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There is increased policy interest in extending test-based evaluations in K-12 education to include student achievement in high school. High school achievement is typically measured by performance on end-of-course exams (EOCs), which test course-specific standards in a variety of subjects. However, unlike standardized tests in the early grades, students take EOCs at different points in their schooling careers. The timing of the test is a choice variable presumably determined by input from administrators, students and parents. Recent research indicates that school and district policies that determine when students take particular courses can have important consequences for achievement and subsequent outcomes like advanced course taking. We develop an approach for modeling EOC test performance that disentangles the influence of school and district policies regarding the timing of course taking from other factors. After separating out the timing issue, better measures of the quality of instruction provided by districts, schools and teachers can be obtained. Our approach also offers diagnostic value because it separates out the influence of school and district course-timing policies from other factors that determine student achievement.

While progress to close racial achievement gaps has stagnated and income achievement gaps have grown, recent case studies enthusiastically describe "transformational" schools, which claim to establish conditions that enable students--primarily poor students of color--to achieve at levels far higher than their social background predicts. Accounts of such schools highlight a widespread belief among their teachers of empowerment over student outcomes despite students' disadvantages. However, such teacher attitudes have never been analyzed on a broad scale, and many analyses of teacher effects focus solely on teachers' human capital, overlooking their social-psychological traits. I use novel data on teachers from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to test whether teachers' beliefs that they can overcome students' social disadvantage are related to higher student achievement, and whether associations are stronger for racial minorities and economically disadvantaged students. Using three-level models, I find a positive association between teachers' beliefs about social disadvantage and students' achievement, which appears to stem from both selection and causal mechanisms. Evidence of heterogeneity contradicts academic and popular theory: rather than mattering most for poor students of color, teachers' beliefs appear especially strongly linked to achievement for the most socioeconomically advantaged African American students.

This study examines the roles played by student characteristics, school resources and practices, peer effects, and province fixed effects in accounting for differences in the academic outcomes of private and public high school students. Private high school students score significantly higher than public high school students on reading, mathematics, and science assessments at age 15, and have higher levels of educational attainment by age 23. Two factors consistently account for these differences. Students who attended private high schools were more likely to have socio-economic characteristics positively associated with academic success and to have school peers with university-educated parents. Province of school attendance accounted for a substantial portion of the differences in academic outcomes measured in high school (i.e., test scores and high school graduation rates), but generally not at the postsecondary level. School resources and practices accounted for little of the differences in academic outcomes.

England's performance in international tests of student achievement continues to be disappointing. Further improvement is essential not only for students' themselves but also for economic growth. This briefing considers the impact of Academies, school spending and teacher quality. Research evidence suggests that it is right to protect school budgets but too early to judge the Coalition's Academies policy. Although there was a large improvement in the first 200 schools (about 4 years after conversion), those schools were disadvantaged and underperforming (unlike the more recent academies) and the current programme is much larger scale. There is broad agreement that high quality teaching matters hugely for student achievement, but there is no magic national formula to bring this about.

This report provides a non-technical overview of the guiding research questions and research design for the ACT-led core research program conducted on behalf of the GEAR UP College and Career Readiness Evaluation Consortium (CCREC). The core research program is a longitudinal study of the effectiveness of 14 GEAR UP state grants on the academic achievement, college going and college retention of low-income and other at-risk students who are eligible to receive grant-funded services. This research program will follow Consortium students and a matched comparison group of non-participants over time using assessment data from ACT Explore®, ACT Plan® or ACT Aspire®, and The ACT®, and college enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) to examine differences in the academic growth and educational outcomes of these two groups.

