Katz (2008) document the key role that the educational attainment of native-born workers in the U.S. has played in determining changing returns to skill and income distribution in the twentieth century, emphasizing the need to understand the forces driving the supply of educated workers. This paper examines stagnation in high school graduation rates from about 1970 to 2000, alongside dramatic changes in elementary and secondary educational institutions and income inequality over those years. I review the policy history of major changes in educational institutions, including but not limited to the massive increase in school spending, and related literature. I then present descriptive analysis of the relationships between income inequality and both graduation and school spending from 1963 to 2007. Results suggest that inequality at the top of the income distribution, which was negatively correlated with the establishment of public secondary schooling earlier in the twentieth century, was positively correlated not only with education spending levels but also with aggregate high school graduation rates at the state level in this later period.

JEL-codes: I2 I20 I24 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-his and nep-ure
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Published as Introduction to "Human Capital in History: The American Record" , Leah Platt Boustan, Carola Frydman, Robert A. Margo. in Human Capital in History: The American Record , Boustan, Frydman, and Margo. 2014

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