The race between edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides a canon­i­cal frame­work that does an excel­lent job of explain­ing US wage struc­ture changes across the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. The frame­work involves sec­u­lar increas­es in the demand for more-edu­­cat­ed work­ers from skill-biased tech­no­log­i­cal change, com­bined with vari­a­tions in the sup­ply of skills from changes in edu­ca­tion­al access. We expand […]

School choice may lead to improve­ments in school pro­duc­tiv­i­ty if par­ents’ choic­es reward effec­tive schools and pun­ish inef­fec­tive ones. This mech­a­nism requires par­ents to choose schools based on causal effec­tive­ness rather than peer char­ac­ter­is­tics. We study rela­tion­ships among par­ent pref­er­ences, peer qual­i­ty, and causal effects on out­comes for appli­cants to New York City’s cen­tral­ized high […]

In a flipped class­room, an increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar ped­a­gog­i­cal mod­el, stu­dents view a video lec­ture at home and work on exer­cis­es with the instruc­tor dur­ing class time. Advocates of the flipped class­room claim the prac­tice not only improves stu­dent achieve­ment, but also ame­lio­rates the achieve­ment gap. We con­duct a ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­al at West Point and find that the flipped class­room pro­duced short term gains in Math and no effect in Economics, but that the flipped mod­el broad­ened the achieve­ment gap: effects are dri­ven by white, male, and high­er achiev­ing stu­dents. We find no long term aver­age effects on stu­dent learn­ing, but the widened achieve­ment gap per­sists. Our find­ings demon­strate fea­si­bil­i­ty for the flipped class­room to induce short term gains in stu­dent learn­ing; how­ev­er, the exac­er­ba­tion of the achieve­ment gap, the effect fade-out, and the null effects in Economics sug­gest that edu­ca­tors should exer­cise cau­tion when con­sid­er­ing the mod­el.