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We describe the levels, trends, and patterns of school closure and restructuring in the United States from 1991 to 2019 across all sectors using a near census of K–12 schools. Focusing on the years with the best available data, 2014–18, we find that the annual closure rate of charter, private, and traditional public schools (TPSs) were 5.1, 2.9, and 0.9 percent respectively. The annual restructuring rates are 2.0 percent for charter schools and 0.6 percent for TPSs. Regression analysis shows that these differences in closure and restructuring rates by sector drop slightly after controlling for student and school characteristics. The strongest predictor of increased closures is low student enrollment, especially in private schools. In charter and traditional public schools, achievement measures predict closure and restructuring nearly as strongly as enrollment. While racial and income composition are weaker predictors of closure/restructuring, that they predict at all, after controlling for many other factors, raises some equity concerns. We also discuss ways in which the forces behind closure/restructuring may be difficult to uncover with this type of quantitative analysis.

Theories of market-based school reform suggest that teacher labor markets may be inefficient, and perhaps inequitable, because union contracts, tenure protections, and government regulation limit school autonomy over hiring, evaluation, compensation, and working conditions. In a less restrictive setting, schools could incentivize performance by selectively retaining and rewarding better-performing teachers. We test this empirically by comparing teacher exits in the deregulated market of New Orleans with exits in neighboring traditional public school districts. Our results suggest that the relationship between teacher performance and retention is stronger in the New Orleans market setting than in similar traditional school districts. We also find positive associations between annual salary increases and performance, but only when teachers transfer from one charter school to another. While teacher retention is more closely tied to performance in New Orleans, this did not yield a net gain in teacher quality, relative to neighbors. New Orleans had much higher teacher turnover, and we find the large numbers of teachers who had to be hired annually in the city had lower value-added than the entrants in comparison districts.

A number of districts are moving toward a portfolio management model, in which central offices act as “portfolio managers” (PMs) that oversee—but may not actively manage—publicly funded schools. Us...

Can a school or district improve student achievement simply by switching to a higher‐quality textbook or curriculum? We conducted the first multi‐textbook, multi‐state effort to estimate textbook efficacy following widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated changes in the textbook market. Pooling textbook adoption and student test score data across six geographically and demographically diverse U.S. states, we found little evidence of differences in average achievement gains for schools using different math textbooks. We found some evidence of greater variation in achievement gains among schools using pre‐CCSS editions, which may have been more varied in their content than post‐CCSS editions because they were written for a broader set of standards. We also found greater variation among schools that had more exposure to a given text. However, these differences were small. Despite considerable interest and attention to textbooks as a low‐cost, “silver bullet” intervention for improving student outcomes, we conclude that the adoption of a new textbook or set of curriculum materials, on its own, is unlikely to achieve this goal.

In this study, we start with developing a theoretical framework incorporating theories from the contracting literature and adapt them to the unusual case of nonprofit charter schools, which yields several seemingly novel theoretical insights. In contrast to earlier studies, we use a quasi-experimental research design, the synthetic control group approach, to test the impact of contracting on spending for public schooling in New Orleans. Using detailed information on spending, our empirical analysis shows that contracting increases total operating spending. The additional funds were used to increase administrative spending, including both the number and salaries of administrators. Fewer resources were devoted to instruction. Although the number of teachers was largely unchanged, per-teacher salaries and benefits dropped. We utilize the results to complement the theory of contracting with regard to outsourcing based on funding formulas and the mix of inputs chosen by contractors.

In recent years, some U.S. school districts have shifted away from direct management of schools, toward systems in which some or all schools operate under enhanced autonomy, accountability, and parental choice. Yet dynamics driving these changes are understudied, and there are few comparative studies of system-level governance shifts. To address these gaps, we use extensive qualitative data to analyze change in Los Angeles, Denver, and New Orleans. Drawing on evolutionary theories, we find that external crises, state policy, and new actors triggered change, yet distinct contexts and change processes resulted in markedly different systems. Finally, in all three cities, concerns that emerging systems exacerbated long-standing inequities indicate that governance change is both an organizational and highly contentious political process.

