The Political Economy of Education

Chapter 12 focuses on how economists model production functions for education production units and, using these models, estimate the effect various inputs have on student outcomes. The most common educational production models are single output (usually student academic performance as measured by test scores), multi-input, and use secondary data collected at the school/classroom/individual student levels to estimate model parameters. Since these are not experimental data, students are not randomly assigned to inputs, and the main methodological problem is to identify the causal impact of particular inputs on student outcomes. The chapter discusses the role of teachers in educational production functions, the methods economists have used to estimate the contribution of teachers to knowledge production, as well as some examples of models to estimate the causal effects of other inputs into the production process – specifically, computer-assisted learning in primary school, summer school and student retention in primary and middle school, and an increased time on core subject teaching through a longer school day.