Texas

A fundamental question for education policy is whether outcomes-based accountability, including comprehensive educator evaluations and a closer relationship between effectiveness and compensation, improves the quality of instruction and raises achievement. We use synthetic control methods to study the comprehensive teacher and principal evaluation and compensation systems introduced in the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD) in 2013 for principals and 2015 for teachers.

Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high-poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge with information produced by its evaluation system to offer large, compensating differentials to highly effective teachers willing to work in its lowest-achievement schools. The Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program resulted in immediate and sustained achievement increases. The improvements were dramatic, bringing average achievement in the previously lowest-performing schools close to the district average.

It is widely believed that teacher turnover adversely affects the quality of instruction in urban schools serving predominantly disadvantaged children, and a growing body of research investigates various components of turnover effects. The evidence at first seems contradictory, as the quality of instruction appears to decline following turnover despite the fact that most work shows higher attrition for less effective teachers. This raises concerns that confounding factors bias estimates of transition differences in teacher effectiveness, the adverse effects of turnover or both. After taking more extensive steps to account for nonrandom sorting of students into classrooms and endogenous teacher exits and grade-switching, we replicate existing findings of adverse selection out of schools and negative effects of turnover in lower-achievement schools. But we find that these turnover effects can be fully accounted for by the resulting loss in experience and productivity loss following the reallocation of some incumbent teachers to different grades.

This paper uses administrative data on schooling and earnings from Texas to estimate the effect of college quality on the distribution of earnings. We proxy for college quality using the college sector from which students graduate and focus on identifying how graduating from UT-Austin, Texas A&M or a community college affects the distribution of earnings relative to graduating from a non-flagship university in Texas.

There has been a resurgence in research that investigates the efficacy of early investments as a means of reducing gaps in academic performance. However, the strongest evidence for these effects comes from experimental evaluations of small, highly enriched programs. We add to this literature by assessing the extent to which a large-scale public program, Texas's targeted pre-Kindergarten (pre-K), affects scores on math and reading achievement tests, the likelihood of being retained in grade, and the probability that a student receives special education services.

A considerable fraction of college students and bachelor's degree recipients attend multiple postsecondary institutions. Despite this fact, there is scant research that examines the nature of the paths – both the number and types of institutions – that students take to obtain a bachelor's degree or through the higher education system more generally. We also know little about how contact with multiple institutions of varying quality affects postgraduate life outcomes.

Search theory suggests early career job changes lead to better matches that benefit both workers and firms, but this may not hold true in teacher labor markets characterized by salary rigidities, barriers to entry, and substantial differences in working conditions. Education policy makers are particularly concerned that teacher turnover may have adverse effects on the quality of instruction in schools serving predominantly disadvantaged children.

Much has been written about the importance of school leadership, but there is surprisingly little systematic evidence on this topic. This paper presents preliminary estimates of key elements of the market for school principals, employing rich panel data on principals from Texas State. The consideration of teacher movements across schools suggests that principals follow patterns quite similar to those of teachers – preferring schools that have less demands as indicated by higher income students, higher achieving students, and fewer minority students.

This paper explores the relative effects of school and neighborhood characteristics on student achievement in Texas. Previous empirical studies have estimated one of these effects in the absence of controls for the other, leading to potentially misleading results. School variables are more robust and explain a greater degree of the variance in test scores than neighborhood characteristics. Neighborhood level variables, as a group, are statistically significant even in the presence of school variables.

Most analyses of teacher quality end without any assessment of the economic value of altered teacher quality. This paper begins with an overview of what is known about the relationship between teacher quality and student achievement. Alternative valuation methods are based on the impact of increased achievement on individual earnings and on the impact of low teacher effectiveness on economic growth through aggregate achievement.