Shifting the bell curve: The benefits and costs of raising student achievement

Stuart S. Yeh

Evaluation and Program Planning, 2009, vol. 32, issue 1, 74-82

Abstract: Benefit-cost analysis was conducted to estimate the increase in earnings, increased tax revenues, value of less crime, and reductions in welfare costs attributable to nationwide implementation of rapid assessment, a promising intervention for raising student achievement in math and reading. Results suggest that social benefits would exceed total social costs by a ratio of 28. Fiscal benefits to the federal government would exceed costs to the federal treasury by a ratio of 93. Social benefits would exceed costs to each state treasury by a ratio no lower than 286, and fiscal benefits would exceed costs to each state treasury by a ratio no lower than 5, for all but two state treasuries. Sensitivity analyses suggest that the findings are robust to a 5-fold change in the underlying parameters.

Keywords: Cost-benefit; analysis; Educational; finance; Mathematics; Reading; Economics; of; education; Evaluation; Educational; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149-7189(08)00072-4
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:epplan:v:32:y:2009:i:1:p:74-82

Access Statistics for this article

Evaluation and Program Planning is currently edited by Jonathan A. Morell

More articles in Evaluation and Program Planning from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().