Investment in the certification of teachers by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) represents a significant policy initiative for the nation's public school teachers. This article investigates the potential impact of NBPTS certification on teachers' career paths. Using a competing risks model on data from North Carolina…

Conventional value-added assessment requires that achievement be reported on an interval scale. While many metrics do not have this property, application of item response theory (IRT) is said to produce interval scales. However, it is difficult to confirm that the requisite conditions are met. Even when they are, the properties of the data that…

This article considers potential impediments to the estimation of teacher quality caused primarily by the purposeful behavior of families, administrators, and teachers. The discussion highlights the benefits of accounting for student and school differences through a value-added modeling approach that incorporates a student's history of family,…

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…

The utility of value-added estimates of teachers' effects on student test scores depends on whether they can distinguish between high- and low-productivity teachers and predict future teacher performance. This article studies the year-to-year variability in value-added measures for elementary and middle school mathematics teachers from five large…

Governance is widely believed to be an important determinant of the effectiveness of educational systems. Yet there are few systematic evaluations of the linkages between educational governance and student outcomes, or cogent frameworks for evaluating the effectiveness of governance arrangements in a way that can guide potential policy changes. In…

This article describes the potential for using K-12 education data to support school improvement efforts and the effective and efficient use of education resources. It examines the availability and transparency of education data in California as part of the "Getting Down to Facts" effort to improve education decision making in that state. The…

This article reports the results of school budget simulations with 568 randomly selected California public school teachers, principals, and superintendents. Simulation participants were presented with the budget for a hypothetical school and asked to use that budget to employ the resources that would maximize the academic achievement of the…

In this study, a cost function is used to estimate the costs for California districts to meet the achievement goals set out for them by the state. I calculate estimates of base costs (i.e., per pupil costs in a district with relatively low levels of student need) and marginal costs (i.e., the additional costs associated with specific student…

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…

This article explores the components of an "adequate" education for linguistic minority students in California and attempts to distinguish these from the components of an adequate education for low-income students who are native English speakers. About 1.6 million students were classified as English learners (ELs) in California in 2006. We argue…

Many states have used professional judgment panels to determine the resources schools need to meet certain performance targets. This study initiates a critical study of that method. Using budget simulations with hypothetical schools, we collected the judgments of forty-five principals about how school budgets should be allocated and how school…

The impact of peers on student outcomes has important policy implications for how students are organized into classes and the overall impact of education interventions. But it is difficult to accurately measure peer effects because of the nonrandom sorting of students and teachers into classrooms and the endogeneity of peers' achievement. In this…

The No Child Left Behind Act imposes sanctions on schools if the fraction of students demonstrating proficiency on a high-stakes test falls below a statewide pass rate. While the motivation behind this system is improved public school performance, it also provides incentives for schools to focus educational resources on the marginal student rather…

How do the elderly influence school spending if they are a minority of the population? We estimate the determinants of school spending in a median voter model, comparing four assumptions about how the elderly influence the identity of the median voter. Using a county-level panel, we find that elderly preferences are best characterized by assuming…