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http://www.scribd.com/doc/43896331/A-Right-Denied-%E2%80%93-...

Slide 34 is most relevant. This is a presentation deck used by KIPP, one of the more successful charter schools in NY.

Family background matters a lot in how well students perform, but it doesn't help that low-income minorities tend to get the worst teachers. Teacher quality is more closely associated with educational outcomes than any other school-related factor, including curriculum, budget, and class size.

What's the value of your product?

According to the papers cited about alcoholism and happiness, you are not affected by the behavior of your coworkers. For smokers, they only claim that coworkers influence each others' behavior within small firms, which makes sense because people are more likely to be friends anyway and there is more pressure to smoke socially. Even then, the confidence interval is huge; they claim smoking cessation by a coworker decreases your chances of smoking by 34% but with a 95% CI between 5% and 56%. I haven't read the papers, and maybe they explain this, but I wonder what happens when more than one of your friends stops smoking; surely they can't decrease your chances of smoking by 34% each.