Thursday, August 5, 2010

Education Research Report: Curing Baumol’s Disease: In Search of Productivity Gains in K–12 Schooling

Education Research Report: Curing Baumol’s Disease: In Search of Productivity Gains in K–12 Schooling

Curing Baumol’s Disease: In Search of Productivity Gains in K–12 Schooling

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Full Report

Public schools in most areas of the U.S. are caught in the vise of declining revenues and rising costs.

Policymakers talk about innovating to do more with less, but to date no one knows what that looks like in education. The truth is that dramatically more productive schooling models simply have not emerged in the last two decades, even amidst cost pressures that drove spending up faster than inflation or GDP.

While education differs in important ways from other service sectors, improvement in productivity in other economic sectors may hold important lessons for understanding how the education system can become more efficient and effective.

This paper first explores the past and future outlook for education absent productivity gains. The authors then