As the City of Detroit emerges from municipal bankruptcy, the imperative for school improvement takes on an urgency rarely witnessed in a U.S. city. If the city is to experience the redevelopment boom that many now anticipate, its public schools must improve. While a variety of different reform strategies are possible, the establishment of a portfolio district in Detroit currently appears to have the greatest political salience. This report is primarily devoted to a detailed analysis of Michigan's Education Achievement Authority (EAA) which was established in 2011 to turn around the state's lowest-performing schools, starting in Detroit. An understanding of the EAA is essential for informed discussion of a Detroit portfolio district for two key reasons. First, portions of Excellent Schools Detroit's plan for a portfolio district were included in the EAA's original design, but they were not effectively implemented. Second, like the EAA, a new administrative authority for a Detroit portfolio district would face basic administrative challenges related to its financial and human resources, oversight of teaching and learning, and public accountability for its operations. It would be unfortunate if policy makers and designers failed to take full measure of the lessons learned from the EAA's experience. The EAA failed to reach its objectives because the policy was hastily and poorly designed. In this report we seek to shift the debate about the EAA from the ideologically polarized question of whether the system is "good" or "bad" to the more fruitful question of how to align policy design with worthy policy goals. This report was written first and foremost for the citizens of Detroit to explain features of state policy so that they may participate effectively in efforts to shape their local public schools. It was also written, however, for citizens of good will throughout Michigan who understand that their own public schools are now powerfully shaped by policy decisions in Lansing, who regret the divisions that have isolated Detroiters for too long, and who will support policies for the children of Detroit that they themselves would want for their own children. This is not simply an ethical issue because, with well-designed policies, the children and grandchildren of residents across Michigan may someday have a choice to live in racially and socially diverse Detroit neighborhoods anchored by excellent public schools. The following are appended: (1) Purpose of the EAA; (2) Powers of the EAA; (3) Implementing the EAS in Detroit; (4) Planned Expansion of the EAA; and (5) Appointment of New EAA Chancellor.

The Federal Pell Grant Program is the nation's largest need-based grant program. While students' initial eligibility for the Pell is based on financial need, renewal of the award is contingent on their making satisfactory academic progress (SAP)--meeting minimum academic standards similar to those proposed in models of performance-based scholarships. It is not clear how many students are affected by failure to meet SAP standards, or how the policies shape student outcomes. In this study, we draw from literature on performance-based funding and academic probation to consider the potential implications of SAP standards. We describe federal guidelines and illustrate how SAP is evaluated in a statewide community college system. Using administrative data with term-by-term measures of Pell receipt, student grades, attempted and earned credits, persistence, degree attainment, and transfer, we employ regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences approaches to examine the magnitude of SAP failure and its effects. Our results suggest that a substantial portion of Pell recipients at community colleges are at risk for Pell ineligibility due to their failure to meet SAP grade point average (GPA) or credit completion requirements. Approximately a quarter fail to meet the GPA standard alone. When the credit completion requirement is taken into consideration, the first-year SAP failure rate approaches 40 percent. Our preferred difference-in-differences estimates show mixed effects of SAP standards: Failing to meet the GPA requirement has a negative impact on persistence into the second year, but it may improve associate degree attainment and transfer among students who are not discouraged from reenrolling. The following are appended: (1) Regression Discontinuity Results; and (2) Difference-in-Differences Results.

Notable attention and effort has been directed toward improving educator productivity through the use of performance incentives. Little of this work has focused on incentive systems for school leaders (principals) and less yet examines performance pay systems used in practice. This research uses 34 funded grants from the federal Teacher Incentive Fund to document how schools across the nation (N = 1,315) are structuring their pay-for-performance systems. Focusing on elements related to measurement, rewards, and program structure, we find that most programs are poorly defined and often lack the requisite design components to ensure successful implementation. Elements that are close to the practice of educators, such as defining professional development activities, tend to be well articulated; however, non-instructional program considerations, such as psychometrics, the aggregation of measures, and the distribution of rewards, were poorly defined. We anticipate that the impact of pay-for-performance programs may be substantially improved if districts are provided a more comprehensive system of supports to help construct the incentive systems. The following is appended: "Features of Teacher Incentive Fund Proposals."

