While states are no longer required to set up teacher evaluation systems based in significant part on student test scores, quite a few continue to use value-added (VAMs) or student growth percentile (SGP) models for that purpose. In this study, we analyzed three years of teacher data to illustrate the performance of teachers' median growth…

State and federal accountability policies are predicated on the ability to estimate valid and reliable measures of school impacts on student learning. The typical spring-to-spring testing window potentially conflates the amount of learning that occurs during the school year with learning that occurs during the summer. We use a unique dataset to…

Every-grade, every-year testing plays a prominent part in U.S. education policy and research, but the rise of standardized testing has been met with frustration and opposition. In response, policymakers have proposed legislation designed to curb the amount of standardized testing. There is little empirical evidence, however, about the potential…

Recent corporate education reform policies have replaced relatively informal systems of principal observations that had been familiar to many teachers for much of their professional careers with high-stakes teacher evaluation (HSTE) systems that now determine who is allowed to remain in the profession and who gets terminated. Many education…

Many school leaders feel pressure to encourage teachers to integrate technology, yet they do not have a strong conceptual framework of how technology should be integrated. Kolb offers up her open-source Triple E Framework, a tool that helps administrators ask smart questions about how technology is being integrated into learning. Three key…

Empirical evidence shows that disadvantaged students tend to have less-qualified and less-effective teachers than their more-advantaged peers. These teacher quality gaps (TQGs), which have existed for decades and across many measures of student disadvantage and teacher quality, are an important factor explaining student achievement gaps between…

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…

We estimate the effects of accountability-driven school closure in New York City on students who attended middle schools that were closed at the time of closure and students who would have likely attended a closed middle school had it remained open. We find that students who would have entered the closed school had it not closed attended schools…

Valid and reliable measurements of teaching quality facilitate school-level decision-making and policies pertaining to teachers, but conventional classroom observations are costly, prone to rater bias, and hard to implement at scale. Using nearly 1,000 word-to-word transcriptions of 4th- and 5th-grade English language arts classes, we apply novel…

We study personnel flexibility in charter schools by exploring how teacher retention varies with teacher and school quality in Massachusetts. Charters are more likely to lose their highest and lowest value-added teachers. Low performers tend to exit public education, while high performers tend to switch to traditional public schools. To…

Testing organizations are faced with increasing demand to provide subscores in addition to the total test score. However, psychometricians argue that most subscores do not have added value to be worth reporting. To have added value, subscores need to meet a number of criteria: they should be reliable, distinctive, and distinct from each other and…

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…

The conventional view is that the origin of the black-white student achievement gap can be traced to sociocultural and socioeconomic factors, plus variation in parental style and parental investment, and is maintained and perpetuated by variation in school and teacher quality. This article rejects the conventional view, drawing upon the results of…

Researchers and policymakers in the US and beyond increasingly seek to identify teaching qualities that are associated with academic achievement gains for K-12 students through effectiveness studies. Yet teaching quality varies with academic content and social contexts, involves multiple participants, and requires a range of skills, knowledge, 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…