BRUCE SACERDOTE, Dartmouth College - Department of Economics, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Email: BRUCE.SACERDOTE@DARTMOUTH.EDU

I examine academic performance and college going for public school students affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Students who are forced to switch schools due to the hurricanes experience sharp declines in test scores in the first year following the hurricane. However, by the second and third years after the disaster, Katrina evacuees displaced from Orleans Parish appear to benefit from the displacement, experiencing a .15 standard deviation improvement in scores. The test score gains are concentrated among students whose initial schools were in the lowest quintile of the test score distribution and among students who leave the New Orleans MSA. Katrina evacuees from suburban areas and Rita evacuees (from the Lake Charles area) eventually recover most of the ground lost during 05-06 but do not experience long term gains relative to their pre-Katrina test scores. High school age Orleans evacuees have higher college enrollment rates than their predecessors from the same high schools. Meanwhile, Katrina evacuees from the suburbs experience a 3.5 percentage point drop in their rate of enrollment in four year colleges. Those evacuees do not to make up for the decline in the subsequent two years. Later cohorts of suburban New Orleans evacuees are unaffected. The results suggest that for students in the lowest performing schools, the long term gains to achievement from switching schools can more than offset even substantial costs of disruption.

GIORGIO BRUNELLO, University of Padua - Department of Economics, CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research), Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Email: brunello@decon.unipd.it
LORENZO ROCCO, University of Padua, University of Toulouse I
Email: lorenzo.rocco@unipd.it

When school quality increases with the educational standard set by schools, education before college need not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools. In our model, private schools can offer a lower educational standard at a positive price because they attract students with a relatively high cost of effort, who would find the high standards of public schools excessively demanding. We estimate the key parameters of the model and show that majority voting supports a system where private schools have higher quality in the US and public schools have higher quality in Italy.

BRUNO S. FREY, University of Zurich - Institute for Empirical Research in Economics (IEW), CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
Email: bsfrey@iew.unizh.ch
KATJA ROST, University of Zurich - Institute for Organization and Administrative Science
Email: katja.rost@iou.unizh.ch

Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and countries, and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. We argue that such rankings do not effectively measure research quality, which should be the essence of evaluation. For that reason, an alternative ranking is developed as a quality indicator, based on membership on academic editorial boards of professional journals. It turns out that especially the ranking of individual scholars is far from objective. The results differ markedly, depending on whether research quantity or research quality is considered. Even quantity rankings are not objective; two citation rankings, based on different samples, produce entirely different results. It follows that any career decisions based on rankings are dominated by chance and do not reflect research quality. Instead of propagating a ranking based on board membership as the gold standard, we suggest that committees make use of this quality indicator to find members who, in turn, evaluate the research quality of individual scholars.

OLGA N. NIKITINA-DEN BESTEN, University of Northampton
Email: olga.denbesten@northampton.ac.uk
JOHN HORTON, University of Northampton
Email: john.horton@northampton.ac.uk
PETER KRAFTL, University of Leicester
Email: pk123@le.ac.uk

Over the last decade, an array of policy interventions relating to children, young people and education in the UK have positioned pupil participation in the (re)design of school environments as a key imperative. Indeed, pupil participation is an explicit, core ideal of major, ongoing school (re)construction and (re)design programmes in the UK such as Building Schools for the Future, Academy schools, and Primary Capital Funding. The aim of this paper is to juxtapose the ideals of participation as expressed in national policy statements, via-a-vis the ways in which participation in these contexts is being done (or not done) in practice. To this end, the paper presents findings from in-depth interviews with Local Authority officers responsible for the implementation of policies relating to school (re)building and (re)design in diverse localities. These interviews show how the idea(l) of pupil participation may, in practice, be foreclosed by contingencies, budgets, issues, debates, personalities and events at grassroots level. The paper will suggest that national policy-making regarding participation should be better grounded in the complex and diverse realities of the (re)design of school environments in practice.