Prior research suggests that families prefer schools with higher test scores, shorter distances from home, and certain student demographics. We build on this using data from New Orleans, a context well suited to identification of parent preferences because of its deferred acceptance algorithm and extensive, standardized, and broadly accessible school information. This allows us to study revealed preferences for a richer set of characteristics. We find that families prefer schools with higher school value-added, more extracurricular activities, and after-school childcare. We also find heterogeneity by family income that is more consistent with income constraints than preference heterogeneity. Finally, we show how methodology and data shape the results.

We investigate student mobility in a choice-based system that has gone to scale, New Orleans, to gain insight into an underlying improvement mechanism of choice-based reform and its potential equit...

New Orleans schools experienced drastic reforms after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. To examine teachers’ perspectives on these reforms, we surveyed 323 teachers who taught in New Orleans public schools before 2005 and in 2013–2014. Teachers directly compared the learning and work environments and student and teacher outcomes of their current schools to those of their pre-Katrina schools. Returning teachers perceived significant and generally positive changes in learning environments and student outcomes but mixed positive and negative changes in work environments. Despite improvements in school environments, the net result is that teachers became less satisfied with their jobs. These results show that intensive, sustained school reform can lead to significant changes, but these changes can have negative impacts on teachers.

Income inequality in educational attainment is a long-standing concern, and disparities in college completion have grown over time. Need-based financial aid is commonly used to promote equality in college outcomes, but its effectiveness has not been established, and some are calling it into question. A randomized experiment is used to estimate the impact of a private need-based grant program on college persistence and degree completion among students from low-income families attending 13 public universities across Wisconsin. Results indicate that offering students additional grant aid increases the odds of bachelor’s degree attainment over four years, helping to diminish income inequality in higher education.

One of the biggest changes in New Orleans after Katrina was observed in the public school system. In this article, we describe the massive overhaul of the public school system in New Orleans post-Katrina and examine the types of problems that this type of decentralized market-oriented system will be most likely to solve as well as those it may struggle with. As examples, we use problems facing New Orleans public schools, namely, student discipline, information sharing with parents, and especially the human capital pipeline, to illustrate the challenges a regulated market system presents. We then present and apply to those cases a general framework for thinking about which of these types of problems a decentralized system will be best able to solve.

Teacher accountability based on teacher value-added measures could have far-reaching effects on classroom instruction and student learning, for good and for ill. To date, however, research has focused almost entirely on the statistical properties of the measures. While a useful starting point, the validity and reliability of the measures tell us very little about the effects on teaching and learning that come from embedding value added into policies like teacher evaluation, tenure, and compensation. We pose dozens of unanswered questions, not only about the net effects of these policies on measurable student outcomes, but about the numerous, often indirect ways in which these and less easily observed effects might arise. Drawing in part on other articles in the special issue, we consider perspectives from labor economics, sociology of organizations, and psychology. Some of the pathways of these policy effects directly influence teaching and learning and in intentional ways, while other pathways are indirect and unintentional. While research is just beginning to answer the key questions, a key initial theme of recent research is that both the opponents and advocates are partly correct about the influence of these policies.

The authorizers of charter schools are an understudied piece of the charter reform process. The local school boards, state agencies, and higher education institutions that act as authorizers play a significant role in the market, determining which operators get to enter the market and which are forced to exit. This article provides an economics-based framework for understanding the objectives of authorizers that can be used to test empirically the relative importance of three main objectives: student achievement, parental satisfaction, and political influence. Which of these objectives authorizers pursue could have a significant impact on which schools are authorized and renewed and therefore on the success of the charter schools generally.

