Doctoral Dissertation Research: School Quality and Occupational Mobility in US Economic History

该项目建议建立新的数据集，以研究学校的质量和可访问性如何与职业和地理流动性在20世纪初的美国进行互动的背景下，这项研究既需要“高中运动”和从农业到服务和制造业活动的过渡。 这两次运动都是美国经济发展中的重要事件，但它们在家庭和个人层面上的相互作用却没有得到很好的记录。 特别是，家庭对高中运动的反应以及这些反应对儿童长期成果和区域经济发展的影响才刚刚开始得到更好的关注。 拟议的项目将开发新的微观层面的证据，以更好地了解这些问题在南方，一个相对贫穷的地区，在当时，随后缩小了教育和经济发展的差距相对于美国其他地区的项目旨在回答以下问题：1）如何在高中入学和高中质量的变化影响未来的收入和职业选择的南方学生？ 2)南方高中的扩张如何影响移民模式？ 该补助金下的主要活动需要从田纳西州档案馆最近发现的记录中收集非常详细的数据集。 高中校长被要求填写关于他们学校的详细报告。 除了师生比例和学年长度等共同指标外，这些报告还载有关于教师教育和学校教授的科目的信息;关于学校建设和教室类型的信息（例如，实验室）;图书馆信息（如果有的话）;以及关于学生年龄和年级进展的信息。 总的来说，这些信息可以更丰富的表征学校的质量比通常提供给研究人员。 在20世纪20年代中期，田纳西州各地的高中存在相当大的差异，即使在控制了可观察到的经济和人口特征之后。 因此，来自观察相似背景的儿童面临着完全不同的教育环境，特别是在八年级以上的时候。 这种变化为研究人们如何应对不断变化的教育环境以及研究1940年人口普查时观察到的对这些学生的长期影响提供了基础。

The project proposes to build new datasets to study how school quality and accessibility interacted with occupational and geographic mobility in the early twentieth-century U.S. The context for the study entails both the "high school movement" and the transition from farming to service and manufacturing activities. Both movements were important events in the economic development of the United States, but their interplay at the household and individual-level is not very well documented. In particular, the responses of families to the high school movement and the implications of those responses for the children's long-run outcomes and for regional economic development are just starting to come into better focus. The proposed project will develop new micro-level evidence to better understand these issues in the South, a relatively poor region at the time, which subsequently narrowed the gaps in education and economic development relative to the rest of the U.S. The project seeks to answer the following questions:1) How did variation in high-school access and high-school quality affect the future earnings and occupational choice of southern students? 2) How did the expansion of southern high schools affect migration patterns? The main activity under the grant entails collecting a highly detailed dataset from recently discovered records in the Tennessee State Archives. High school principals were required to fill out detailed reports on their schools. Above and beyond common indicators such as the student-teacher ratio and length of the school year, these reports contain information on the faculty's education and the subjects that were taught at the school; information on school construction and the types of classrooms (e.g., labs); information on the library (if one existed); and information about the age and progression of students through grades. Taken together, this information allows a much richer characterization of school quality than normally available to researchers. There are sizable differences in high schools across locations in Tennessee in the mid-1920s, even after controlling for observable economic and demographic characteristics of the locations. Consequently, children from observationally similar backgrounds faced quite different schooling environments, especially when looking beyond the 8th grade level. This variation provides a basis for studying how people responded to the changing educational environment and for studying the long-run implications for those students as observed later in life at the time of the 1940 Census.