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Colliders are built on a foundation of superconducting magnet technology that provides strong dipole magnets to maintain the beam orbit and strong focusing magnets to enable the extraordinary luminosity required to probe physics at the energy frontier. The dipole magnet strength plays a critical role in dictating the energy reach of a collider, and the superconducting magnets are arguably the dominant cost driver for future collider facilities. As the community considers opportunities to explore new energy frontiers, the importance of advanced magnet technology - both in terms of magnet performance and in the magnet technology's potential for cost reduction - is evident, as the technology status is essential for informed decisions on targets for physics reach and facility feasibility., Comment: contribution to Snowmass 2021

High-field superconducting magnets with a dipole field of 16 T and above enable future energy-frontier circular particle colliders. Although we believe these magnets can be built, none exists today. They can also be a showstopper for future high-energy machines due to a prohibitively high price tag based on the current conductor and magnet fabrication cost. The high-temperature superconducting REBCO coated conductor can address both the technical and cost issues, a silver bullet to lay both monsters to rest. The challenges and unknowns, however, can be too arduous to make the silver bullet. We lay out a potential road forward and suggest key action items. As a contribution from the accelerator community, we attempt to clarify for our theorist and experimenter colleagues a few aspects about the future high-field superconducting magnets. We hope to stimulate an effective plan for the 2023 P5 process that can lead to a cost-effective high-field magnet technology for future colliders and the exciting physics they can steward., Comment: contribution to Snowmass 2021. Additional typos corrected; references updated with hyperlinks

Significant numbers of people have very low levels of literacy in many OECD countries and, because of this, face significant labour market penalties. Despite this, it remains unclear what teaching strategies are most useful for actually rectifying literacy deficiencies. The subject remains hugely controversial amongst educationalists and has seldom been studied by economists. Research evidence from part of Scotland prompted a national change in the policy guidance given to schools in England in the mid-2000s about how children are taught to read. We conceptualise this as a shock to the education production function that affects the technology of teaching. In particular, there was phasing in of intensive support to some schools across Local Authorities: teachers were trained to use a new phonics approach. We use this staggered introduction of intensive support to estimate the effect of the new "teaching technology" on children's educational attainment. We find there to be effects of the teaching technology ("synthetic phonics") at age 5 and 7. However, by the age of 11, other children have caught up and there are no average effects. There are long-term effects only for those children with a higher initial propensity to struggle with reading. An appendix contains the following tables: (1) Communication, Language and Literacy at Age 5; (2) Local Authorities in Treatment and Control Groups; (3) Heterogeneity in Estimated Treatment Effects by Non-Native Speaker Status and Free School Meals Eligibility--Different Cohorts for the EDRp v Control; (4) Age 11 Results With and Without Imputation; (5) Heterogeneity in Estimated Treatment Effects by Language Type (i.e. Latin Script v Non-Latin Script) and Free School Meals Eligibility; (6) Heterogeneous Effects for Boys and Girls; (7) Heterogeneity by Subject; and (8) Heterogeneity by Subject: Threshold Effects. [Support was provided by the British Academy and the Royal Society in the framework of the Newton International Fellowship.]

Improvement of educational attainment in schools in urban, disadvantaged areas is an important priority for policy--particularly in countries like England which have a long tail at the bottom of the educational distribution and where there is much concern about low social mobility. An anomaly in the spatial dimension of school funding policy in England allows us to examine the effect of increasing school expenditure for schools in urban areas. This anomaly arises because an "area cost adjustment" is made in how central government allocates funds to Local Authorities (school districts) whereas, in reality, teachers are drawn from the same labour market and are paid according to national pay scales. This is one of the features that give rise to neighbouring schools on either side of a Local Authority boundary being allocated very different resources, even if they have very similar characteristics. We find that these funding disparities give rise to sizeable differences in pupil attainment in national tests at the end of primary school. This finding lends adds to the evidence that school resources have an important role to play in improving educational attainment and has direct policy implications for the current "pupil premium" policy in England. (Contains 3 figures, 9 tables and 20 footnotes.)

The motivation for this paper is to increase individuals' understanding of the way in which inequality in educational outcomes and in the relation between measures of backgrounds is related to levels and dispersion of educational performance of young persons. The article thus sheds light on the international variation in the importance of socioeconomic status in affecting the quality of educational outcomes. This paper uses test scores on eighth-grade mathematics from the 1999 and 2007 waves of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to examine the magnitude and correlates of country differences in levels and dispersion in test scores. It relates test scores of students to measures of their background characteristics within each country and examines the link between the estimated association of characteristics with the country level and dispersion of test scores. The evidence shows the following: (1) Wide cross-country variation in the level and dispersion of test scores, with a virtuous equity-efficiency relation in which higher test scores are associated with lower inequality in scores across countries; (2) Substantial variation among countries in the importance of measures of family background in predicting the mathematics test scores of eighth-grade students; and (3) Higher median test scores and lower variation in student test scores in countries in which family background as measured by the number of books in the home is strongly related to test scores than in countries where it is weakly related to test scores, but no such patterns when family background is measured by parents' educational attainments. Description of Figures 2a and 2b is appended. (Contains 3 tables, 8 figures and 12 footnotes.)