We examine the relationships between observational ratings of teacher performance, principals’ evaluations of teachers’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills and test-score based measures of teachers’ productivity. We find that principals can distinguish between high and low performing teachers, but the overall correlation between principal ratings of teachers and teachers’ value-added contribution to student achievement is modest. The variation across metrics occurs in part because they are capturing different traits. While past teacher value-added predicts future value-added, principals’ subjective ratings can provide additional information, particularly when prior value-added measures are based on a single year of teacher performance.

Policymakers are revolutionizing teacher evaluation by attaching greater stakes to student test scores and observation-based teacher effectiveness measures, but relatively little is known about why they often differ so much. Quantitative analysis of thirty schools suggests that teacher value-added measures and informal principal evaluations are positively, but weakly, correlated. Qualitative analysis suggests that some principals give high value-added teachers low ratings because the teachers exert too little effort and are “lone wolves” who work in isolation and contribute little to the school community. The results suggest that the method of evaluation may not only affect which specific teachers are rewarded in the short term, but shape the qualities of teacher and teaching students experience in the long term.

Research on teacher productivity, as well as recently developed accountability systems for teachers, relies on “value-added” models to estimate the impact of teachers on student performance. We consider six value-added models that encompass most commonly estimated specifications. We test many of the central assumptions required to derive each of the value-added models from an underlying structural cumulative achievement model and reject nearly all of them. While some of the six popular models produce similar estimates, other specifications yield estimates of teacher productivity and other key parameters that are considerably different.

One of the key barriers in accessing postsecondary opportunities for many students is financial aid. This chapter begins by providing a review of prior evidence on the relationship between financial aid and postsecondary outcomes. One type of financial aid intervention that challenges traditional aid and scholarship options are “promise programs.” These programs make commitments to low-income students when they are much younger than when students typically apply for aid and have the potential to encourage students to better prepare during high school, develop the social capital they need to navigate the path to college, and pay for growing college costs. In this chapter, the author describes the design and rationale for The Degree Project (TDP), which is the first randomized trial of a promise scholarship in the United States. In addition to the important new evidence the demonstration program will generate, TDP also shows how educators and researchers can work together to provide the insight and answers policy makers need to address very real education gaps.

Given scarce resources for evaluation, we recommend that education researchers more frequently conduct comprehensive randomized trials that generate evidence on how, why, and under what conditions interventions succeed or fail in producing effects. Recent experience evaluating a randomized need-based financial aid intervention highlights some of our arguments and guides our outline of the circumstances under which the examination of mechanisms and heterogeneous impacts is particularly important. Comprehensive experiments can enhance research productivity by increasing the number of theories both tested and generated and can advance policy and practice by exploring the conditions under which interventions will be most successful in scale up. Paradoxically, while the emphasis on average treatment effects is typically associated with efficiency-minded economists, we argue that the approach is often inefficient from the standpoints of science and policy. © 2012 Association for Education Finance and Policy

We study the effects of various types of education and training on the productivity of teachers in promoting student achievement. Previous studies on the subject have been hampered by inadequate measures of teacher training and difficulties in addressing the non-random selection of teachers to students and of teachers to training. We address these issues by estimating models that include detailed measures of pre-service and in-service training, a rich set of time-varying covariates, and student, teacher, and school fixed effects. We find that elementary and middle school teacher productivity increases with experience (informal on-the-job training). The largest gains from experience occur in the first few years, but we find continuing gains beyond the first five years of a teacher's career. In contrast, we do not find a consistent relationship between formal professional development training and teacher productivity. However, this may be partly driven by estimation issues as we find more significant positive effects of formal training in the subject-grade combination where estimates should be most precise (middle school math). There is no evidence that teachers' pre-service (undergraduate) training or college entrance exam scores are related to productivity.

