Difficulties of Estimating the Cost of Achieving Education Standards

Outlines the limitations of four approaches to estimating the resources needed to improve educational outcomes, including higher state standards, varied student needs, different capacities and prices for education inputs across districts, and poor data

Effective Schools: Managing the Recruitment, Development, and Retention of High-Quality Teachers

Analyzes the correlation between a school's effectiveness as measured by student achievement value-add and its ability to recruit, retain, and develop high-quality teachers and remove others, with a focus on the principal's leadership effectiveness

Have Assessment-Based Accountability Reforms Influenced the Career Decisions of Teachers and Principals?

Report. Prepared as part of Title I, Part E, Section 1503 of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001

Analyzing the Determinants of the Matching Public School Teachers to Jobs: Estimating Compensating Differentials in Imperfect Labor Markets

Although there is growing recognition of the contribution of teachers to students' educational outcomes, there are large gaps in our understanding of how teacher labor markets function. Most research on teacher labor markets use models developed for the private sector. However, markets for public school teachers differ in fundamental ways from those in the private sector. Collective bargaining and public decision making processes set teacher salaries. Thus it is unlikely that wages adjust quickly to equilibrate the supply and demand for worker and job attributes. The objective of this paper is to develop and estimate a model that more accurately characterizes the institutional features of teacher labor markets. The approach is based on a game-theoretic two-sided matching model and the estimation strategy employs the method of simulated moments. With this combination, we are able to estimate how factors affect the choices of individual teachers and hiring authorities, as well as how these choices interact to determine the equilibrium allocation of teachers across jobs. Even though this paper focuses on worker-job match within teacher labor markets, many of the issues raised and the empirical framework employed are relevant in other settings where wages are set administratively or, more generally, do not clear the pertinent markets for job and worker attributes.

The Effect of Measured School Inputs on Academic Achievement: Evidence from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s Birth Cohorts

The study presented here uses data from the NORC General Social Surveys to explore the effects of measurable school characteristics on student achievement. What separates this study from many others is the use of aggregate data on older cohorts, usually associated with research on the influence of school inputs on earnings. Earnings studies have tended to find substantial effects, while much of the research on achievement using contemporary, cross-sectional data has not. We find substantively large effects, similar in size to those found in many earnings-focused studies. In this way, our results point to the importance of aggregation and cohort effects in modeling the relationship between school inputs and student outcomes. The level of data aggregation, in particular, appears important, bringing into question causal interpretations of the results of studies using aggregate data to assess school input effects.

Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems

Describes how state or federal governments could reward exceptional teachers based on a uniform standard across various district-level teacher evaluation systems by determining the systems' reliability in predicting future performance. Includes Q & A

Coding Geographic Areas Across Census Years: Creating Consistent Definitions of Metropolitan Areas

This paper presents suggested matches for the geographical coding (geocoding) of metropolitan areas in the 1970, 1980, and 1990 Censuses. The Census Bureau used different definitions and taxonomies to describe the geography of metropolitan areas in these three Census years. As a result, the geographical areas referred to by the standard Census Bureau definitions differ among the three Census data sets. The geographic matching scheme explained in this paper attempts to maximize consistency over time for metropolitan areas in the U.S.

Evaluating Teachers: The Important Role of Value-Added

Outlines issues for evaluating teachers based on value added -- their contribution to student learning -- and the use of value added information, implications of classifying teachers, and reliability compared with other fields and evaluations

Do Higher State Test Scores in Texas Make for Better High School Outcomes?

Making schools accountable through state testing was the pre-eminent educational reform of the 1990s. Thirty-nine states now administer some form of performance-based assessment, 24 states attach stakes to their tests, and 40 states use test scores for school accountability purposes (Stecher and Barron, 1999). Proponents argue that using student scores on curriculum-based tests as a measure of school effectiveness encourages teachers to teach the curriculum. The test results set a minimum standard by which schools can be judged; they quantify school quality in a way that parents and politicians can easily understand. By setting student improvement goals for schools, states can motivate school personnel to reach continuously higher, while also identifying those schools that are unwilling or unable to meet the prescribed goals. Indeed, some analyses of national test results suggest that those states, such as North Carolina and Texas, that implemented standards and testing to standards in the early 1990s, showed large, positive gains in mathematics between 1992 and 1996 (Grissmer and Flanagan, 1998). Other analyses show that low-performing schools made significantly larger gains than higherperforming schools in states with strong accountability systems, although it is difficult to attribute causal effects. (For a summary of recent studies, see Carnoy, 2001). However, many disagree with these positive analyses of the new accountability systems. Critics argue that such testing does not promote real improvement in student learning