Participation in the federally-subsidized school breakfast program often falls well below its lunchtime counterpart. To increase take-up, many districts have implemented Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC), offering breakfast directly to students at the start of the school day. Beyond increasing participation, advocates claim BIC improves academic performance, attendance, and engagement. Others caution BIC has deleterious effects on child weight. We use the implementation of BIC in NYC to estimate its impact on meals program participation, BMI, achievement, and attendance. While we find large effects on participation, our findings provide no evidence of hoped-for gains in academic performance, nor of feared increases in obesity. The policy case for BIC will depend upon reductions in hunger and food insecurity for disadvantaged children, or its longer-term effects. The following are appended: (1) Mean Annual Breakfast and Lunch Participation Rates: Balanced Panel of Elementary and Middle School; (2) Impact of BIC adoption on meals program participation, 2001-2012--models using school specific linear time trends; (3) Impact of BIC on obesity and BMI--using grade-specific BIC treatment; (4) Impact of BIC on ELA and math achievement--using grade-specific BIC treatment; (5) Impact of BIC on obesity and BMI--using percent of BIC classrooms treatment; and (6) Impact of BIC on ELA and math achievement--using percent of BIC classrooms treatment.

The purpose of this Technical Assistance Paper (TAP) is to provide school districts with updates and changes relative to third-grade student progression policies, including information on alternative assessments, promotion criteria and resources. This paper provides: (1) General Information; (2) Student Portfolios for Third-Grade Students; (3) Assessment; (4) Students Retained Twice in Third Grade and Intensive Accelerated Classrooms; (5) Summer Reading Camps for Third-Grade Students; (6) Mid-Year Promotion for Third Grade; (7) Exceptional Student Education (ESE); and (8) Options for Parents of Struggling Readers.

This research paper has the objective of providing a comprehensive overview of Dutch education policy approaches to the integration of children with a migration background, with a particular focus on those who have recently arrived in the country. After mapping the current population characteristics of children with a migration background and their educational performance and socio-emotional well-being, the research paper summarises the Dutch education system and the opportunities it provides for newcomer children. The remainder of the paper focuses on three key policy issues that are crucial for promoting the academic and social resilience of children with a migration background: promoting social cohesion and multiculturalism in schools, capacity building in the education system and language acquisition for newcomers. The paper concludes with pointers for the short and long-term policy debates to enhance the successful integration of students with a migration background in the education system as well as the wider society.

As states are continuing to refine teacher evaluation models, there are opportunities for student learning in the arts to be documented and connected with teacher evaluation. The Tennessee Portfolio of Student Growth in the Arts ("the Portfolio") has provided a new perspective on documenting the relationship between student growth and teacher evaluation in the fine arts. It also offers a reliable and rigorous process for art educators to generate an individual growth score and engage in data-driven reflective teaching practice. The Portfolio allows fine arts educators to document and reflect on the work that students do in a way that previously did not exist. This documentation generates an individual growth score that replaces the previous schoolwide growth measure. The Portfolio uses a purposeful collection of authentic student work artifacts that are grouped into four collections representative of the course load of the educator, based on the state's academic standards, and differentiated based on student proficiency. This White Paper provides a snapshot of a portfolio assessment model and serves as a model for other states and regions to integrate what has been learned from the Tennessee Portfolio of Student Growth in the Arts. Assessment White Papers for Art Education is a collection of essays that teach about current and established assessment practices and theories, and how they are relevant to all of the National Art Education Association's membership. This series offers a starting point for NAEA members--across all levels--as well as parents, administrators, and the general public to understand assessments' applications to art education.

This paper explains the rationale for updating the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2021 questionnaire on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and shows how it covers policy topics of current relevance. After presenting key findings based on previous ICT-related PISA data, the paper provides a summary of the PISA 2021 ICT framework guiding the development of the questionnaire. The paper then describes the process followed by the OECD/PISA secretariat for the development of the PISA 2021 ICT questionnaire items. The paper concludes by drawing some lessons that would inform future development of this instrument.

