(25%)Educational outcomes, racial residential segregation, and education production functions

Following is a quote from an Op-Ed piece entitled “The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries” that was in the April 30, 2011 issue of The New York Times.

“When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, ‘It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!’ No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources…

So every year 20 percent of teachers in urban districts quit. Nationwide, 46 percent of teachers quit before their fifth year.”

The authors then went on to argue that in order to improve educational outcomes, we should raise the pay of schoolteachers in order to attract and retain better-quality teachers.

Write an essay in which you lay out the education production function approach in detail, explain how this approach helps one understand the persistence of inequality in economic outcomes between blacks and whites, and assess the arguments in the Op-Ed piece as to the likely effectiveness of raising teacher pay as a method of improving educational outcomes of blacks.