Feeling the Florida Heat?: How Low-Performing Schools Respond to Voucher and Accountability Pressure (Working Paper)
Author(s): Cecilia Elena Rouse, Jane Hannaway, Dan Goldhaber, and David Figlio

This paper examines the effect of accountability policy on school practices and student outcomes with remarkably comprehensive and detailed data that include a multi-wave five-year survey of the census of public schools in Florida and administrative data on individual student performance over time. The authors show that low-performing schools facing accountability pressure changed their instructional practices in meaningful ways. In addition, they present medium-run evidence school accountability promotes improved student test scores, and find that a significant portion of these test score gains can likely be attributed to the changes in school policies and practices uncovered in these surveys.

Are Public Schools Really Losing Their Best? Assessing the Career Transitions of Teachers and Their Implications for the Quality of the Teacher Workforce (Working Paper)
Author(s): Dan Goldhaber, Betheny Gross, and Daniel Player

This paper examines attrition and mobility of teachers using teacher value-added measures for early-career teachers in North Carolina. The findings suggest that the most effective teachers tend to stay in teaching and in specific schools.

Everyone's Doing It, but What Does Teacher Testing Tell Us about Teacher Effectiveness? (Working Paper)
Author(s): Dan Goldhaber

This paper explores the relationship between teacher testing and teacher effectiveness using a unique dataset that links teachers to their individual students. My findings show a positive relationship between some teacher licensure tests and student achievement. But they also suggest that states face significant tradeoffs when they require particular performance levels as a precondition to becoming a teacher: some teachers whom we might wish were not in the teacher workforce based on their contribution toward student achievement are eligible to teach based on their performance on these tests, while other individuals who would be effective teachers are ineligible.