Accurately measuring performance is important to any organization, including schools. State longitudinal data systems with annual student assessments are expanding the possibilities for measuring school and teacher performance. This can increase the potential for evaluating educators in ways that are fair and improve performance and student outcomes. Unfortunately, despite almost two decades of the "new accountability" that links student test scores to schools, our performance measurement and accountability systems are still broken. Some of the problems--narrowing the curriculum and teaching to the test--have received widespread attention. Another critical problem is less widely recognized. The "Fundamental Principle of Accountability," as I will call it, is that we should hold people accountable for what they can control. But accountability systems violate this principle when they focus on student attainment, or student achievement at a point in time. The problem with attainment has to do with a basic fact of human development: Knowledge and skill accumulate over each person's life. What adults know and can do depends on what they experienced as students, which in turn depends on experiences before school, all the way back to birth (Heckman 2006). Kindergarteners have vastly different early childhood experiences and readiness for school. For example, black students start kindergarten with scores that are already 22 percentile points behind white kindergartners (Fryer and Levitt 2004). Schools have not caused these "starting-gate inequalities," because most students haven't set foot in a classroom before kindergarten. The gaps are so large and persistent that even effective schools don't completely overcome them. Not only are the starting gate inequalities large, but nonschool factors continue to influence children as they progress through school. So, while the "new accountability" focus on student achievement was a step forward in some ways, both state and federal policies misuse test scores in ways that violate the Fundamental Principle of Accountability. These misuses have consequences. Performance measures based on student test score attainment are partly responsible for pressuring schools to exclude students from testing (Figlio 2005) and pushing out good teachers (Clotfelter et al. 2004) who are frustrated by a system that punishes them no matter how well they perform. It's also well known that school systems, especially urban school districts, "spin their wheels" in an endless cycle of reform and changes in curriculum, instruction, and leadership (Hess 1998). A continual cycle of reform might make sense if those schools were continually failing, but "low-performing" schools often aren't failing by more reasonable definitions. As I will show below, many low-attainment schools are actually high-performing, and the reverse is also true. While we have focused on low-attainment schools, high-attainment schools present an equally large, but hidden, problem. In these schools, students enter with high scores, so their attainment remains high almost no matter what the schools do. These schools often largely ignore external accountability. Fortunately, we can take steps to help avoid confounding out-of-school influences with school or teacher performance. The Basics of Value-Added Accountability Performance can be reasonably defined, according to the Fundamental Principle of Accountability, as what each school and teacher contributes to student outcomes. But how can we measure that? One simple way to measure performance is by subtracting the initial level of student achievement test score from the end-of-year test score. This is illustrated in Figure 1, in which each arrow represents the achievement growth of students in two hypothetical schools: Rockefeller Elementary and Smith Elementary. The bracket in the lower left corner indicates the differences in initial achievement--the "starting gate inequality"--and shows that Rockefeller students begin in a stronger position than Smith students. …

Background Interest among social scientists in peer influences has grown with recent reseg-regation of the nation's schools and court decisions that limit the ability of school districts to consider race in school assignment decisions. If having more advantaged peers is beneficial, then these trends may reduce educational equity. Previous studies have outlined individual or groups of theories about how peers influence one another, but these theories have rarely been subjected to empirical tests. Focus of Study This study provides a description of a wide range of peer influence theories from psychologists, sociologists, and economists. A taxonomy is developed that distinguishes theories based primarily on whether students are hypothesized to change each other's beliefs and values (direct influences) versus more indirect influences, such as the allocation of teachers and school resources. Whether empirical evidence, including important new advancements by economists, informs the validity of the various theories is then considered. Although far from definitive, the study highlights the importance of carrying out empirical analysis that tests specific theories. Research Design Quantitative researchers are increasingly aware of the great difficulty of determining whether correlations between individual and group outcomes reflect a causal effect of peers. The review of empirical evidence focuses on experimental and quasi-experimental studies, which most plausibly reflect causal influences. These studies focus on student achievement as the outcome of interest. Conclusions The evidence is not completely consistent with any single theory, though it is more supportive of some over others. A new hybrid theory—group-based contagion—is proposed that is more consistent with the evidence.

