Schools are among the most important contributors to human capital development. Over the past few decades, the education sector has witnessed two significant trends that highlight the complex challenges and opportunities that schools currently face. First, there is a growing concern over the quality of the public school system. In response, school choice initiatives have become increasingly common, proposed as a means to introduce competitive forces into the education market, thereby incentivizing incumbent schools to enhance their quality. Second, the impact of climate change on human capital development has become increasingly apparent. The education system is particularly vulnerable to disruptions caused by climate-induced adverse events, such as natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks, which are growing more frequent and severe. This dissertation examines the consequences of these two important trends, aiming to provide insights into their implications for education policy. In the first chapter, I study the impact of competitive pressures on school resource allocation and the consequent impact on student achievement. Using administrative data in North Carolina, I examine the impact of nearby charter openings on the class structure and the allocation of teachers to students within traditional public schools (TPSs). I find that TPSs experience a significant attrition of teachers and a disproportionate exodus of economically advantaged and high-achieving students to charter schools. Subsequently, TPSs reduce the number of classes, resulting in a significant increase in both class size and the student-teacher ratio. Faced with the dual pressures of enlarged class sizes and the necessity of maintaining school proficiency rates dictated by accountability systems, TPSs undertake measures to enhance the allocation equity and efficiency of teaching resources. This involves a strategic reassignment of more high-quality teachers to disadvantaged students, and the enhancement in teacher-student racial matching. These effects remain consistent after accounting for changes in the composition of both teachers and students at the school level before and after the introduction of charter schools. Exposure to charter schools does not significantly affect the average standardized test scores in Math for TPSs, but it does lead to a noticeable increase in school proficiency rates. The second chapter studies the implications of alternative school choice designs for the equity and efficiency in the allocation of teachers within TPSs. This chapter develops and estimates an empirical model of school choice and school competition to characterize how TPSs reallocate teachers to students in response to competitive forces from charter schools, and the subsequent impacts on the distribution of student academic performance. I use administrative data from North Carolina to estimate the model with standard structural model estimation techniques. I utilize the model to assess the policy implications of expanding charter schools, decomposing the policy's effects into those stemming from student sorting and those from the reallocation of teachers (via the competition channel). I find that expanding the charter school sector effectively enhances equity in the distribution of high-quality teachers within TPSs and reduces achievement gaps, primarily through the competition channel. Additionally, optimizing the matching process between teachers and students can further facilitate allocative efficiency as a result of this policy. The third chapter focuses on the distributional effects of climate change on human capital development, with an acute emphasis on the suffering of the most disadvantaged students. We examine the causal effect of unexpected school closures due to wildfires on student academic achievement and the underlying mechanisms. We exploit exogenous variation in the intensity of wildfire school closures in California between 2009 and 2017 as a natural experiment. We find that wildfire school closures have negative effects on both English language arts and Math test scores. Students with lower socioeconomic status experience larger negative effects from such unexpected closures. Furthermore, we show that school time loss and air pollution are two important mechanisms contributing to the decline we measure in student achievement.

This thesis has presented a comprehensive study on the abandonment of historic school buildings by the Indianapolis Public Schools system from 1970 to 1997. During this period, IPS closed or demolished sixty-four city schools representing nearly fifty-three percent of all Indianapolis public schools in 1970. The principal reason behind the facility closings was a dramatic decline in student enrollment beginning in 1967, but rapidly accelerating after 1970.Several factors contributed to this fall in public school rolls: lower birth rates, the unified government system (Unigov) that merged Indianapolis and Marion County administrative functions, and highway construction and urban renewal projects that cleared large areas of residential neighborhoods. The most significant factor, however, was court mandated integration of Indianapolis public schools in 1970, which led many white families to flee the IPS district and eventually resulted in one way, cross-district busing in 1981.The approaches adopted by Indianapolis Public School officials and the school board between 1970 and 1997, in response to the loss of student population, demonstrates an evolution of policy concerning historic school buildings in the city's inventory. During the early rounds of large scale closings, 1972-1975 and 1980-1981, IPS authorities specifically targeted older schools for closing. This policy changed during the last period of closings, 1995-1997, as some consideration was placed in closing decisions on school buildings' historic and architectural significance.Indianapolis Public School procedures governing the sale of surplus schools also went through a transformation between 1970 and 1997. Until recently, IPS was little concerned about the intended use of former schools by potential buyers. As a result, many historic school buildings were lost due to neglect or outright demolition. In 1997, however, Indianapolis school officials began to take responsibility for ensuring that historic schools leaving IPS's stewardship be preserved. / Department of Architecture

A MATTER OF NATIONAL CONCERN examines the Kennedy Administration’s contribution to the restoration of public education in Prince Edward County, Virginia, and determines if those actions support the dominant narrative of Kennedy’s overall civil rights record – a historical assessment generally generated from a few acute crises. For five consecutive years (1959-1964), in defiance of federal court orders, the county board of supervisors refused to levy taxes to operate public schools, marking Prince Edward County as the only locale in the nation without free public education. The county leadership organized a segregated private school system for the 1,400 white children, but afforded no formal education for the 1,700 African American students. The Kennedy Administration inherited the Prince Edward County school situation – a crisis that threatened to cripple a generation, and, if replicated, destroy public education. In the Prince Edward County school dilemma, the Kennedy Administration took proactive measures, proved sympathetic to the plight of African Americans, challenged Virginia’s congressional delegation, and appointed federal judges that supported President Kennedy’s civil rights agenda. The Prince Edward County story generally, and the federal government’s actions specifically, have been virtually overlooked by historians. A MATTER OF NATIONAL CONCERN challenges scholars to re-evaluate the Kennedy Administration’s civil rights record by including all of the civil rights events of the Kennedy years, thus developing a thorough, comprehensive assessment. A MATTER OF NATIONAL CONCERN is the product of the study of unpublished archival documents, oral histories, interviews, newspaper reports, and secondary sources. This work was created using Microsoft Word 2003.