In the UK, education is the third largest area of government spending (of which school spending has the largest share). Since 2000, school expenditure has increased by about 40 per cent in real terms for both primary and secondary schools (see Figure 1). The question as to whether such investment is worthwhile is of central importance. The national debate is not revealing as to the answer. The government points to the improvement in the number of students achieving government targets in national tests whereas critics argue that this simply represents "grade-inflation" and "teaching to the test". In this paper, the authors address this issue for English primary schools. They use census data available on all pupils completing state primary schools between 2001/02 and 2006/07. This includes measures of academic achievement on national (externally marked) tests of English, Mathematics and Science at age 11 (the authors' outcome measures); similar measures of prior attainment (on the basis of tests at age 7); and indicators of gender, ethnicity and socio-economic deprivation. The data set can be linked to the school-level census for relevant years, which includes school expenditure. Thus, a unique feature of the authors' data set is that it contains detailed information on school-level expenditure, for all English state primary schools, over a time period of eight years. In the literature about the effects of school resources, one of the main difficulties has been that there is a strong redistributive component in how resources are allocated to schools (at least in the UK and the US). If this is not taken into account, there is a high risk of downward bias in the estimate of the effect of school resources on academic achievement. This is one argument for why so many studies find no apparent effect of resources on achievement. The authors show that by controlling for the range of pupil and school-level characteristics available to them (and taking out the school fixed effect), the sign of the estimated effect of school resources on pupil achievement changes from negative to positive (and is statistically significant). Moreover, this effect is of a similar magnitude for all three subjects (English, Mathematics and Science) and corresponds to about 5 per cent of a standard deviation. The authors are able to identify effects after including so many controls because of the complicated system of funding schools. The system has many idiosyncrasies at the local level, and the sharp increase in school spending since 2000 has also been accompanied by numerous changes at the national level. The changes over time implied by government regulations are thus exogenous to decisions made at school level. Although the authors are not able to prove their identifying assumption (that the error term is randomly distributed), they apply a simple falsification test, where they show results which support their argument that the positive effect of expenditure on achievement represents a causal impact. Specifically, they find that a positive effect of expenditure on achievement only occurs if the spending has taken place during the pupil's time in primary school; it has no effect if it takes place the year after the pupil has left their primary school (and entered secondary school). This finding is convincing and suggests that the estimated positive effects of school expenditure are not driven by an unobservable factor. If one accepts the assumption of the authors' analysis, then it is legitimate to interact average expenditure with pupil-level characteristics and consider whether there might be heterogeneity in the effects of expenditure. The authors find that expenditure has had a higher impact for pupils who are more economically disadvantaged, but there seems to be little heterogeneity in expenditure effects based on pupils' ability or whether they speak English as a second language. Additional tables are appended. (Contains 2 figures, 5 tables and 17 footnotes.)

The expansion of compulsory schooling after the Second World War represented an important reform common to the majority of European countries. Specifically, over the period 1950-2000, the fifteen Western European countries considered in this study have extended the school-leaving age by one year or longer. Interestingly, this change in legislation was undertaken by Nordic, Anglo-Saxon and Continental countries, which had different traditions and experiences in educational policy. Many theories have been proposed in the sociology and political science literature to explain the expansion of education during this "period of extensive development of the educational and training system" (Diebolt (1999), p.30). But these country-level studies are too specific to allow any inference on the common factors that may have influenced education policies in a similar way. What is missing in the literature is a comparative analysis of the educational reforms undertaken at the European level. Comparative works by Diebolt and Fontevielle (2001) and Ringer (1979) represent an attractive start but are not sufficient to exhibit the factors driving the expansion of compulsory schooling in general. Nor do they explain the timing and the magnitude of changes in compulsory years of schooling that occurred in most European countries after the war. In contrast, this paper adopts a comparative approach using an original data set for fifteen European countries over the period 1950-2000, and undertakes a quantitative analysis of the determinants of changes in compulsory schooling laws. The major phenomenom the authors observe in the data is convergence: the lower mandatory schooling in 1950, the sooner and the larger the change in the legal age of compulsory schooling. The authors argue that economic forces promote convergence of educational systems for two simple reasons: first, the profitability of education is decreasing at the margin, second, extending compulsory schooling has an increasing marginal cost because years of Secondary are more expensive than years of Primary. In other words, compulsory schooling has decreasing net aggregate returns that trigger convergence. Next, the authors test whether convergence still holds when one controls for other determinants described in the literature. Some theories have emphasized respectively the effects of trade and technological progress, institutional aspects, and constraints set on a benevolent State. They do find conditional convergence as well as evidence supporting some aspects of these theories taken individually. However, the most robust secondary effect is openness: the more open a country, the higher compulsory years of schooling. Rising globalization and public investments into education therefore appear to be complementary phenomenoms in the postwar Western Europe. Appended are: (1) Variables; (2) Tables; and (3) Figures. (Contains 5 tables, 3 figures and 22 footnotes.)