Assessment is not an end in itself but a vehicle for educational improvement. Assessment is vital to the educational process as it enhances teaching and learning, promotes accountability, motivates students, guides instructional decisions, and drives systemic improvements. Assessment plays a crucial role in the educational process as it serves…

The success of students with disabilities (SWDs) depends on access to high-quality general education teachers. Yet, teacher value-added measures (VAMs) generally fail to distinguish between effectiveness in educating students with or without disabilities. Using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, we create two VAMs: one focusing on…

This paper examines how different measures of teacher quality are related to students' long-run educational trajectories. We estimate teachers' "test-based" and "nontest" value-added (the latter based on contributions to student absences, suspensions, grade progression, and grades) and assess how these predict various student…

The clinical teaching experience is one of the most important components of teacher preparation. Prior observational research has found that more effective mentors and schools with better professional climates are associated with better preparation for teacher candidates. We test these findings using an experimental assignment of teacher…

Contemporary teacher evaluation policies are built upon multiple-measure systems including, primarily, teacher-level value-added and observational estimates. However, researchers have not yet investigated how using these indicators to evaluate teachers might distort validity, especially when one indicator seemingly trumps, or is trusted over the…

School districts increasingly gauge school quality with surveys that ask about school climate and student engagement. We use data from New York City's middle and high schools to compare the long-run predictive validity of surveys with that of conventional test score value-added models (VAMs). Our analysis leverages the New York school match, which…

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…

The Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), the value-added model (VAM) sold by the international business analytics software company SAS Institute Inc., is advertised as offering "precise, reliable and unbiased results that go far beyond what other simplistic [value-added] models found in the market today can provide." In this…

This paper proposes a new methodology for estimating teacher value-added. Rather than imposing a normality assumption on unobserved teacher quality (as in the standard empirical Bayes approach), our nonparametric estimator permits the underlying distribution to be estimated directly and in a computationally feasible way. The resulting estimates…

This study compares the estimated grammar school effect in different regression models, and explains why previous evidence of the effectiveness of grammar school is mixed. Like most studies of school effectiveness evaluation, previous research on grammar school effect usually applies regression to control for confounding between-school factors and…

Although existing research suggests that students benefit on a range of outcomes when they enroll in early algebra classes, policy efforts that accelerate algebra enrollment for large numbers of students often have negative effects. Explanations for this apparent contradiction often emphasize the potential role of teacher and peer effects, which…

States are responsible for setting and evaluating the standards that teacher preparation programs (TPPs) must meet for accreditation. Despite the considerable investment that states make in this process, no prior research has linked the ratings of TPPs generated by program reviews to inservice teacher performance. In this paper, we describe…

This dissertation studies a few topics in industrial organization. In the first two chapters, I study the education market from the perspective of industrial organization. Chapter 3 studies second-price auctions with participation costs. Chapters 1 and 2 study the high school market of a large city in China that introduced a policy allowing public…

This technical report provides an overview of the datasets and methodology used in the main report, "Investigating the Potential Use of Long-Term School and College Destination Measures. Final Report" (see ED619071). The purpose of the main report is to investigate the potential for using Department for Education's (DfE's) Longitudinal…

This dissertation consists of three essays that use and develop econometric methods to causally investigate topics in education and development economics. In the first chapter, I develop an econometric framework to correctly and efficiently draw inference in models where estimated value-added (VA) is an explanatory variable (and models where it…