TY - JOUR AU - Gordon, Nora E TI - High School Graduation in the Context of Changing Elementary and Secondary Education Policy and Income Inequality: The Last Half Century JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 19049 PY - 2013 Y2 - May 2013 DO - 10.3386/w19049 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19049 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19049.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Nora E. Gordon McCourt School of Public Policy Georgetown University 306 Old North 37th and O Streets NW Washington, DC 20057 Tel: 202/687-6756 E-Mail: neg24@georgetown.edu M1 - published as Leah Platt Boustan, Carola Frydman, Robert A. Margo. "Introduction to "Human Capital in History: The American Record"," in Leah Platt Boustan, Carola Frydman, and Robert A. Margo, editors, "Human Capital in History: The American Record" University of Chicago Press (2014) AB - Goldin and Katz (2008) document the key role that the educational attainment of native-born workers in the U.S. has played in determining changing returns to skill and income distribution in the twentieth century, emphasizing the need to understand the forces driving the supply of educated workers. This paper examines stagnation in high school graduation rates from about 1970 to 2000, alongside dramatic changes in elementary and secondary educational institutions and income inequality over those years. I review the policy history of major changes in educational institutions, including but not limited to the massive increase in school spending, and related literature. I then present descriptive analysis of the relationships between income inequality and both graduation and school spending from 1963 to 2007. Results suggest that inequality at the top of the income distribution, which was negatively correlated with the establishment of public secondary schooling earlier in the twentieth century, was positively correlated not only with education spending levels but also with aggregate high school graduation rates at the state level in this later period. ER -