In this mixed‐methods study, we examine the degree to which district‐ and building‐level administrators accommodate teacher‐quality and test‐based accountability policies in their hiring practices. We find that administrators negotiated local hiring goals with characteristics emphasized by federal and state teacher‐quality policies, such as knowledge of the subject and teaching skills. While district administrators and principals largely “bridged” to external certification requirements, some principals “buffered” their hiring decisions from the pressures of test‐based accountability. Principals who bridged to test‐based accountability gave greater weight to subject knowledge and teaching skills. We find that bridging and buffering differs by policy and cannot be easily applied to accountability policies. Specifically, separating the indirect effect of external accountability from other policies influencing principal hiring is difficult. Our analysis also highlights tensions among local, state, and federal...

The vast majority of research and policy related to teacher quality focuses on the supply of teachers and ignores teacher demand. In particular, the important role of school principals in hiring teachers is rarely considered. Using interviews of school principals in a midsized Florida school district, we provide an exploratory mixed methods analysis of the teacher characteristics principals prefer. Our findings contradict the conventional wisdom that principals undervalue content knowledge and intelligence. Principals in our study ranked content knowledge third among a list of twelve characteristics. Intelligence does appear less important at first glance, but this is apparently because principals believe all applicants who meet certification requirements meet a minimum threshold on intelligence and because some intelligent teachers have difficulty connecting with students. More generally, we find that principals prefer an “individual mix” of personal and professional qualities. They also create an “organizational mix,” hiring teachers who differ from those already in the school in terms of race, gender, experience, and skills, and an “organizational match,” in which teachers have similar work habits and a high propensity to remain with the school over time. Because of tenure rules, many principals also prefer less experienced (untenured) teachers, even though research suggests that they are less effective. © 2010 American Education Finance Association

In this study, we consider the efficacy of a relatively new and widely accepted certification system for teachers established by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). We utilize an extensive database covering the universe of teachers and students in Florida for a four-year span to determine the relationship between NBPTS certification and the impact of teachers on student test scores from both low-stakes and high-stakes exams. Contrary to some previous studies, we find evidence that NBPTS certification provides a positive signal of a teacher's contribution to student achievement only in a few isolated cases. However, our results do reinforce evidence from previous research that the process of becoming NBPTS certified does not increase teacher productivity. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

led to restrictions on using value-added data in teacher pay, evaluation, or person nel decisions in California and in teacher tenure decisions in New York. Though the idea of tracing students' performance back to the individual teacher may intuitively seem simple, value-added models are quite complicated technically in ways that can cause impatient reformers' eyes to glaze over. States and districts may therefore undertake to build value-added models and use value-added data without appreciating the statistical and testing (or "measurement") issues that are involved, as Heather C. Hill points out in the following exchange. This problem is compounded by a national shortage of expertise in educational testing and account ability systems. How should policymakers decide whether to use value-added data to evaluate teach ers? Douglas N. Harris (pro) and Hill (con) agree that policy decisions about teacher value-added should be analyzed using the criteria?validity and reliability?that measurement experts apply to determine whether a particular test is suitable for a given purpose. To those criteria, Harris would add cost, a comparison of teacher value-added with alternative methods of ensuring instructional quality, such as per formance observations and credentials, and consideration of exactly how teacher value-added would be used. Harris argues that value-added models provide an inexpensive tool that could turn out to work better for some purposes than alternative methods. Hill agrees with Harris that credentials and some forms of performance observation have drawbacks, but, she contends, value-added models are not sufficiently reliable to sort good teachers from bad ones.

The common reporting of effect sizes has been an important advance in education research in recent years. However, the benchmarks used to interpret the size of these effects—as small, medium, and large—do little to inform educational administration and policy making because they do not account for program costs. The author proposes an approach to establishing cost-effectiveness benchmarks rooted in an explicit economics-based decision-making framework and assumptions about the decision-making context. To be considered large, the ratio of effects to costs must be at least as large as the ratios for substitute interventions. Evidence related to class size, prekindergarten, and other interventions is discussed to illustrate the calculation of the cost-effectiveness ratios, how the evidence can be used to develop benchmarks, and how the benchmarks can be useful for researchers and policy makers. The development of benchmarks is intended to encourage cost-effectiveness analysis as a standard part of policy analysis, thereby providing more evidence to increase the validity of the benchmarks and, ultimately, improving policy decisions. Recent cost-effectiveness research in health care policy illustrates the potential value of cost-effectiveness benchmarks in education.

