The effects of school quality on income

This paper uses a unique data set created by merging the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with school data from the Common Core of Data to examine the relationship between school expenditures and earnings. I find that school expenditures are related to earnings, and also positively affect the returns to schooling. This is particularly important given recent papers that have found no effect because this study is able to observe wages at later ages and is estimated for males and females. Robustness estimates find that if the sample were only observed at young ages, or estimated for white males, as has been done previously, the results would not hold. Therefore, it appears that even using an individual-level data set with students educated in this half of the century, school spending affects earnings.     

Science and ideology

Presented here is his keynote address to the November 1994 convention of the National Association of Scholars in Cambridge, MA. A portion was taken in slightly modified form from Professor Wilson's autobiography,Naturalist (Washington, D.C. and Covelo, Calif.: Island Press-Shearwater Books, 1994).     

Learning subjects: Impersonal or user-friendly?

In this article, written in “interchange” with Anita Rampal's “A Possible ‘Orality’ for Science?” (Interchange, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 227–244), a distinction is made between (A) aims of science, which is a philosophical issue; (B) the existence of forms of thought in their own right; and (C) the question of whether we teach the most important forms. The general conclusion is that we have to subject students to transcendental forms of thought irrespective of their social or cultural background, by whatever methods are most appropriate.