No school district can be all charismatic leaders and super-teachers. It can't start from scratch, and it can't fire all its teachers and principals when students do poorly. Great charter schools can only serve a tiny minority of students. Whether we like it or not, most of our youngsters will continue to be educated in mainstream public schools.

The good news, as David L. Kirp reveals in Improbable Scholars, is that there's a sensible way to rebuild public education and close the achievement gap for all students. Indeed, this is precisely what's happening in a most unlikely place: Union City, New Jersey, a poor, crowded Latino community just across the Hudson from Manhattan. The school district--once one of the worst in the state--has ignored trendy reforms in favor of proven game-changers like quality early education, a word-soaked curriculum, and hands-on help for teachers. When beneficial new strategies have emerged, like using sophisticated data-crunching to generate pinpoint assessments to help individual students, they have been folded into the mix.

The results demand that we take notice--from third grade through high school, Union City scores on the high-stakes state tests approximate the statewide average. In other words, these inner-city kids are achieving just as much as their suburban cousins in reading, writing, and math. What's even more impressive, nearly ninety percent of high school students are earning their diplomas and sixty percent of them are going to college. Top students are winning national science awards and full rides at Ivy League universities. These schools are not just good places for poor kids. They are good places for kids, period.

Improbable Scholars offers a playbook--not a prayer book--for reform that will dramatically change our approach to reviving public education.

Is it possible to increase one’s influence simply by behaving more confidently? Prior research presents two competing hypotheses: (1) the confidence heuristic holds that more confidence increases credibility, and (2) the calibration hypothesis asserts that overconfidence will backfire when others find out. Study 1 reveals that, consistent with the calibration hypothesis, while accurate advisors benefit from displaying confidence, confident but inaccurate advisors receive low credibility ratings. However, Study 2 shows that when feedback on advisor accuracy is unavailable or costly, confident advisors hold sway regardless of accuracy. People also made less effort to determine the accuracy of confident advisors; interest in buying advisor performance data decreased as the advisor’s confidence went up. These results add to our understanding of how advisor confidence, accuracy, and calibration influence others.

The CCAPS program’s research on institutional capacity for natural disasters examines the causes of variation in government policies to reduce the risk of, prepare for, and respond to natural disasters. Natural hazards, such as floods, drought, earthquakes, and tropical cyclones, do not necessarily result in disasters, but they present a clear policy challenge for national governments: how does a country prepare for the often unexpected? This brief presents the methodologies used to investigate how governments answer this question. Through a qualitative analysis of ten African country case studies, this study provides a comprehensive evaluation of existing explanations for variation in government efforts to develop disaster management capacities. The research strategy also helps to overcome limitations of previous analyses focused on a small number of cases or inadequate quantitative data, thereby providing new insights into the practice of disaster preparedness.

CCAPS research has aimed to document natural disaster response capacities in Africa and explore what drives government investment in disaster preparedness and response. The research shows that the two clearest predictors of investment in preparedness activities are economic strength and perceived risk of natural threats. However, these factors explain little when there is limited electoral incentive to invest in disaster management or minimal bureaucratic capacity to implement preparedness programs. Electoral conditions and political development affect whether governments have the incentive to invest in preparedness activities and the institutional capability to do so. In addition, domestic civil society and external actors often offer important support to governments, and it is the explicit focus by these nonstate actors on both preparedness and response that seems to limit the risk that international funding for disaster preparedness would reduce domestic spending on that goal in the majority of cases considered here. These findings have important implications for understanding the relationship between national governments and international aid agencies. Both domestic and international actors need to know what characteristics of states must be supported to encourage the development of vulnerability-reducing institutions in the face of dynamic natural hazards. This study attempts to shed new light on these issues and to inform debates over the most appropriate and efficient uses of aid and national resources for addressing natural shocks.

Parents may have important effects on their children, but little work in economics explores whether children’s schooling opportunities crowd out or encourage parents’ investment in children. We analyze data from the Head Start Impact Study, which granted randomly-chosen preschool-aged children the opportunity to attend Head Start. We find that Head Start causes a substantial increase in parents’ involvement with their children—such as time spent reading to children, math activities, or days spent with children by fathers who do not live with their children—both during and after the period when their children are potentially enrolled in Head Start. These results are not predicted by the model of Becker and Tomes (1976), who argue that child schooling should crowd out parent investment in children.

Once again, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide on the contentious issue of Affirmative Action, and specifically the use of race in admissions decisions in public universities. Despite differences in the details, seasoned veterans of affirmative action debates are experiencing déjà vu. In this case, Abigail Noel Fisher claims overt racial discrimination when the highly selective University of Texas at Austin (UT) rejected her freshman application in 2008. The Court’s ruling could range from upholding the legal precedent of allowing race to be one of many factors in admissions; to a more narrow decision that rejects UT’s particular use of race, but sets new limits on such decisions; to an outright rejection of using race in any form as one among many factors universities currently use in admissions. In this paper, I discuss the case and present a number of themes that should be considered by the Court and by the public, including problems with the notion of a “critical mass” of minority students; that arguments regarding academic merit are complex and nuanced; and that among highly selective public universities, where demand from many qualified students far exceeds the supply of admissions spots, admissions policies have arbitrary outcomes despite the best efforts to create rational and explainable admissions policies. As much as anything, the Fisher case is about the appropriate locus of admissions policy and decisions. The historical precedent, as reiterated by Justice Sandra Day O’Conner in the 2003 Grutter case, is that judgments related to the question of admissions, including the idea of sufficient critical mass of underrepresented students and factors that indicate future academic success, are, in the end, judgments that should remain within the Academy and which the courts should not infringe on without a compelling need to do so. There is no compelling need in the Fisher case. Simply agreeing to hear the case seems to indicate a willingness by the Court to overrule past precedent. Yet there is also a possibility that the Court’s decision will be influenced by the prospect that a ruling against affirmative action will, for the first time, have meaning for selective private institutions, which have largely avoided scrutiny of their admissions practices and biases. As all of the justices are products of eastern elite private institutions, this could be an important consideration, although speculative.

How do restaurant workers live on some of the lowest wages in America? And how do poor working conditions—discriminatory labor practices, exploitation, and unsanitary kitchens affect the meals that arrive at our restaurant tables? Food Labor Research Center director Saru Jayaraman sets out to answer these questions by following the lives of restaurant workers in eight American cities. Blending personal narrative and investigative journalism, her book is an exploration of the political, economic, and moral implications of dining out.

Drawing from historical, sociological, and policy literatures, as well as legislative activity, this article traces the intellectual and political evolution of educational equity, beginning with progressive models of redistribution and remedy to more recent neoliberal forms, which privilege parental empowerment through the expansion of school choice. At the legislative and regulatory levels, policymakers have redefined equity in schooling to mean providing parents with sufficient school choices to “buy” education for their children. This framework recasts the role of the state as a broadening agent for educational markets. Although parental empowerment is seemingly a central goal of the legislation, the laws also facilitate the entry of private sector actors into the educational marketplace. The resulting choice options depart from redistributive forms of equity, advantage some parents over others, and also empower for-profit and nonprofit intermediaries and private providers seeking to gain a share of the educational marketplace.