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Black teachers are critical resources for children and schools. In experimental data, I document large effects of Black upper-elementary teachers on the self-efficacy (0.9 SD) and classroom engagement (0.7 SD) of their Black but not non-Black students, potentially driven by role modeling. Black teachers also benefit the test scores (0.2 SD) and absences (over 20% decrease) of all students--no matter their race/ethnicity--that often persist years later in high school. Furthermore, Black teachers bring unique mindsets and practices to their work (differentiated instruction, growth mindset beliefs, well-organized classrooms) that mediate a moderate to large share of effects on student outcomes. These findings help bridge the quantitative race/ethnicity-matching literature with theoretical discussion and qualitative exploration on why Black teachers matter.

Over the past 15 years, the education research community has advocated for rigorous research designs that support causal inferences, for research that provides more generalizable results across settings, and for the value of research-practice partnerships that inform the design of local programs and policies. We propose the multi-cohort, longitudinal experiment (MCLE) as one approach to balancing these three, sometimes competing goals in a single study. We describe our application of an MCLE design to evaluate a teacher coaching program, where we find that changes in program features related to personnel, content, and duration coincided with substantial differences in effectiveness across three cohorts of the experiment. Our analyses and corresponding recommendations can help researchers weigh the benefits and trade-offs of the MCLE design.

Instructional coaching is an attractive alternative to one-size-fits-all teacher training and development in part because it is purposefully differentiated: Programming is aligned to individual teachers' needs and implemented by an individual coach. But, how much of the benefit of coaching as an instructional improvement model depends on the specific coach with whom a teacher works? Collaborating with a national teacher training and development organization, TNTP, we find substantial variability in effectiveness across coaches in terms of changes in preservice teachers' instructional practice (roughly 0.25 to 0.3 standard deviation from our preferred sample and models). The magnitude of coach effectiveness heterogeneity is quite similar to average coaching program effects on teaching practice identified in other research. Through a set of alternative model specifications and permutation tests, we rule out the possibility that our estimates of coach effectiveness heterogeneity are driven by nonrandom sorting of coaches to teachers, at least on observable characteristics available in our data, as well as the possibility that these estimates are simply statistical noise. These findings suggest that identifying, recruiting, and supporting highly skilled coaches will be key to scaling instructional coaching programs.

What guidance does research provide about how to improve school district performance in the United States? Despite over 30 years of inquiry on the topic of effective districts, existing frameworks are relatively narrow in terms of disciplinary focus (primarily educational leadership perspectives) and research design (primarily qualitative case studies). To bridge this gap for researchers, we first review the theoretical literatures on how districts are thought to affect educational outcomes, arguing that an expanded set of disciplinary perspectives--organizational behavior, political science, economics--have distinct theories about the types of district-level policies that might improve district-wide performance. Using these frameworks as a guide, we next conduct a review of quantitative studies that estimate the relationship between district-level inputs and educational outcomes, finding benefits of policies that cross disciplinary perspectives: higher teacher salaries, data use, and school autonomy and parental choice in the context of district-wide turnarounds. Our review also reveals the need for significant additional causal evidence and provides an inter-disciplinary map of theorized pathways through which district-level policies could influence student outcomes that are ripe for rigorous testing.

Policymakers and researchers have for many years advocated disparate approaches to ensuring teachers deliver high-quality instruction, including requiring that teachers complete specific training requirements, possess a minimum level of content knowledge, and use curriculum materials and professional development resources available from schools and districts. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which these factors, which we conceptualize as resources for teaching, predict instructional quality in upper elementary mathematics classrooms. Results show that teachers’ mathematical knowledge and their district context explained a moderate share of the variation in mathematics-specific teaching dimensions; other factors, such as teacher experience, preparation, non-instructional work hours, and measures of the school environment, explained very little variation in any dimension.