Education has been described as the key to raising living standards. A person with more human capital will tend to have more income. Many factors can affect the level of education attainment. The facilities in schools, peer effects and the education level of parents can all have a significant effect on schooling of a child. A large number of papers have looked at the links between education attainment and income. There is also a link between education from one generation to the next. The paper of Becker and Tomes (1986) shows the intergenerational link of education and income, and a number of papers, like Solon (1992) shows that the intergenerational correlation of income between fathers and sons is pretty high in the US.
Education quality is very important. In the US, houses in better school districts tend to have higher prices. Parents want better education for their children, and they are willing to pay a premium to live in neighborhoods that have better school districts. This can increase land values, and can reduce the capability of poor families to live in those neighborhoods. Furthermore, a large portion of school district budget comes from property taxes, and so, a richer neighborhood will have more expenditure on its school districts because of higher tax collection.
How important are different factors? Local neighborhood effects, and school quality can be very important. Even the quality of one's elementary school teacher has been shown to have a large effect on the future earnings of a person. With increasing attention given to rising inequality in the US, many economists have been interested to see how childhood neighborhoods affect future income. Economist Raj Chetty has mapped the probability of a child moving up the income ladder given the home-county characteristics.
Most economists and policy-makers believe that schooling is important. Even early education like Head Start is important in determining future outcome of children. Yet people disagree on how to ensure proper education is delivered. Many want to follow Finland's example, a country that scores high on student achievement scores. However, given the population size of the US, it is very difficult to provide uniform, high quality education to all students. The US has been trying to promote charter schools, a school run by individuals with considerable independence in setting school curriculum, but they can receive funding from government. Despite the independence, they have not been more successful than public schools on average.
Its still an open discussion how to make education quality better for all. Many have resorted to advocating online education as key to improving education quality. There is some success in different kinds of online pedagogy, but generalizing it without proper study may not be a good idea. So, this debate on how to improve school quality will continue for a long time,
