Education Program meets.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings

The NBER's Program on Education met in Cambridge on November 14. Program Director Caroline M. Hoxby of NBER and Stanford University organized the meeting. These papers were discussed:

Richard J. Murnane, Harvard University and NBER, and Jennifer Steele and John Willett, Harvard University, "Do Financial Incentives Help Low-Performing Schools Attract and Keep Academically Talented Teachers? New Evidence from California"

Kirabo Jackson, Cornell University, "Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation" Jonah E. Rockoff, Columbia University and NBER, and Lesley Turner, Columbia University, "Short-Run Impacts of Accountability on School Quality"

Hanley Chiang, Mathematica, Inc., "How Accountability Pressure on Failing Schools Affects Student Achievement"

Virginia, "Human Capital Response to Globalization: Education and Information Technology in India"

Maria Fitzpatrick, Stanford University, Preschoolers Enrolled and Mothers at Work? The Effects of Universal Pre-Kindergarten"

Fernando B. Botelho and Ricardo A. Madeira, University of Sao Paulo, and Marcos A. Rangel, University of Chicago, "Discrimination Goes to School? Understanding Racial Differences in Non-Blind Grading"

Murnane, Steele, and Willett capitalize on a natural experiment that occurred in California between 2000 and 2002: in those years, the state offered a competitively allocated $20,000 incentive, called the Governor's Teaching Fellowship (GTF), aimed at attracting academically talented, novice teachers to low-performing schools and retaining them in those schools for at least four years. Taking advantage of data on the career histories of 14,045 individuals who pursued California teaching licenses between 1998 and 2003, the authors are able to estimate the unbiased impact of the GTF on the decisions of recipients to begin and continue working in low-performing schools. They find that acquiring a GTF increased the probability that recipients entered low-performing schools within two years after licensure program enrollment by 34 percentage points. However, on average, GTF recipients left low performing schools at a higher rate in their first year of teaching than academically talented teachers without GTFs who chose to work in low-performing schools.

Jackson uses the reshuffling of students caused by the end of student busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg to investigate the relationship between changes in student attributes...