Does Gaming the System Affect Students' Academic Achievement?

A growing body of evidence suggests that schools use test exemption to game educational accountability systems. However, it is not known whether test exemption affects students' academic progress. Analyzing data from an urban school district in Texas, the authors find that special education students make larger achievement gains when they are tested. Using their most conservative estimates, the effect of being tested is approximately .40 standard deviations in reading and .28 standard deviations in math for grades 3-8. Because special education students are more likely to be minority and poor students and these students are more likely to be exempted than their white and non-poor special education counterparts, the exemption of special education students contributes to the growth of black-white, Hispanic-white, and high-low socioeconomic status achievement gaps

Teacher Effects on Academic and Social Outcomes in Elementary School

Numerous studies conclude that teacher effects on academic achievement are substantial in size. Education is about more than academic achievement, and we know very little about teachers' effectiveness in promoting students' social development. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS- K), we estimate teacher effects on social as well as academic outcomes. We find that teacher effects on social development are sizeable, and are approximately twice as large as teacher effects on academic development. We further determine that teachers who produce better than average academic results are not the same teachers who produce better than average social results. However, we find that observable characteristics of teachers and the instructional approaches utilized in their classrooms are weak predictors of teacher effects. Finally, we show that the development of social skills has a positive effect on the growth of academic skills, and therefore teachers who are good at teaching social skills provide an additional indirect boost to academic skills in addition to their direct teaching of academic skills. We conclude that current policy debates over what it means to be a "highly qualified teacher" should also take social development into account