This paper examines the effects of a comprehensive performance pay program for teachers implemented in high-need schools on students' longer-run educational, criminal justice, and economic self-sufficiency outcomes. Using linked administrative data from a Southern state, we leverage the quasi-randomness of the timing of program adoption across…

The success of many students with disabilities (SWDs) depends on access to high-quality general education teachers. Yet, most measures of teacher value-added measures (VAM) fail to distinguish between a teacher's effectiveness in educating students with and without disabilities. We create two VAM measures: one focusing on teachers' effectiveness…

This paper studies how increasing teacher compensation at hard-to-staff schools can reduce inequality in access to qualified teachers. Leveraging an unconditional change in the teacher compensation structure in Peru, we first show causal evidence that increasing salaries at less desirable locations attracts better quality applicants and improves…

This paper proposes a new methodology for estimating teacher value-added. Rather than imposing a normality assumption on unobserved teacher quality (as in the standard empirical Bayes approach), our nonparametric estimator permits the underlying distribution to be estimated directly and in a computationally feasible way. The resulting estimates…

We study the effects of counterfactual teacher-to-classroom assignments on average student achievement in elementary and middle schools in the US. We use the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) experiment to semiparametrically identify the average reallocation effects (AREs) of such assignments. Our findings suggest that changes in…

We study personnel flexibility in charter schools by exploring how teacher retention varies with teacher and school quality in Massachusetts. Charters are more likely to lose their highest and lowest value-added teachers. Low performers tend to exit public education, while high performers tend to switch to traditional public schools. To…

Can schools that boost student outcomes reproduce their success at new campuses? We study a policy reform that allowed effective charter schools in Boston, Massachusetts to replicate their school models at new locations. Estimates based on randomized admission lotteries show that replication charter schools generate large achievement gains on par…

Compensation of most US public school teachers is rigid and solely based on seniority. This paper studies the labor market effects of a reform that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay schemes. Following the reform, some districts switched to flexible compensation and started paying high-quality teachers more.…

Estimates of teacher "value-added" suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using…

Instructors are a chief input into the higher education production process, yet we know very little about their role in promoting student success. This is in contrast to elementary and secondary schooling, for which ample evidence suggests teacher quality is an important determinant of student achievement. Whether colleges could improve student…

Unlike in elementary school, high-school teacher effects may be confounded with both selection to tracks and unobserved track-level treatments. I document sizable confounding track effects, and show that traditional tests for the existence of teacher effects are likely biased. After accounting for these biases, high-school algebra and English…

This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus non-tenure line faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student's first term at Northwestern, and employ a unique identification strategy…

Teachers in the United States are compensated largely on the basis of fixed schedules that reward experience and credentials. However, there is a growing interest in whether performance-based incentives based on rigorous teacher evaluations can improve teacher retention and performance. The evidence available to date has been mixed at best. This…

The large-scale expansion of primary schooling in developing countries has led to the increasing use of non-civil-service contract teachers who are hired locally by the school, are not professionally trained, have fixed-term renewable contracts, and are paid much lower salaries than regular civil-service teachers. This has been a controversial…

Domestic attempts to use financial incentives for teachers to increase student achievement have been ineffective. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting the power of loss aversion--teachers are paid in advance and asked to give back the money if their students do not improve sufficiently--increases math test scores between 0.201 (0.076) and…