The assertion that choice-driven competition between schools will improve school quality rests on several largely unexamined assumptions. One is that choice increases the competitive pressure experienced by school leaders. A second is that schools will seek to become more effective in response to competitive pressure. In this article, we use…

We propose an efficiency-based mechanism for state funding of public colleges and universities using data envelopment analysis. We describe the philosophy and the mathematics that underlie the approach and apply\break the proposed model to data from 362 U.S. public four-year colleges and universities. The model provides incentives to institution…

The literature on effective schools emphasizes the importance of a quality teaching force in improving educational outcomes for students. In this article we use value-added methods to examine the relationship between a school's effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development, and retention of its teachers. Our results reveal four key…

How useful are "corporate brands" in markets? In theory, brands convey reliable information, providing consumers with shortcuts to time-consuming provider searches. We examine the usefulness of a corporate brand when parental school choice is expanded through K-12 tuition scholarships. Specifically, we evaluate whether Catholic schools carry an…

The expansion of charter schools--publicly funded, yet in direct competition with traditional public schools--has emerged as a favored response to poor performance in the education sector. While a large and growing literature has sought to estimate the impact of these schools on student achievement, comparatively little is known about demand for…

The United States is an outlier with respect to its heavy emphasis on student test scores for the purposes of school accountability. Many other countries instead use school inspection systems that pay more attention to a school's internal processes and practices. This policy note focuses on the school inspection systems of New Zealand and the…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the sensitivity of growth and value-added modeling to the way an underlying vertical score scale has been created. Longitudinal item-level data were analyzed with both student- and school-level identifiers for the entire state of Colorado between 2003 and 2006. Eight different vertical scales were…

Value-added indicators are now a central part of school accountability in England, and value-added information is routinely used in school improvement at both the national and the local levels. This article describes the value-added models that are being used in the academic year 2007-8 by schools, parents, school inspectors, and other…

Fixed effects models are often useful in longitudinal studies when the goal is to assess the impact of teacher or school characteristics on student learning. In this article, I introduce an alternative procedure: adaptive centering with random effects. I show that this procedure can replicate the fixed effects analysis while offering several…

The ability of school (or teacher) value-added models to provide unbiased estimates of school (or teacher) effects rests on a set of assumptions. In this article, we identify six assumptions that are required so that the estimands of such models are well defined and the models are able to recover the desired parameters from observable data. These…

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…

An underlying premise of many resource adequacy studies is that reaching a specified set of educational outcomes is directly dependent on the level of resources. This article analyzes resource allocation practices among successful schools, low-performing schools, and average public schools in California. We find that differences in traditional…

Households pay a premium to live in houses assigned to high quality public schools, and the housing market yields information about the demand for public school quality. The current study estimates a two-stage house price hedonic emphasizing the role that private schools play in the willingness to pay for public school quality. The elasticity of…