Reforming teacher tenure is an idea that appears to be gaining traction with the underlying assumption being that one can infer to a reasonable degree how well a teacher will perform over her career based on estimates of her early-career effectiveness. Here we explore the potential for using value-added models to estimate performance and inform tenure decisions.
This paper analyzes households' response to the introduction of intra-district school choice and examines the impact of this choice on student test scores in Pinellas County Schools, one of the largest school districts in the United States. Households react strongly to the incentives created by such programs, leading to significant changes in the frequency of exercising alternative public schooling options, as well as changes in the composition of the "opt out" students.
This paper describes the school mobility rates for elementary and middle school students in North Carolina and attempts to estimate the effect of school mobility on the performance of different groups of students using student fixed effects models. School mobility is defined as changing schools at times that are non-promotional (e.g., moving from middle to high school). We used detailed administrative data on North Carolina students and schools from 1996 to 2005 and followed four cohorts of 3rd graders for six years each.
Teach for America (TFA) selects and places graduates from the most competitive colleges as teachers in the lowest-performing schools in the country. This paper is the first study that examines TFA effects in high school. We use rich longitudinal data from North Carolina and estimate TFA effects through cross-subject student and school fixed-effects models. We find that TFA teachers tend to have a positive effect on high school student test scores relative to non-TFA teachers, including those who are certified in-field.
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.
Using data from North Carolina and Florida, this paper examines whether teachers in high-poverty schools are as effective as teachers in schools with more advantaged students. Bottom teachers in high-poverty schools are less effective than bottom teachers in lower-poverty schools. The best teachers, by comparison, are equally effective across school poverty settings. The gap in teacher quality appears to arise from the lower payoff to teacher qualifications in high-poverty schools.
This paper provides practical guidance for researchers who are designing and analyzing studies that randomize schools — which comprise three levels of clustering (students in classrooms in schools) — to measure intervention effects on student academic outcomes when information on the middle level (classrooms) is missing. This situation arises frequently in practice because many available data sets identify the schools that students attend but not the classrooms in which they are taught.
In this paper we report on work estimating the stability of value-added estimates of teacher effects, an important area of investigation given public interest in workforce policies that implicitly assume effectiveness is a stable attribute within teachers. The results strongly reject the hypothesis that teacher performance is completely stable within teachers over long periods of time, but estimates suggest that a component of performance appears to persist within teachers, even over a ten-year panel.
Redistributing highly effective teachers from low- to high-need schools is an education policy tool that is at the center of several major current policy initiatives. The underlying assumption is that teacher productivity is portable across different schools settings. Using elementary and secondary school data from North Carolina and Florida, this paper investigates the validity of this assumption.
Using longitudinal data on spanning the 2002-03 through 2007-08 school years in Florida and North Carolina, this paper decomposes the workforce dynamics among teachers and principals in low-performing schools that significantly improved their performance. In general, I find strong, consistent evidence of human capital development (i.e., improvements in the productivity of the teachers and principals already in the school) accounting for the increased performance in turnaround schools.