While at Harvard, Kane also began working as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, with which he still maintains an affiliation, held appointment as visiting fellow at Brookings Institution and as national fellow at the Hoover Institution, and worked as senior economist for labour, education, and welfare on the Council of Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton (1995–96).
[18] Comparing different methods to estimate teachers' impacts on student achievement, Kane and Staiger argue for the impact to be estimated most accurately if both prior student test scores and mean classroom characteristics are considered; they find that teacher-specific effects fade by about half each year after teachers' initial assignment to a class.
[21] Finally, in joint work with John Tyler, Eric Taylor and Amy Wooten, Kane finds classroom-based measures of teaching effectiveness to be good predictors of student achievement (though some teaching practices predict achievement more than others), leading him to suggest that teacher evaluations should use both classroom observations and student test scores.
In particular, Kane and Staiger found that (i) measures of teaching effectiveness such as FFT, CLASS, PLATO, MQI, and UTOP are positively correlated with student achievement gains; (ii) the reliable assessment of teacher's practices necessitates the averaging of scores over multiple observations, (iii) the combination of observation scores with evidence of student achievement gains and student feedback is more predictive and reliable; (iv) unlike teaching experience and graduate degrees, the combined measure identifies teachers with larger gains on the state tests; and (v) teachers performing strongly on the combined measure also performed well in terms of their students' in-class effort, enjoyment and gains in terms of math comprehension and literacy.
[23] Later research by Kane and his MET co-researchers Staiger, Daniel McCaffrey and Trey Miller confirmed that the measures of effective teaching assessed within the MET project successfully identified teachers who produced on average higher gains in student achievement, with the differences being roughly as large as what would have been predicted based on their effectiveness as measured in 2009-10.
For example, he and Cecilia Rouse find that the labour market returns to 2- and 4-year college credits are similarly large - ca.
5% per year of college - and not due to signalling.,[26] and that U.S. community colleges have played a key role in providing access to higher education to older, part-time or less well-prepared students, substantially raising aggregate educational attainment and even non-graduates' earnings, even for non-graduates.
[28] With respect to the financing of postsecondary education, Kane finds that especially low-income youth are very sensitive to the price of college education, but also that means-tested grant programmes haven't been more effective in increasing the college enrollment of that target group than general tuition subsidies.
Tuition Assistance Program, which has subsidized the tuition of D.C. residents attending public higher education institutions in nearby states since 2000, Kane finds that the programme has increased the number of Pell grant recipients and college freshmen from D.C. by at least 15%, especially within the Afro-American community.
[32] Finally, together with Peter Orszag and David Gunter, Kane finds that higher education spending has been increasingly crowded out by other items of state budgets since the late 1970s, in particular Medicaid, with countercyclical reductions in higher education spending typically becoming permanent in the absence of procyclical increases.
[35] Studying the potential of the German vocational training system for the U.S., Kane (together with Dietmar Harhoff) has argued that the conditions that U.S. employers would be less willing to invest into vocational training than in Germany, leading him to doubt that the introduction of the German apprenticeship system would increase the earnings of comparable American youth and improve the school-to-work transitions of in particular minority youth.