Many of the analytic techniques that are widely utilized in the economics of education focus on central tendencies. Traditional experimental analyses compare the mean on an outcome of interest for subjects randomly assigned to a treatment group with the mean for subjects randomly assigned to a control group. Regression analyses model the mean value of the outcome variable for fixed values of predictors. Quantile regression and other distributional estimators expand these mean-focused techniques to make it possible to analyze an outcome variable’s entire distribution by estimating the relationship between one or more predictor variables and a specific quantile (i.e., percentile) of an outcome.

These approaches have wide applicability in discussions of educational policy and economics, where stakeholders are interested in pursuing both excellence and equity goals. ...