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

该项目建议建立新的数据集，以研究学校质量和可及性如何与20世纪初美国的职业和地理流动性相互作用。这项研究的背景包括“高中运动”和从农业向服务业和制造业活动的转变。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的长期结果和区域经济发展的影响才刚刚开始得到更好的关注。拟议中的项目将开发新的微观证据，以更好地了解南方的这些问题，当时南方是一个相对贫穷的地区，随后缩小了与美国其他地区相比在教育和经济发展方面的差距。该项目试图回答以下问题：1)高中入学和高中质量的差异如何影响南方学生未来的收入和职业选择？2)南方高中的扩张如何影响移民模式？拨款的主要活动是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短等常见指标外，这些报告还包括关于教员教育和学校教授的科目的信息；关于学校建设和教室类型(例如实验室)的信息；关于图书馆(如果有的话)的信息；以及关于学生的年龄和成绩进步的信息。总而言之，这些信息允许对学校质量的描述比研究人员通常获得的要丰富得多。20世纪20年代中期，田纳西州不同地区的高中之间存在着相当大的差异，即使在控制了这些地区可观察到的经济和人口特征后也是如此。因此，来自观察相似背景的孩子面临着截然不同的学校环境，特别是当他们着眼于8年级以后的水平时。这一变化为研究人们如何应对不断变化的教育环境提供了基础，并为研究1940年人口普查时观察到的对这些学生晚年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.