Essays on education politics, economics, and policy

The first essay of this dissertation, "Citizen Perceptions of Government Service Quality: Evidence from Public Schools," examines the criteria that citizens use to evaluate the quality of government services. Using data from a nationally representative survey, we find that citizens' perceptions of the quality of specific public schools reflect publicly available information about student achievement in those schools. The relationship between actual and perceived school quality is two to three times stronger for parents of school-age children, but does not differ by respondents' race/ethnicity, income, education, or homeowner status. A regression discontinuity analysis of an oversample of Florida residents confirms that highly visible accountability systems can have a causal effect on citizen perceptions of school quality. The second essay, "Do More Effective Teachers Earn More Outside of the Classroom?" examines earnings records for more than 90,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001-02 and 2006-07 school years, roughly 20,000 of whom left teaching during that time. Among grade 4-8 teachers leaving for other industries, a 1 standard deviation increase in estimated value-added to student achievement is associated with 6-9 percent higher earnings outside of teaching. The relationship between effectiveness and earnings is stronger in other industries than it is for the same teachers while in the classroom, suggesting that existing compensation systems do not account for the higher opportunity wages of effective teachers. The final essay, "The Impact of a Universal Class-Size Reduction Policy: Evidence from Florida's Statewide Mandate," estimates the impact of Florida's statewide class-size reduction (CSR) policy by comparing the deviations from prior achievement trends in districts that were required to reduce class size to deviations from prior trends in districts that received equivalent resources but were not required to reduce class size. I use the same comparative interrupted time series design to compare schools that were differentially affected by the policy (in terms of whether they had to reduce class size) but that did not receive equal additional resources. The results from both the district- and school-level analyses indicate that mandated CSR in Florida had little, if any, effect on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.