Schooling and Human Capital Formation in the Global Economy: Revisiting the Equity-efficiency Quandary

Most of the research attention to schools has focused on the level of student achievement with much less attention given to the distribution of results. Policy makers on the other hand place a disproportionate amount of attention on achievement results for minorities and disadvantaged students. This paper considers a range of school factors that potentially have differential effects on groups in the student population. These include the influence of peers, the distribution of teacher quality, the impacts of residential mobility, and other programmatic differences. By using the rich data form the UTD Texas Schools Project, it is possible to quantify the magnitude of separate effects and to place them within a unified discussion of trade-offs and policy alternatives. * Stanford University, University of Texas at Dallas, and National Bureau of Economic Research. This research has been supported by the Packard Humanities Institute.