WWS professor Krueger wins economics research award

Wilson School professor Alan Krueger has received a Milken Institute Award for Distinguished Economic Research for his study examining the effects of public school class sizes on student achievement.

Krueger's paper, titled "An Economist's View of Class Size Research," was one of four winners of the $2,000 award, given for the first time this year.

The judges of the contest — who were members of the Milken Institute's professional staff — looked for "unique, serious research" that had not yet been distributed, Milken Institute director of communications Skip Rimer said. The research had to be presented in a way that made it "accessible to members of the business, finance, economics and policy communities," he said.

Krueger, on leave this year at the Center for Advanced Studies and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, said the focus of his research was twofold. "First, it goes back and reexamines the literature on the effect of school resources on achievement," he said. "Second, it tries to calculate the economic rate of return to investments in school resources."

Class size is closely related to the amount of financial resources a public school spends because schools with smaller classes must pay for more teachers, said Diane Whitmore GS, who assisted Krueger in his research.

Krueger said he analyzed an influential study conducted by economist Eric Hanushek. Hanu-shek's research tried to summarize the literature on the effects of school spending and smaller classes on student achievement and concluded that there was no correlation.

Resource levels

"One of the things I found is that his conclusion is not very robust," Krueger said, noting that Hanushek drew estimates mainly from studies that showed class size had only a minimal effect on student achievement. "If all the studies are weighted equally, then the results show fairly strong and consistent evidence that students who go to schools that had a higher level of resources tended to perform better," Krueger said.

Krueger said his main reason for doing the research was that education spending is a major public policy issue. "There's been controversy for some time over whether spending is used properly and has an effect," he said.

Krueger said he wants to continue his research by examining the existing data on class size and student achievement in order to determine its validity.

"I view that study as the first step along the way," he said of his prize-winning paper. "One of the things I concluded from the literature reviews is that the literature is only as good as the underlying studies."

Researchers from Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Case Western Reserve University received the other three awards given by the Milken Institute.