 Hello, my name is Josh Angrist and I'm a professor in the MIT Department of Economics. This morning I'll be presenting a summary of some of the research that I've been working on related to education reform in the United States and in my home state of Massachusetts in particular. The area of education reform that I'll be reviewing in my talk is charter schools. I understand that there's a similar institution in Spain, concertavos, it's of great interest in the United States to investigate that and we study it scientifically with data on students and their test scores and we've also been following up their college enrollment and other outcomes. So I'll summarize some of that work this morning. I work with a group at MIT called the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, a group of scholars that studies education reform. We collect data on applicants to different sorts of schools, children who would like to get in to charter schools. Some of the schools have more applicants than seats and those schools use lotteries to pick their applicants. We can take advantage of that as researchers to compare similar sorts of children. Some are randomly offered seats and others don't get the opportunity to attend the schools to which they're applying. That gives us the chance to make well controlled comparisons. We can compare the achievement of children who are and are not offered seats in charter schools. Our results show very strong gains in achievement for applicants to charter schools. We also have results for another education reform model in Boston called pilot schools. I'll talk briefly about that. Pilot schools have some of the autonomy of charter schools, but they're not as independent. They employ members of the teachers union in the host district. There we didn't see any gains. The most recent work we've been doing looks at what we call longer term outcomes. Besides test scores of children in schools, we're also looking at measures of economic and educational importance that come later, such as college application and college enrollment. I'll show a sample of all of that work today.