Based on a review of previous research, the paper describes the distinctive characteristics of rural areas and communities and the factors typically associated with shaping students' learning experience in rural contexts. Data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 and the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013 are analysed to examine differences in learning outcomes and education expectations between rural and urban students and to assess the extent to which challenges and opportunities in the provision of rural education are commonplace across OECD member and partner countries. To our surprise, some of the perceived challenges of providing rural education, such as an inadequate infrastructure or a lack of quality teachers, are far from universal. Rural-urban gaps in academic performance generally disappear after accounting for socio-economic status and rural students are less likely to expect completing a university degree than city students, but this gap in expectations persists even when rural students have a similar socio-economic status, on average across OECD countries. This highlights the importance of raising aspirations and creating opportunities for rural students. The paper concludes with ideas for policy and country experiences that governments may consider to ensure high quality learning for students in rural contexts.

Policy makers periodically consider using student assignment policies to improve educational outcomes by altering the socio-economic and academic skill composition of schools. We exploit the quasi-random reassignment of students across schools in the Wake County Public School System to estimate the academic and behavioral effects of being reassigned to a different school and, separately, of shifts in peer characteristics. We rule out all but substantively small effects of transitioning to a different school as a result of reassignment on test scores, course grades and chronic absenteeism. In contrast, increasing the achievement levels of students' peers improves students' math and ELA test scores but harms their ELA course grades. Test score benefits accrue primarily to students from higher-income families, though students with lower family income or lower prior performance still benefit. Our results suggest that student assignment policies that relocate students to avoid the over-concentration of lower-achieving students or those from lower-income families can accomplish equity goals (despite important caveats), although these reassignments may reduce achievement for students from higher-income backgrounds.

In this paper we examine a range of postsecondary education and labor market outcomes, with a particular focus on minorities and/or disadvantaged workers. We use administrative data from the state of Florida, where postsecondary student records have been linked to UI earnings data and also to secondary education records. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: 1) Gaps in secondary school achievement can account for a large portion of the variation in postsecondary attainment and labor market outcomes between the disadvantaged and other students, but meaningful gaps also "exist" within achievement groups, and 2) Earnings of the disadvantaged are hurt by low completion rates in postsecondary programs, poor performance during college, and not choosing high-earning fields. In particular, significant labor market premia can be earned in a variety of more technical certificate and Associate (AA) programs, even for those with weak earlier academic performance, but instead many disadvantaged (and other) students choose general humanities programs at the AA (and even the Bachelor's or BA) level with low completion rates and low compensation afterwards. A range of policies and practices might be used to improve student choices as well as their completion rates and earnings.

School districts and state departments of education frequently must choose between a variety of methods to estimating teacher quality. This paper examines under what circumstances the decision between estimators of teacher quality is important. We examine estimates derived from student growth percentile measures and estimates derived from commonly used value-added estimators. Using simulated data, we examine how well the estimators can rank teachers and avoid misclassification errors under a variety of assignment scenarios of teachers to students. We find that growth percentile measures perform worse than value-added measures that control for prior year student test scores and include teacher fixed effects when assignment of students to teachers is nonrandom. In addition, using actual data from a large diverse anonymous state, we find evidence that growth percentile measures are less correlated with value-added measures with teacher fixed effects when there is evidence of nonrandom grouping of students in schools. This evidence suggests that the choice between estimators is most consequential under nonrandom assignment of teachers to students, and that value-added measures controlling for teacher fixed effects may be better suited to estimating teacher quality in this case.

Student employment subsidies are one of the largest types of federal employment subsidies, and one of the oldest forms of student aid. Yet it is unclear whether they help or harm students' long term outcomes. We present a framework that decomposes overall effects into a weighted average of effects for marginal and inframarginal workers. We then use an application of propensity scores, which we call conditional-counterfactual matching, in which we estimate the overall impact, and the impact under two distinct counterfactuals: working at an unsubsidized job, or not working at all. Finally, we estimate the effects of the largest student employment subsidy program--Federal Work-Study (FWS)--for a broad range of participants and outcomes. Our results suggest that about half of FWS participants are inframarginal workers, for whom FWS reduces hours worked and improves academic outcomes, but has little impact on future employment. For students who would not have worked otherwise, the pattern of effects reverses. With the exception of first-year GPA, we find scant evidence of negative effects of FWS for any outcome or subgroup. However, positive effects are largest for lower-income and lower-SAT subgroups, suggesting there may be gains to improved targeting of funds. [For Appendix A: Additional Full Sample Results and Appendix B: Subgroup Analyses, see ED555376, "Should Student Employment Be Subsidized? Conditional Counterfactuals and the Outcomes of Work-Study Participation: Appendices A and B. A CAPSEE Working Paper."]

