Improving Urban Public Education: Lessons from Charter Schools

Charter schools represent one of the fastest growing, yet controversial innovations in education reform. In this talk, I will review several papers measuring urban school performance from a series of papers using data from Boston, New York City, Denver, and New Orleans from MIT’s School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative. In addition to discussing the broader debates on sources of achievement gaps, I will also briefly touch upon some new methodological issues emerging from this work.

Speaker Details

Parag A. Pathak is a Professor of Economics at MIT, founding co-director of the NBER Working Group on Market Design, and founder of MIT’s School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII), a laboratory focused on education, human capital, and the income distribution. His work on market design and education was recognized with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Shapley Lectureship, and the 2016 Social Choice and Welfare Prize. More than a million students have been assigned to school in choice systems he has helped to design in Boston, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, New York, and Washington DC.

Date:
Speakers:
Parag Pathak
Affiliation:
MIT