Accountability systems are designed to introduce market pressures to increase efficiency in education. One potential channel by which this can occur is to match with effective teachers in the transfer market. I use a smooth maximum score estimator model, North Carolina data, and the state's bonus system to analyze how teachers and schools change…

Since 2002, public school teachers in Florida have been permitted to choose between a defined benefit (DB) and a defined contribution (DC) retirement plan. We exploit this unique policy environment to study new teachers' revealed preferences over pension plan structures. Roughly 30 percent of teachers hired between 2003 and 2008 selected the DC…

This article presents findings from the first independent, third-party appraisal of the impact of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) on student test score gains in mathematics. TAP is a comprehensive school reform model designed to attract highly effective teachers, improve instructional effectiveness, and elevate student achievement. We use a…

In this policy brief we argue that there is little debate about the statistical properties of value-added model (VAM) estimates of teacher performance, yet, despite this, there is little consensus about what the evidence about VAMs implies for their practical utility as part of high-stakes performance evaluation systems. A review of the evidence…

Teacher experience has long been a central pillar of teacher workforce policies in U.S. school systems. The underlying assumption behind many of these policies is that experience promotes effectiveness, but is this really the case? What does existing evidence tell us about how, why, and for whom teacher experience matters? This policy brief…

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 data set that includes student, teacher, school, and district variables to determine the factors that predict the likelihood of a teacher receiving a RIF…

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 a regression discontinuity strategy to produce causal estimates for the effect of remediation under Florida's test-based promotion policy on multiple outcomes for up to five years after the intervention. Students subjected to the policy were retained in the third grade, were required to be assigned to a high-quality teacher during the…

Value-added modeling continues to gain traction as a tool for measuring teacher performance. However, recent research questions the validity of the value-added approach by showing that it does not mitigate student-teacher sorting bias (its presumed primary benefit). Our study explores this critique in more detail. Although we find that estimated…

Research on the relationship between teacher characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. To extend this literature, we administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York City and collected…

School districts are confronting difficult choices in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Today, the financial imbalance in many school districts is so large that there may be few alternatives to teacher layoffs. In nearly all school districts, layoffs are currently determined by some version of teacher seniority. Yet, alternative approaches to…

Value-added measures of teacher quality may be sensitive to the quantitative properties of the student tests upon which they are based. This article focuses on the sensitivity of value added to test score ceiling effects. Test score ceilings are increasingly common in testing instruments across the country as education policy continues to…

Because of the rigid salary structure in the public teacher labor market, principals may have the incentive to align classes favorably for high-quality teachers as a form of nonmonetary compensation. This article tests whether higher-quality teachers, holding other characteristics constant, tend to be matched with more favorable assignments. The…

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…