Though measures of long-term academic performance trends are valuable to education policy analysts and policymakers, they have been hard to come by at the state level, where most education policy is made. Such data are either nonexistent prior to 1990 or are unrepresentative of statewide student populations. A continuous series of state mean SAT scores is available back to 1972, however, and a previous study identified a method for adjusting these scores to account for varying participation rates and demographics. The present paper aims to extend that earlier work, modifying it to facilitate meaningful trend analysis, using a substantially larger data set, relaxing its assumptions, and improving its approach to model selection and validation. The optimal model derived from that process is externally validated against both lagged 8th-grade and contemporaneous 12th-grade National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores, with good results. [Contains one appendix: Principal Component Analysis Discussion.]

Previous research suggests that there are academic benefits when students and teachers share the same race/ethnicity because such teachers can serve as role models, mentors, advocates, or cultural translators. In this paper, we obtain estimates of achievement changes as students are assigned to teachers of different races/ethnicities from grades 3 through 10 utilizing a large administrative dataset provided by the Florida Department of Education that follows the universe of test-taking students in Florida public schools from 2001-02 through 2008-09. We find small but significant positive effects when black and white students are assigned to race-congruent teachers in reading (0.004 to 0.005 standard deviations) and for black, white and Asian/Pacific Island students in math (0.007 to 0.041 standard deviations). We also examine the effects of race matching by students' prior performance level, finding that lower-performing black and white students appear to particularly benefit from being assigned to a race-congruent teacher. An appendix provides a test of the authors' hypothesis and supplemental tables.

This study evaluates the postsecondary and labor market outcomes of students who attended for-profit colleges. The evaluation complements a similar study by Deming, Goldin, and Katz (2012) that found significant differences in outcomes between students in for-profit colleges and those in other sectors. In this study we use the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, a nationally representative survey monitoring the transitions of young people who were 10th graders in 2002, and compare outcomes during the college years and up to age 26. In accord with Deming et al. (2012), we find adverse levels of borrowing and some evidence of wage penalties for students who attended a for-profit college. Paradoxically, however, these results are not associated with lower attainment levels, and there is little evidence that for-profit students were less satisfied with their college experience. These results hold even with detailed controls for ability, for alternative comparison groups, for selection into the for-profit sector, and for alternative designations of for-profit college enrollment. However, the combined effect of higher borrowing and lower earnings for students at for-profit colleges is substantial such that the average returns to community college dominate those at for-profit colleges. The following are appended: Table A1: Differences in Selected Outcomes by Enrollment Status; Table A2: Selection into College Sector (Multinomial Logit); Table A3: Differences in College Financial Aid (Selection Correction and IV Estimates); and Table A4: Differences in Student Outcomes (Selection Correction and IV Estimates).

Aside from effects on nearby property values, research is sparse on how foreclosures may generate negative externalities. Employing a unique dataset that matches individual student records from Boston Public Schools--including test scores, demographics, home address moves, and school changes--with real estate records indicating whether the student lived at an address involved in foreclosure, we investigate the degree to which the test scores of students attending high-foreclosure schools suffer, even among students not directly experiencing foreclosure. We also explore the impact on individual test scores of school-level (by grade and year) student mobility--that is, inflows of new students to a school during the school year--including mobility induced by residential moves (in some cases caused by foreclosures) and mobility arising for other reasons. We find fairly robust evidence that higher student mobility at a school, induced by residential moves, imposes significant negative effects on test scores of students at the receiving school. Beyond this channel, school-level foreclosure prevalence does not appear to generate externalities. Since we also find that residential-move-induced school changes appear to harm the outcomes of the school-changers themselves, policies that seek to limit such changes within the academic year may uniformly raise test scores, at least in the short run. The following are appended: (1) Math Test Score Regressions, (2) ELA Test Score Regressions; and 14 tables.

