School closings displace thousands of teachers in the United States every year. This paper explores how elementary school teachers in North Carolina respond to this labor market shock. After documenting in our study that declining enrollment is a key driver of school closings, we find that whereas most displaced teachers move to new schools in the…

Ten years ago, many policy makers viewed the reform of teacher evaluation as a highly promising mechanism to improve teacher effectiveness and student achievement. Recently, that enthusiasm has dimmed as the available evidence suggests the subsequent reforms had a mixed record of implementation and efficacy. Even in districts where there was…

We study how the introduction of a rigorous teacher evaluation system in a large urban school district affects the quality composition of teacher turnovers. With the implementation of the new system, we document increased turnover among the least effective teachers and decreased turnover among the most effective teachers, relative to teachers in…

In 2010, Teach For America (TFA) launched a major expansion effort, funded in part by a five-year Investing in Innovation scale-up grant from the U.S. Department of Education. To examine the effectiveness of TFA elementary school teachers in the second year of the scale-up, we recruited thirty-six schools from ten states and randomly assigned…

A growing literature documents the importance of student teaching placements for teacher development. Emerging evidence from this literature highlights the importance of the mentor teacher who supervises this placement, as teachers tend to be more effective when they student teach with a mentor who is a more effective teacher. But the efficacy of…

Using unique administrative data from North Carolina that allow us to separate classroom teacher turnover during the school year from end-of-year turnover, we find students who lose their teacher during the school year have significantly lower test score gains (on average -7.5 percent of a standard deviation unit) than those students whose…

Whereas subject-area specialization is common practice in secondary grades, little is known about its incidence and impact in elementary schools. In this study we use data from North Carolina elementary schools to assess which teachers specialize and estimate whether specialization is associated with teacher effectiveness and school achievement.…

There is growing interest among researchers, policy makers, and practitioners in identifying teachers who are skilled at improving student outcomes beyond test scores. However, questions remain about the validity of these teacher effect estimates. Leveraging the random assignment of teachers to classes, I find that teachers have causal effects on…

Recent evidence on teacher productivity suggests that teachers meaningfully influence non-test academic student outcomes that are commonly overlooked by narrowly focusing on test scores. Despite a large number of studies investigating the Teach For America (TFA) effect on math and English achievement, little is known about non-tested academic…

Sorensen (corresponding author) Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy University of Albany SUNY Albany, NY 12222 lsorensen@albany.edu Abstract We use rich longitudinally matched administrative data on students and teachers in North Carolina to examine the patterns of differential effectiveness by teachers' years of experience. The paper…

Teacher effectiveness varies substantially, yet principals' evaluations of teachers often fail to differentiate performance among teachers. We offer new evidence on principals' subjective evaluations of their teachers' effectiveness using two sources of data from a large, urban district: principals' high-stakes personnel evaluations of teachers,…

There is growing concern among policy makers over the quality of the teacher workforce in general, and the distribution of effective teachers across schools. The impact of teacher attrition on overall teacher quality will depend on the effectiveness of teachers who leave the profession. Likewise, teacher turnover may alleviate or worsen inequities…

Current uses of value-added modeling largely ignore or assume away the potential for teachers to be more effective with one type of student than another or in one subject than another. This paper explores the stability of value-added measures across different subgroups and subjects using administrative data from a large urban school district. For…

Research on the effectiveness of educational inputs, particularly research on teacher effectiveness, typically overlooks teachers' potential impact on behavioral outcomes, such as student attendance. Using longitudinal data on teachers and students in North Carolina I estimate teacher effects on primary school student absences in a value-added…

We investigate whether commonly used value-added estimation strategies produce accurate estimates of teacher effects under a variety of scenarios. We estimate teacher effects in simulated student achievement data sets that mimic plausible types of student grouping and teacher assignment scenarios. We find that no one method accurately captures…