School districts throughout the United States are increasingly providing greater autonomy to local public (non-charter) school principals. In 2005-06, Chicago Public Schools initiated the Autonomous Management and Performance Schools program, granting academic, programmatic, and operational freedoms to select principals. This paper provides…

We use North Carolina data to explore whether the quality of teachers in the lower elementary grades (K-2) falls short of teacher quality in the upper grades (3-5) and to examine the hypothesis that school accountability pressures contribute to such quality shortfalls. Our concern with the early grades arises from recent studies highlighting how…

We examine earnings records for more than 130,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001-2 and 2006-7 school years, roughly 35,000 of whom left the classroom during that time. A majority of those leaving the classroom remained employed by public school districts. Among teachers in grades 4-8 leaving for other…

We use data on students in grades 4-7 in the Canadian province of British Columbia to investigate the effect of having disabled peers on value-added exam outcomes. Longitudinal data for multiple cohorts of students are used together with school-by-grade-level fixed effects to account for endogenous selection into schools. Our estimates suggest…

Nonrandom assignment of students to teachers can bias value-added estimates of teachers' causal effects. Rothstein (2008, 2010) shows that typical value-added models indicate large counterfactual effects of fifth-grade teachers on students' fourth-grade learning, indicating that classroom assignments are far from random. This article quantifies…

Do students perform better on statewide assessments in years in which they have more school days to prepare? We explore this question using data on math and reading assessments taken by students in the third, fifth, and eighth grades since 1994 in Maryland. Our identification strategy is rooted in the fact that tests are administered on the same…