Helen Ladd

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Helen F. Ladd
Academic career
InstitutionsDuke University
Brookings Institution
FieldEducation economics
Alma materWellesley College
London School of Economics
Harvard University
Websitehttps://sites.duke.edu/ericafield/

Helen F. Ladd is an

economics of education, she has been elected to the National Academy for Education and the National Academy of Sciences
.

Biography

Helen Ladd earned a

National Tax Journal.[6]

Ladd is married to

Edward Fiske.[7]

Ladd was one of the signees of a 2018 amici curiae brief that expressed support for Harvard University in the

Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit. Other signees of the brief include Alan B. Krueger, Robert M. Solow, George A. Akerlof, Janet Yellen, as well as numerous others.[8]

Research

Ladd's research focuses on school finance, school accountability, teacher labour markets, school choice, and early childhood programmes.

IDEAS/RePEc, she belongs to the top 5% of economists in terms of research output.[10]

Research on public finance

Early in her research career, Ladd conducted extensive research on local

John Yinger).[12] Together with Yinger, Ladd has further expanded on the fiscal crisis of U.S. cities in the 1970s and early 1980s in her book America's Ailing Cities, wherein she explores how it affected cities' policies and disparities between them.[13] Researching local tax mimicking between neighbouring U.S. counties, Ladd finds evidence of it with regard to the burdens of total local taxes and property taxes but not of sales taxes.[14] Studying the relationship between public finances and local population growth in the U.S., Ladd finds a U-shaped relationship between spending and density and a positive relationship between local population growth and per capita public spending, with the effect mainly reflecting the higher population density and a larger share of local public spending, suggesting that established residents in fast-growing areas may experience declining quality in public services and/or rising local tax burdens.[15][16]

Research on the economics of education

Research on school accountability

Since the mid-1990s, Ladd has performed research on the topic of school accountability. In

Eva Baker or Edward Haertel, that test scores should only be one part of teacher evaluation and not dominate decisions about teachers' compensation or promotion.[20]

Research on school choice

Ladd and Sheila Murray find no evidence of a direct effect of the share of elderly households on spending on education, though they may do so through their locational decision: as they tend to live in counties with low shares of children, the tax price of education is higher in other counties, which could decrease education spending in those counties.[21] With regard to school vouchers, Ladd has argued that the gains in student achievement from voucher programmes are likely to be small and to harm many disadvantaged students due to parents' tendency to judge schools by the characteristics of their students, with a slightly better case being made for means-tested vouchers.[22] In research with Robert Bifulco on charter schools in N.C., Ladd finds that students make substantially smaller gains in achievement in charter schools than in public schools and that these effects aren't due to positive impacts of charter schools on traditional public schools, though the high rates of student turnover at charter schools appear to account for a third of the difference.[23] Moreover, they find these charter schools to have raised the racial isolation of Afro-American and Caucasian students and widened their test-score gaps, in particular as students (and their families) tend to choose charter schools that are more racially isolated than students' previous schools, resulting in very few racially balanced charter schools.[24] Ladd has also performed research on school choice and school competition outside the U.S., e.g. analyzing the liberalization and decentralization of New Zealand's compulsory state education system during the 1990s, which yielded many cautionary lessons about the potential long-term consequences of market-based education reforms.[25]

Research on teacher labour markets

Together with Clotfelter and Vigdor, Ladd has also conducted extensive research on teacher labour markets. In line with Ladd's research on

certification systematically and substantially affect student achievement and that the unequal distribution of teacher credentials by race and socioeconomic status of high school students exacerbates gaps between demographic groups' educational achievement.[32] Finally, Ladd also observes that teachers' perceptions of their working conditions are good predictors of their transitions to other schools, with school leadership as the most salient dimension of working conditions.[33]