Identifying and understanding the foundational skills children need to participate effectively in formal schooling is an important objective for research in early childhood education. One component of school readiness is cognitive self-regulation (CSR). The question this study addresses is how to assess CSR with prekindergarten-aged children in a way that taps into the learning-related cognitive engagement behaviors teachers observe in the classroom that are predictive of later academic achievement. A number of candidate measures applicable to prekindergarten age children have been generated for research on attention, effortful control, executive function, and related constructs. A diverse set of twelve candidate measures that can be easily administered in school settings was selected from these domains and applied to a sample of prekindergarten children. These measures were then examined for construct validity, developmental change, convergent validity with teacher ratings of CSR, and predictive validity for subsequent academic achievement and achievement gain. Six measures performed well by these criteria: Peg Tapping, Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS), the Kansas Reflection-Impulsivity Scale for Preschoolers (KRISP), Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS), Copy Design, and Backwards Digit Span. Cross-validation with a new sample of children confirmed the validity of these measures, estimated their test-retest reliability, identified the best performing individual measures, and demonstrated that a composite score combining results from all these measures performed better than any single measure. The Scoring Scheme for the Child Measures of LRCSR is appended.

This report focuses on the extent to which students who are academically far off track in fourth or eighth grade in Kentucky catch up by eighth or eleventh grade. We studied three recent cohorts of Kentucky students whose eighth-grade ACT Explore® scores were more than one standard deviation below the ACT Explore benchmark scores associated with being on track. We found that 5% or fewer of the students who were far off track in eighth grade attained the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks® by the spring of eleventh grade. We did a similar analysis for two cohorts of students beginning in fourth grade, using scores on the Kentucky Core Content Tests in reading, mathematics, and science in grade four and ACT Explore scores in the same subjects in grade eight, and found that catching-up rates ranged from 7% in mathematics to 12% in science. We also found that students from at-risk groups--those who are low-income, African American, Hispanic, English language learners or in special education--have lower catching up rates than their more advantaged peers. These results are of special concern because a large percentage of students from those groups are far off track in fourth and eighth grade. These findings should underscore the importance of policies and practices that focus on getting students off to a good start in the early grades. These practices are especially important for disadvantaged students. Ongoing research should identify practices that help to accomplish this goal, and state and local policy should support efforts to disseminate and implement those practices. The following are appended: (1) Narrowing of Scale Score Gaps in Grades 8-11; and (2) Results by Income, Ethnicity, and Gender.

As more states begin to adopt teacher evaluation systems based on value-added measures, legal challenges have been filed both seeking to limit the use of value-added measures ("Cook v. Stewart") and others seeking to require more robust evaluation systems ("Vergara v. California"). This study reviews existing teacher evaluation systems and examines validity evidence supporting the use of value-added scores as part of the teacher evaluation. We discuss key aspects of ongoing teacher evaluation lawsuits in California and Florida and assess issues for evaluating the legality of teacher evaluation systems.

In recent years, state policymakers have increased high school course requirements--particularly in mathematics and science. This research examines whether stricter requirements have been effective at improving student outcomes. Student-level evidence from a state's recent reform suggests that higher requirements had little effect on trends in course-taking, student performance, and college enrollment. Our evidence suggests that state policies that simply raise math and science graduation requirement may not be effective alone for improving student outcomes. This shortcoming may reflect that the laws primarily affect lower-ability and less-motivated students who often have weaker preparation for advanced coursework. Districts and states may require greater efforts at preparing these students for advanced coursework or redesigning the curriculum to improve student outcomes.

