The purpose of this study was to understand how a school-based personalized learning approach can help improve literacy achievement among middle grades students in a rural area. This study followed two cohorts of schools serving students in grades 6-8 in northeast Tennessee for one year each (2018-19 and 2021-22), to assess student and school…

It is widely believed that the teacher is one of the most important factors influencing a student's success at school. In many countries, teachers' salaries and promotion prospects are determined by their students' performance. Value-added models (VAMs) are increasingly used to measure teacher effectiveness to reward or penalize teachers. The aim…

Public schools with impressive records of serving lower-performing students are often overlooked because their average test scores, even when students are growing quickly, are lower than scores in schools that serve higher-performing students. Schools may appear to be doing poorly either because baseline achievement is not easily accounted for or…

Value-added modeling (VAM), one class of statistical models used to estimate individual teacher's or school's contribution to student achievement based on student test score growth between consecutive years, has become increasingly popular in the last decades. Despite the increasing popularity of VAM, many researchers are concerned about the…

In accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2001, 100% of students were expected to become proficient on state assessments of reading and mathematics by the end of 2013-2014 academic year. Schools that consistently failed to meet the NCLB's Adequate Yearly Progress requirements were subject to penalties. In 2011, the U.S.…

Unlike in elementary school, high-school teacher effects may be confounded with both selection to tracks and unobserved track-level treatments. I document sizable confounding track effects, and show that traditional tests for the existence of teacher effects are likely biased. After accounting for these biases, high-school algebra and English…