Local education agencies (LEAs) continue to use value-added models (VAMs) for teacher evaluation policies and purposes, often with consequences attached. Although the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides more flexibility to LEAs, few have discontinued VAM use, suggesting they interpret VAMs as a valid measure of teacher effectiveness. In…

Background/Context: The Race to the Top federal initiatives and requirements surrounding waivers of No Child Left Behind promoted expanded use of value-added models (VAMs) to evaluate teachers. Even after passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) relaxed these requirements, allowing more flexibility and local control, many states and…

This study sought to explore the lived experience of parents concerning school voucher programs and determine whether parental knowledge of funding discrepancies between income-eligible voucher programs and traditional public schools drives parents' advocacy for vouchers. This research is rooted in the interest convergence theory to explore and…

Educational reforms have occurred throughout the history of public education. In 2009, the federal Race to the Top initiative was born and included many educational reform models. To have these reform models gain traction at the state level, a call was made by the U.S. Department of Education (Race to the Top Program Executive Summary, 2009) for…

Education systems focus on issues related to school effects and differences. School effects are used as a basis for accountability in various countries including China. This study investigated the stability and cross-disciplinary consistency of value-added estimates based on student scores in selected schools in a city in central China. The…

The Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) loosened the federal policy grip over states' teacher accountability systems. We present information, collected via surveys sent to state department of education personnel, about all states' teacher evaluation systems post-ESSA, while also highlighting differences before and after ESSA. We found that states…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) appears to offer states and districts discretion to develop teacher evaluation policies, including those that may use Value Added Models (VAMs). While scholars are discussing this flexibility, limited attention has been paid to the potential role of the law in connection with the future use of VAMs in…

Panel or grouped data are often used to allow for unobserved individual heterogeneity in econometric models via fixed effects. In this paper, we discuss identification of a panel data model in which the unobserved heterogeneity both enters additively and interacts with treatment variables. We present identification and estimation methods for…

The federal Race to the Top competition provided significant impetus for states to adopt value-added models as a part of their teacher evaluation systems. Such models typically link students to their teachers in the spring semester when statewide tests are administered and estimate a teacher's performance based on his or her students' learning…

Previous reports suggest that administrators rarely dismiss low-performing teachers despite the changing policy landscape allowing them to do so. This brief uses survey data from Tennessee to investigate the underlying reasons explaining administrators' decisions to retain low-performing teachers. The presented analysis suggests that…

Research has begun to investigate whether teachers and schools are as effective with certain student subgroups as they are with the overall student population. Most of this research has examined the issue by trying to produce causal estimates of school contributions to short-term student growth (usually using value-added models) and has emphasized…

Anecdotal evidence points to the importance of school principals, but the limited existing research has neither provided consistent results nor indicated any set of essential characteristics of effective principals. This paper exploits extensive student-level panel data across six states to investigate both variations in principal performance and…

This study examined claims that teachers' years of teaching experience correlate to teachers' effectiveness. The assumed experience-effectiveness relationship was used to support the Government of Ontario, Canada's policy decisions concerning teacher hiring practices. This study critically examined sources cited in the policy report and reviewed…

Can schools that boost student outcomes reproduce their success at new campuses? We study a policy reform that allowed effective charter schools in Boston, Massachusetts to replicate their school models at new locations. Estimates based on randomized admission lotteries show that replication charter schools generate large achievement gains on par…

In this study, we seek to illuminate teachers' constructions of US teacher evaluation policies through close analysis of the way teachers in one district describe these policies. We conducted a thematic discursive analysis of 60 teachers' speeches, recorded during local school board meetings in a Tennessee school district. Using discursive…