Teachers require knowledge of the unique skills that each child brings to the classroom in order to effectively target instruction towards students' learning needs. Despite substantial investments in programs aimed at enhancing teacher knowledge of individual students' skills (KISS), we know surprisingly little about how KISS is distributed or how teachers develop KISS, let alone the role that KISS plays in instruction and learning. In this study, I employ nationally-representative data to create KISS measures for kindergarten and first grade teachers. I use these measures to examine the distribution of KISS across schools, within schools, and within classrooms, as well as to investigate potential KISS development mechanisms and instructional uses. To estimate the effect of KISS on student learning, I use a set of student and subject fixed effects models that control for the non-random sorting of students into classrooms, average differences in how well teachers know particular children, and baseline achievement. I find that a standard deviation increase in KISS positively impacts kindergartners' and first graders' achievement by about 0.08-0.09 standard deviations. This result is highly robust to a number of different modeling choices and alternative explanations.

Differences in teacher quality are commonly cited as a key determinant of the huge international student performance gaps. However, convincing evidence on this relationship is still lacking, in part because it is unclear how to measure teacher quality consistently across countries. We use unique international assessment data to investigate the role of teacher cognitive skills as one main dimension of teacher quality in explaining student outcomes. Our main identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in teacher cognitive skills attributable to international differences in relative wages of nonteacher public sector employees. Using student-level test score data, we find that teacher cognitive skills are an important determinant of international differences in student performance. Results are supported by fixed-effects estimation that uses within-country between-subject variation in teacher skills.

Measures of teachers' "value added" to student achievement play an increasingly central role in k-12 teacher policy and practice, in part because they have been shown to predict teachers' long-term impacts on students' life outcomes. However, little research has examined variation in the long-term effects of teachers with similar value-added performance. In this study, we investigate variation in the persistence of teachers' value-added effects on student achievement in New York City. We separate persistent effects into general effects that improve both the subject taught (math or English language arts (ELA)) and the other area of measured achievement and subject-specific effects which improve only the subject taught. Two findings emerge. First, a teacher's value-added to ELA achievement has substantial crossover effects on long-term math performance. That is, having a better ELA teacher affects both math and ELA performance in a future year. Conversely, math teachers have only minimal long-term effects on ELA performance; their effects are far more subject-specific. Second, we identify substantial heterogeneity in the persistence of English Language Arts (ELA) teachers' effects across observable student, teacher, and school characteristics. In particular, teachers in schools serving more poor, minority, and previously low-scoring students have less persistence than other teachers with the same value-added scores. Moreover, ELA teachers with stronger academic backgrounds have more persistent effects on student achievement, as do schools staffed with a higher proportion of such teachers. The results indicate that teachers' effects on students' long-term skills can vary as a function of instructional content and quality in ways that are not fully captured by value-added measures of teacher effectiveness.

We examine the efficiency implications of imposing proportionality in teacher evaluation systems. Proportional evaluations force comparisons to be between equally-circumstanced teachers. We contrast proportional evaluations with global evaluations, which compare teachers to each other regardless of teaching circumstance. We consider a policy where administrators use the ratings from the evaluation system to help shape the teaching workforce, and define efficiency in terms of student achievement. Our analysis indicates that proportionality can be imposed in teacher evaluation systems without efficiency costs under a wide range of evaluation and estimation conditions. Proportionality is efficiency-enhancing in some cases. These findings are notable given that proportional teacher evaluations offer a number of other policy benefits.

Gaps in average college success among students of differing backgrounds have persisted in the United States for decades. One of the primary ways governments have attempted to ameliorate such gaps is by providing need-based grants, but little evidence exists on the impacts of such aid on longer term outcomes such as college persistence and degree completion. We examine the effects of the Florida Student Access Grant (FSAG) using a regression-discontinuity strategy and exploiting the cutoff used to determine eligibility. Grant eligibility had a positive effect on college attendance at public four-year institutions. Eligibility for the FSAG also increased early persistence and the cumulative number of college-level credits students earned in their first four years. Most importantly, FSAG receipt increased the likelihood of bachelor's degree receipt within six years at a public college or university by 4.6 percentage points--a 22 percent increase among students near the eligibility cutoff. The results are robust to sensitivity analyses. An appendix contains 1 figure and 3 tables.

