TEACHER QUALITY
Has the quality of public school teachers really fallen over the past generation and, if so, why? My latest NYT column looks at recent research that finds some surprising answers.
As a side note, one of the frustrations of writing a popular column on economics is that I tend to emphasize the results--what the research concludes--rather than the meticulous techniques and clever data collection that give work like this its credibility. One sign of a good empirical study is how careful the researchers are about testing and eliminating other possible explanations, including quirks in the data.