Annual student testing may make it possible to measure the contributions to student achievement made by individual teachers. But would these “teacher value-added” measures help to improve student achievement? I consider the statistical validity, purposes, and costs of teacher value-added policies. Many of the key assumptions of teacher value added are rejected by empirical evidence. However, the assumption violations may not be severe, and value-added measures still seem to contain useful information. I also compare teacher value-added accountability with three main policy alternatives: teacher credentials, school value-added accountability, and formative uses of test data. I argue that using teacher value-added measures is likely to increase student achievement more efficiently than a teacher credentials-only strategy but may not be the most cost-effective policy overall. Resolving this issue will require a new research and policy agenda that goes beyond analysis of assumptions and statistical properties and focuses on the effects of actual policy alternatives. © 2009 American Education Finance Association

While much has been written about the process of employee selection in other occupations, there has been little discussion on the process and tools of teacher selection and why it occurs as it does. To understand this question, we conduct an extensive literature review in which we compare teacher hiring with hiring in other occupations. We also present findings from a study of school principals and district administrators in a midsized Florida school district. Our results suggest that the screening and selection process in teaching is not much different from occupations that have similar levels of job complexity. A theory emerges from the review and analysis that explains the process and reliance on certain tools in teacher hiring. The theory focuses especially on the costs of various tools and processes, the types and quality of information that come from them, and the distinctive features of teaching as an occupation and schools as organizations.

It is commonly believed that teacher turnover is unusually high and that this is a sign of failure in the education system. Previous studies have tested this idea by comparing teacher turnover with that of similar professions, but have come to contradictory conclusions. We provide additional evidence by comparing teachers with professionals from other fields that are arguably comparable, namely nurses, social workers, and accountants. Using data from the Current Population Survey, the results suggest that the average rate of teacher turnover is not significantly higher than these professions, even after controlling for other measured differences among them. Where teacher turnover differs most from other professions is in the greater prevalence of turnover among older workers, likely reflecting earlier retirement. We find some evidence that the relatively high ratio of pensions-to-salaries in teaching partially explains this behavior. Other factors affecting turnover are also studied.

In debates about accountability, advocates often point to individual “high‐flying” schools that achieve high test scores despite serving disadvantaged populations. Using a near‐census of U.S. public schools, this new analysis considers the likelihood that schools become high flyers. The results suggest that of the more than 60,000 schools considered, low‐poverty schools are 22 times more likely to reach consistently high academic achievement compared with high‐poverty schools. Schools serving student populations that are both low poverty and low minority are 89 times more likely to be consistently high performing compared with high‐poverty, high‐minority schools. This does not mean that schools have no influence over student achievement, or that schools should be unaccountable, but that accountability systems need to have carefully defined objectives and measures of school progress. In addition, the results suggest the continued need to address home and community factors in the pursuit of educational equity.

Diminishing marginal returns (DMR) to school inputs could explain a wide variety of findings in the research literature. One important example is the influential finding by Heyneman and Loxley that school inputs are the ‘predominant influence’ on achievement in developing nations, where input levels are low, even though the same school inputs have relatively little influence in developed nations, where input levels are higher. However, few studies of education production, including those related to the Heyneman–Loxley hypothesis, use functional forms that allow for DMR, and common tests for DMR appear to be invalid. Various tests are implemented using data from 32 countries. As is commonly found in the literature, the marginal effects of school inputs are frequently negative, precluding DMR. In those cases with positive marginal effects, there is more evidence for DMR than for increasing returns, but constant returns rarely can be rejected. DMR therefore does not appear to explain the differences...