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A key concern is the extent to which nonrandom sorting of students to teachers may bias the results and lead to a misclassification of teachers as high or low performing. In light of this, it is important to assess the extent to which evidence of sorting can be found in the large administrative data sets used for VAM estimation. Using a large longitudinal data set from an anonymous state, we find evidence that a nontrivial amount of sorting exists--particularly sorting based on prior test scores--and that the extent of sorting varies considerably across schools, a fact obscured by the types of aggregate sorting indices developed in prior research. We also find that VAM estimation is sensitive to the presence of nonrandom sorting. There is less agreement across estimation approaches regarding a particular teacher's rank in the distribution of estimated effectiveness when schools engage in sorting. The following is appended: Performance of Panel Data Value-added Estimates.

This report provides an overview of key provisions in Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), discusses how Florida's ESSA plan addresses accountability for Latino students and English Learners (ELs), and provides recommendations to Florida's accountability system to better ensure that Latino and EL students in Florida are receiving a high-quality education that prepares them for both college and career.

This report provides an overview of key provisions in Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), discusses how Arizona's ESSA plan addresses accountability for Latino students and English Learners (ELs), and provides recommendations to Arizona's accountability system to better ensure that Latino and EL students in Arizona are receiving a high-quality education that prepares them for both college and career.

We argue that place-based college scholarships, if designed intentionally and leveraged effectively, can foster local economic development. Since the introduction of the Kalamazoo Promise in 2005, a growing number of communities have applied the place-based approach to investments in human capital through the creation of college scholarship programs. Reviewing the existing literature on educational and economic outcomes associated with Promise programs reveals that they can expand students' postsecondary aspirations, improve a school district's college-going culture, and increase college enrollment and degree attainment while promoting immigration of residents and positive growth in housing prices. Therefore, these programs can serve a broader communal interest, benefiting both individuals (e.g., through higher earnings) and their localities. We conclude this report by outlining observations for city leaders and local policymakers that can be distilled into lessons concerning the civic engagement and economic vitality of a community, the attainment of equity in student outcomes, and the scale and sustainability of a program's design. We hope the evidence presented in this report will aid in the design, adoption, and scaling of programs that harness community assets and respond to community needs. [For the accompanying policy brief, see ED598184.]

This paper investigates how the precision and stability of a teacher's value-added estimate relates to the characteristics of the teacher's students. Using a large administrative data set and a variety of teacher value-added estimators, it finds that the stability over time of teacher value-added estimates can depend on the previous achievement level of a teacher's students. The differences are large in magnitude and statistically significant. The year-to-year stability level of teacher value-added estimates are typically 25% to more than 50% larger for teachers serving initially higher performing students compared to teachers with initially lower performing students. In addition, some differences are detected even when the number of student observations is artificially set to the same level and the data are pooled across two years to compute teacher value-added. Finally, the paper offers a policy simulation which demonstrates that teachers who face students with certain characteristics may be differentially likely to be the recipient of sanctions in a high stakes policy based on value-added estimates and more likely to see their estimates vary from year-to-year due to low stability.

A safe environment is a prerequisite for productive learning. This paper represents the first large-scale analysis of how feelings of safety at school affect educational outcomes. Using a unique longitudinal dataset of survey responses from New York City middle school students, the paper provides insight into the causal relationship between feelings of safety and academic achievement. The survey data include the reported feelings of safety for more than 340,000 students annually from 2007-2010 in over 700 middle schools. Findings show consistent negative effects of feeling unsafe on test scores. The paper explores the mechanisms through which feeling unsafe in the classroom may impact test scores, and multiple robustness checks support the validity of the causal claim.

We study whether reallocating existing teachers across schools within a district can increase student achievement, and what policies would help achieve these gains. Using a model of multi-dimensional value-added, we find meaningful achievement gains from reallocating teachers within a district. Using an estimated equilibrium model of the teacher labor market, we find that achieving most of these gains requires directly affecting teachers' preferences over schools. In contrast, directly affecting principals' selection of teachers can lower student achievement. Our analysis highlights the importance of equilibrium and second-best reasoning in analyzing teacher labor market policies.