Other research

With regard to the economics of education, Ladd has contributed substantially to research on the relationship between poverty and education: Together with Jens Ludwig and Greg Duncan, Ladd evaluates the impact of the Moving to Opportunity programme of residential mobility, wherein volunteering low-income families were randomly assigned to either receive rental subsidies for housing in low-poverty areas as well as counseling and housing search assistance, to only receive unrestricted rental subsidies or to a control group, finding that assignment to the first group considerably raised elementary school children's performance in reading and math, though there is also some evidence that teens in both experimental groups experience increases in grade retentions, drop-out rates and disciplinary actions at school due to differences between the academic and behavioural standards between their new and old schools.[34] Moreover, in further research on the relationship between education and poverty, Ladd has strongly criticized Bush- and Obama-era efforts to improve the U.S. education system for their ignorance of the growing performance gap between the achievement of students from advantaged and disadvantaged families and their lack of focus on the educational challenges of disadvantaged students.[35] Another area of research concerns the impact of technology on education, wherein Ladd, Vigdor and Erika Martinez confirm earlier findings of large gaps between different racial and socioeconomic groups' access and use of home computers and observe that the introduction of home computer technology and high-speed Internet access in households tends to modestly decrease students' math and reading test scores.[36] Furthermore, in another study outside the U.S., Ladd and Fiske have evaluated the post-Apartheid education reform in South Africa, concluding that while genuine equal treatment of races was at hand, equality in terms of educational opportunity or adequacy remained elusive.[37] Finally, in a much-cited study, Ladd finds strong evidence for discrimination in mortgage lending, most of which she attributes to profit-driven statistical discrimination, notably reflecting the fact that minority borrowers often display characteristics associated with lower creditworthiness.[38]

Selected awards

Selected publications

  • Holding Schools Accountable: Performance-Based Reform in Education
  • Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy
  • Educational Goods, Values, Evidence and Decision-Making
  • Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools
  • Equity and Adequacy in Education Finance

References

  1. ^ Faculty profile of Helen Ladd on the website of Duke University. Retrieved April 17th, 2018.
  2. ^ Profile of Helen Ladd on the website of the Brookings Institution. Retrieved April 17th, 2018.
  3. ^ Profile of Helen Ladd at the Learning Policy Institute. Retrieved April 17th, 2018.
  4. ^ Profile of Helen Ladd on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved April 17th, 2018.
  5. ^ Profile of Helen Ladd on the website of the Urban Institute. Retrieved April 17th, 2018.
  6. ^ Curriculum vitae of Helen Ladd from the website of Duke University (status: October 2017). Retrieved April 17th, 2018.
  7. ^ Profile of Helen Ladd on the website of the Brookings Institution. Retrieved April 17th, 2018.
  8. ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). admissionscase.harvard.edu. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-10-22. Retrieved 2018-12-30.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  9. ^ Profile of Helen Ladd on the website of the Brookings Institution. Retrieved April 17th, 2018.
  10. ^ Ranking of economists registered on IDEAS/RePEc. Retrieved April 17th, 2018.
  11. S2CID 232211240
    .
  12. S2CID 150856795
    .
  13. ^ Ladd, H.F., Yinger, J. (1991). America's ailing cities: Fiscal health and the design of urban policy. Baltimore, MY: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  14. S2CID 155030799
    .
  15. doi:10.1016/0166-0462(94)90006-X
    .
  16. S2CID 154286188
    .
  17. doi:10.1016/S0272-7757(97)00044-7
    .
  18. doi:10.1016/S0272-7757(00)00039-X
    .
  19. S2CID 146417387
    .
  20. ^ Baker, E.L. et al. (2010). Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. Economic Policy Institute Working Paper Series, No. 278.
  21. doi:10.1016/S0272-7757(00)00058-3
    .
  22. hdl:10161/7025
    .
  23. S2CID 37528265
    .
  24. doi:10.1002/pam.20226
    .
  25. ^ Fiske, E.B., Ladd, H.F. (2001). When schools compete: A cautionary tale. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
  26. doi:10.1002/pam.20003
    .
  27. ^ Clotfelter, C. et al. (2006). High-poverty schools and the distribution of teachers and principals. North Carolina Law Review, 85(5), pp. 1345-1380.
  28. S2CID 33549375
    .
  29. ^ Clotfelter, C.T., Ladd, H.F., Vigdor, J.L. (2006). Teacher-student matching and the assessment of teacher effectiveness. Journal of Human Resources, 41(4), pp. 778-820.
  30. S2CID 10349672
    .
  31. S2CID 57564132
    .
  32. ^ Clotfelter, C.T., Ladd, H.F., Vigdor, J.L. (2010). Teacher credentials and student achievement in high school: a cross-subject analysis with student fixed effects. Journal of Human Resources, 45(3), pp. 655-681.
  33. S2CID 145077874
    .
  34. ^ Ludwig, J. et al. (2001). Urban poverty and educational outcomes. Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, pp. 147-201.
  35. hdl:10161/6650
    .
  36. doi:10.1111/ecin.12089
    .
  37. ^ Fiske, E.B., Ladd, H.F. (2004). Elusive equity: Education reform in post-apartheid South Africa. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press
  38. doi:10.1257/jep.12.2.41
    .
  39. ^ List of past Raymond Vernon Memorial Award recipients. Retrieved April 17th, 2018.

External links

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