The Failure of Input‐based Schooling Policies
回顾美国和全球证据，指出增加学校资源（如缩小班级规模）对提升学生成绩效果有限，而改变学校内部激励机制更有效，对政策制定者和教育研究者有参考价值。
In an effort to improve the quality of schools, governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them. By concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools, the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement. This paper provides a review of the US and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies. It then contrasts the impact of resources with that of variations in teacher quality that are not systematically related to school resources. Finally, alternative performance incentive policies are described. Academic and policy interest in improving schools has followed directly from recognition of the importance of human capital formation to both individuals and society. Much of the motivation comes from theoretical and empirical analyses of the relationship between income, productivity, and economic growth and the quantity of schooling of individuals – the most common proxy for human capital levels. For the most part, however, policy initiatives do not focus on the quantity of schooling but instead on the quality of schooling. It is here that controversy about research into the determinants of quality has led to ambiguities about policy. This discussion reviews basic evidence on student performance and puts it into the context of contemporary policy debates. The central conclusion is that the commonly used input policies – such as lowering class sizes or tightening the requirements for teaching credentials – are almost certainly inferior to altered incentives within the schools. The general arguments about schooling in the US and elsewhere in the world have a simple structure. First, the high returns to additional schooling are noted. In the US these returns have grown dramatically over the past 20 years, particularly for a college education. During the 1990s, for example, an average college graduate earned in excess of a 70 % premium above the average high school graduate, e.g., Pierce and Welch (1996). Schooling returns in other countries,