IPR - Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern University

Education Policy
childhood education centers as a vehicle for supporting
parents’ continuing educational development. The
Gates initiative seeks to double the number of lowincome
students who attend college and earn degrees
by 2025, an increase of more than 250,000 graduates
per year. Chase-Lansdale is collaborating with the
Ounce of Prevention Fund and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
of Columbia University.
< Tax Policy and Education Funding
The property tax has long been the primary local source
of funding for schools and, along with state aid, provides
the lion’s share of total resources for schools. In recent
decades, though, the property tax has come under
siege as a source of revenue for schools. Management
and strategy professor Therese McGuire and Leslie
Papke of Michigan State University set out to examine
the various charges
against the property tax
as a means of funding
schools and to compare
alternative sources of
revenue, such as sales
and income taxes, with
the property tax.
Therese McGuire conducts
research on property taxes
and school funding.
The principal charge
has been that, since
property wealth is
unequally distributed
across school districts,
reliance on this source
of revenue results in
unacceptable differences in property tax rates, property
revenues per pupil, and most importantly, spending per
pupil across districts. The property tax is also criticized
for being inefficient and complex. Dissatisfaction
with the tax appears to be growing, as evidenced by
the number of attempts to constrain spending and
challenge such taxes in court. Among the possible
explanations for the declining support for property
taxes are demographic shifts, with rising numbers of the
elderly and declining numbers of school-age children.
McGuire is ConAgra Foods Research Professor.
< Juvenile Delinquency and Comer
In 2000, Cook with colleagues Robert Murphy
and H. David Hunt published a multilevel study of
Chicago inner-city schools to evaluate James Comer’s
School Development Program (SDP), a whole-school
reform effort designed to improve a school’s social and
academic climate through three teams of operations
(school planning, mental health, and parents). One
of their main findings was that SDP seemed to reduce
delinquency between grades 5 and 8, based on the
youths’ self-reported information.
In a new study, Cook and Paul Hirschfield of Rutgers
examine whether the same effect would be seen when
using juvenile justice system records to measure
delinquency instead of self-reports. With unparalleled
access to individual-level records about contact with
the justice system from police and school records—
especially from the Cook County Juvenile Court
records until age 17—the two researchers do not find
any evidence showing that Chicago’s Comer schools
reduce delinquency between Grades 5 and 8 or even
the high school years. Indeed, their finding casts doubt
on prior claims about SDP’s effects on delinquency.
They point to SDP as creating “a thin reed” on which to
stack any theories or policies and call for more rigorous,
broader, multilevel studies to determine the true effects
of SDP, including on rates of juvenile delinquency.
< Abilities, Schooling Choices, and Racial Gaps
Economist Sergio Urzúa uses data from the 1979
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79)
to create a model of the relationship between abilities,
schooling choices, and racial gaps in labor market
outcomes. In his analysis, he distinguishes observed
cognitive and noncognitive measures from unobserved
cognitive and noncognitive abilities. He analyzes
schooling decisions based on future earnings, family
background, and unobserved abilities. The results indicate
that, even after controlling for abilities, significant
racial labor market gaps exist. They also suggest that the
standard practice of equating observed test scores might
overcompensate for differentials in ability.
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