With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important "schooling" factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents the results of research investigating the relationship between teachers who graduate from different training programs and…

In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher effects on past student achievement, a finding that obviously cannot be viewed as causal. This is the basis of a falsification test (the Rothstein falsification test) that appears to indicate bias in VAM…

Recent research (Strunk and Reardon forthcoming) applies Partial Independence Item Response (PIIR) models to teacher bargaining agreements in California to calculate the latent restrictiveness of these contracts. Further research (Strunk and Grissom 2010; Strunk forthcoming) tests the external validity of these estimates. Given that much research…

A large literature on teacher collective bargaining describes the potential influence of provisions in teacher union contracts, but little is known about the determinants of these provisions. Using a unique dataset of every active teacher collective bargaining agreement in Washington state, we find that the proximity of two districts is a…

With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important "schooling" factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents research examining the variation between and impact that individual teacher training institutions in Washington State have on…

There is significant and growing interest in teacher pay reform as a number of states and localities have begun experimenting with departures from the single salary schedule--a pay system employed in most school districts, which links teacher pay solely to degree and experience level (Chait, 2007; Goldhaber, 2009; Podgursky and Springer, 2007).…

Over 2,000 teachers in the state of Washington received reduction-in-force (RIF) notices across the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. We link data on these RIF notices to an administrative dataset that includes student, teacher, school, and district variables to determine the factors that predict the likelihood of a teacher receiving a RIF notice.…

This paper reports on findings based on analyses of a unique dataset collected by ACT that includes information on student achievement in a variety of subjects at the high school level, which allow us to examine the relationship between teacher effect estimates derived from VAM specifications employing different student learning assumptions.…