Education program meeting.

• Position: Bureau News

The NBER's Program on Education met on April 27 in Cambridge. Program Director Caroline M. Hoxby of Harvard University organized the meeting at which these papers were discussed:

Caroline Hoxby, and Gretchen Weingarth, Harvard University, "Taking Race Out of the Equation: School Reassignment and the Structure of Peer Effects"

Mary A. Burke, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Tim R. Sass, Florida State University, "Classroom Peer Effects and Student Achievement"

Michael Anderson, MIT, "Uncovering Gender Differences in the Effects of Early Intervention: A Reevaluation of the Abecedarian, Perry Preschool, and Early Training Projects"

Erich Battistin and Barbara Sianesi, Institute for Fiscal Studies, "Misreported Schooling and Returns to Education: Evidence from the UK"

Andrew Leigh, Australian National University, "Teacher Pay and Teacher Aptitude"

Harry Krashinsky, University of Toronto, " How Would One Extra Year of High School Affect Academic Performance in University? Evidence from a Unique Policy Change"

In the last and current decade, the Wake County school district has reassigned numerous students to schools, moving up to 5 percent of the student population in any given year. Before 2000, the explicit goal was balancing schools' racial composition; after 2000, it was balancing schools' income composition. Throughout, finding space for the areas rapidly expanding student population was the most important concern. The reassignments generate a very large number of natural experiments in which students experience new peers in the classroom. As a matter of policy, exposure to an "experiment" should have been and actually appears to have been random, conditional on a student's fixed characteristics such as race and income. Using panel data on students before and after they experience policy-induced changes in peers, Hoxby and Weingarth explore which models of peer effects explain the data. Their results reject the models in which a peer has a homogeneous effect that does not depend on the student's own characteristics. They find support for models in which a student benefits from peers who are somewhat higher achieving than himself but not very different. A student benefits least from peers who are very different (in either positive or negative ways) and peers who create an unfocused (bimodal or "schizophrenic") classroom. These results also indicate that, when we properly account for the effects of peers' achievement and peers' race, the...