Teacher evaluation is at the center of current education policy reform. Most evaluation systems rely at least in part on principals' assessments of teachers, and their discretionary judgments carry substantial weight. However, we know relatively little about what they value when determining evaluations and high stakes personnel decisions.…

Collective bargaining is common in American public education, but its consequences are poorly understood. We focus here on key contractual provisions--seniority-based transfer rights--that affect teacher assignments, and we show that these transfer rights operate to burden disadvantaged schools with higher percentages of inexperienced teachers. We…

One of the enduring problems in education is the persistence of achievement gaps between White, wealthy, native English-speaking students and their counterparts who are minority, lower-income, or English language learners. This study shows that one intensive technical assistance (TA) intervention--California's District Assistance and…

In this article, we perform cost-effectiveness analysis on interventions that improve the rate of high school completion. Using the What Works Clearinghouse to select effective interventions, we calculate cost-effectiveness ratios for five youth interventions. We document wide variation in cost-effectiveness ratios between programs and between…

Remediation is one of the largest single interventions intended to improve outcomes for underprepared college students, yet little is known about the remedial screening process. Using administrative data and a rich predictive model, we find that severe mis-assignments are common using current test-score-cutoff-based policies, with…

Research on early compulsory schooling laws finds minimal effects on attendance but fails to investigate heterogeneous effects. Similarly, research proposes limited contexts in which expansion policies can increase equality but has difficulty separating policy and cohort effects. Capitalizing on within-country variation in timing of early…

This article considers the impact of a high-stakes testing and reporting requirement on students using publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools. We describe how such a policy was implemented during the course of a previously authorized multi-year evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which provided us with data on voucher…

Recent years have seen the convergence of two major policy streams in U.S. K-12 education: standards/accountability and teacher quality reforms. Work in these areas has led to the creation of multiple measures of teacher quality, including measures of their instructional alignment to standards/assessments, observational and student survey measures…

A number of studies have examined the impact of school accountability policies, including No Child Left Behind (NCLB), on student achievement. However, there is relatively little evidence on how school accountability reforms and NCLB, in particular, have influenced education policies and practices. This study examines the effects of NCLB on…

Many English Language Learners (ELLs) migrate to the United States at older ages and administrators must choose a grade in which to place these new entrants as soon as they register for school. In this study, I estimate the effect of grade placement on the short-term academic performance of ELLs who enroll in the Miami-Dade County Public School…

This study examines the impact of high-stakes school accountability, capacity, and resources under NCLB on reading and math achievement outcomes through comparative interrupted time-series analyses of 1990-2009 NAEP state assessment data. Through hierarchical linear modeling latent variable regression with inverse probability of treatment…

This article examines the micropolitics of implementing New York City's Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program and school governance bodies (Compensation Committees) that determined distribution of school-level rewards among personnel. Drawing on a two-year, mixed-methods study, the author finds that although most participants surveyed described a…

In 1997, Chicago implemented a policy that required algebra for all ninth-grade students, eliminating all remedial coursework. This policy increased opportunities to take algebra for low-skill students who had previously enrolled in remedial math. However, little is known about how schools respond to the policy in terms of organizing math…

We use data from one of the few states where information on curriculum adoptions is available--Indiana--to empirically evaluate differences in performance across three elementary-mathematics curricula. The three curricula that we evaluate were popular nationally during the time of our study, and two of the three remain popular today. We find large…

When English learners are "reclassified" as fluent English proficient, often their instructional setting changes, including a significant reduction in or elimination of English language development services. Depending on a child's language skills, this instructional change could hinder future development or provide needed opportunities for…