Educational Reform and Disadvantaged Students: Are They Better Off or Worse Off?

John Bishop and Ferran Mane ()

No 1309, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper analyzes the effects of increased academic standards on both average achievement levels and on equality of opportunity. The five policies evaluated are: (1) universal Curriculum-Based External Exit Exam Systems, (2) voluntary curriculum-based external exit exam systems with partial coverage such as New York State Regents exams in 1992, (3) state minimum competency graduation tests, (4) state defined minimums for the total number of courses students must take and pass to get a high school diploma and (5) state defined minimums for the number of academic courses necessary to get a diploma. We use international data to evaluate the effects of CBEEES. High school graduation standards differ a lot across states in the U.S. This allowed us to measure policy effects on student achievement and labor market success after high school by comparing states in a multiple regression framework. Our analysis shows that only two of the policies examined deliver on increasing everyone’s achievement and also reduce achievement gaps: universal CBEEES and higher academic course graduation requirements. Other policies were less successful in raising achievement and enhancing equality of opportunity.

Date: 2004
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp1309.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1309

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().