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Considerable controversy surrounds the impact of schools and teachers on the achievement of students. This paper disentangles the separate factors influencing achievement with special attention given to the role of teacher differences and other aspects of schools. Unique matched panel data from the Harvard/UTD Texas Schools Project permit distinguishing between total effects and the impact of specific, measured components of teachers and schools. While schools are seen to have powerful effects on achievement differences, these effects appear to derive most importantly from variations in teacher quality. A lower bound suggests that variations in teacher quality account for at least 7« percent of the total variation in student achievement, and there are reasons to believe that the true percentage is considerably larger. The subsequent analysis estimates educational production functions based on models of achievement growth with individual fixed effects. It identifies a few systematic factors a negative impact of initial years of teaching and a positive effect of smaller class sizes for low income children in earlier grades but these effects are very small relative to the effects of overall teacher quality differences.
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While special education has become a hotly debated issue of school policy, most of the discussion has centered on the aggregate costs of providing mandated programs for disabled children. Little attention has been paid to the effectiveness of such programs or possible interactions with the provision of regular education. This study, building on the unique data of the Harvard/UTD Texas Schools Project provides direct evidence on the effectiveness of special education programs. The average special education program boosts mathematics and reading achievement of special education students, particularly those classified as learning disabled, while not detracting from regular education students. These results are estimated quite precisely from models of fixed effects in achievement gains, and they are robust to a series of specification tests. At this stage, it is not possible to judge whether the program benefits are sufficiently large to justify the added spending involved.
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