Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…

This study introduces the signal weighted teacher value-added model (SW VAM), a value-added model that weights student-level observations based on each student's capacity to signal their assigned teacher's quality. Specifically, the model leverages the repeated appearance of a given student to estimate student reliability and sensitivity…

An increasing emphasis on principals as key to school improvement has contributed to efforts to elevate principal effectiveness that have taken various forms across the US. The primacy of the state as the focal point of educational reform elevates the value of understanding commonalities and differences among states in characteristics of…

We examine the relationship between absenteeism and achievement since the onset of COVID-19. Applying first-differences models to North Carolina administrative data, we estimate that each absence was associated with a 0.0032 standard deviation (SD) decline in math achievement in 2022-23. As students averaged 3.3 more absences in 2022-23 than…

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…

Existing research on "school effectiveness" indicates that differences at the school level contribute significantly towards variation in student outcomes; however, less is known about the effectiveness of schooling in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This paper addresses this gap using quantitative analysis of data from two…

Does student-teacher match quality exist? Prior work has documented large disparities in teachers' impacts across student types but has not distinguished between sorting and causal effects as the drivers of these disparities. I propose a disparate value-added model and derive a novel measure of teacher quality--revealed comparative advantage--that…

Our secondary analysis of Measures of Effective Teaching data contributes to growing evidence that observation ratings, used as part of comprehensive teacher evaluation systems across the nation, may measure factors outside of a teacher's performance or control. Specifically, men and teachers in classrooms with high concentrations of Black,…

We apply "value-added" models to estimate the effects of teachers on an outcome they cannot plausibly affect: student height. When fitting the relatively simple models that are widely used in educational practice to New York City data, we find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and…

Papay (2011) noticed that teacher value-added measures (VAMs) from a statistical model using the most common pre/post testing timeframe--current-year spring relative to previous spring (SS)--are essentially unrelated to those same teachers' VAMs when instead using next-fall relative to current-fall (FF). This is concerning since this choice--made…

Estimates of teacher "value-added" suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using…

This paper evaluates an online charter school that serves children in grades K-8 in a southern state in the United States. We compare growth in math and literacy learning on state standardized assessments between students enrolled in this school and "matched twin" students enrolled in traditional public school students statewide each…

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…

The growing availability of data linking students to classroom teachers has made it possible to estimate the contribution teachers make to student achievement. While there is a growing consensus that teacher quality is important and current evaluation systems are inadequate, many have expressed concerns over the use of value-added measures (VAMs)…