About Martin Carnoy
Martin Carnoy is Lemann Foundation Professor of Education and Economics at Stanford University. He is one of the directors of the Lemann Center at Stanford, a former president of the Comparative and International Education Society, and a fellow of the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education. He has written more than forty books and 150 articles on the economic value of education, the political economy of educational policy, educational production, and higher education. He graduated from Caltech with a BS degree in electrical engineering and received his MA PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.
About the presentation
Do school systems tend to equalize the academic skills of lower and higher social class students or the skills of students of diverse ethnic/race groups as they move up through the grades and levels of education? This paper studies the role that a key level of education—middle schooling—plays in equalizing academic achievement in two of the world’s largest countries, the United States and Brazil. This comparative analysis provides insights into whether educational systems in two different racially and socially diverse societies are generally similar or distinct in equalizing learning gains. Our value-added estimates for middle schools in Brazil provide important insights into how the provision of middle-level schooling in a large middle-income, economically unequal country compares with middle-level schooling in a developed, similarly administratively decentralized country such as the United States. Most importantly for our purposes, our estimates allow us to test whether, on average, middle schooling tends to equalize achievement outcomes within and across race and social class groups with systematically higher and lower initial achievement levels.
