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K-12
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This paper studies the pension preferences of Washington State public school teachers by examining two periods of time during which teachers were able to choose between enrolling in a traditional defined benefit plan and a hybrid plan with defined benefit and defined contribution components. Our findings suggest that a large share of teachers are willing to transfer from a traditional DB plan to a hybrid pension plan, and that the probability that a teacher will choose to transfer is related to financial incentives and factors related to risk preferences. There is evidence that more effective teachers are more likely to enroll in the hybrid pension plan, suggesting that states could reduce the financial risk associated with strict defined benefit pension systems without sacrificing the desirability of pension plans to employees.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout (2014). Which Plan to Choose? The Determinants of Pension System Choice for Public School Teachers. CALDER Working Paper No. 111
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This paper examines the value of strategically assigning disproportionately larger classes to the strongest teachers in order to optimize student learning in the face of differential teacher effectiveness. The rationale is straightforward: Larger classes for the best teachers benefit the pupils who are reassigned to them; they also help the less effective teachers improve their instruction by enabling them to concentrate on fewer students. But just how much of a difference could manipulating class sizes in this way make for overall student learning and access to effective teaching? This study performs a simulation based on North Carolina data to estimate plausible student outcomes under this approach. In the North Carolina data, I find there is a very slight tendency to place more students in the classes of effective teachers; but still only about 25 percent of students are taught by the top 25 percent of teachers. Intensively reallocating eighth-grade students—so that the most effective teachers have up to twelve more pupils than the average classroom—may produce gains equivalent to adding roughly two-and-a-half extra weeks of school. Even adding a handful of students to the most effective eighth-grade teachers (up to six more than the school’s average) produces gains in math and science akin to extending the school year by nearly two weeks or, equivalently, to removing the lowest 5 percent of teachers from the classroom. The potential impacts on learning are more modest in fifth grade, where the large majority of teachers are in self-contained classrooms. Results show that this strategy shows an overall improvement in student access to effective teaching, yet gaps in access for economically disadvantaged students persist. For instance, disadvantaged eighth-grade students are about 8 percent less likely than non-disadvantaged peers to be assigned to a teacher in the top 25 percent of performance. This gap in access changes little in spite of the policy putting more students in front of effective teachers — because the pool of available teachers in high-poverty schools does not change under this strategy. Thus, this policy alone shows little promise in reducing achievement gaps.
Citation: Michael Hansen (2014). Right-Sizing the Classroom: Making the Most of Great Teachers. CALDER Working Paper No. 110
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We examine the efficiency implications of imposing proportionality in teacher evaluation systems. Proportional evaluations force comparisons to be between equally-circumstanced teachers. We contrast proportional evaluations with global evaluations, which compare teachers to each other regardless of teaching circumstance. We consider a policy where administrators use the ratings from the evaluation system to help shape the teaching workforce, and define efficiency in terms of student achievement. Our analysis indicates that proportionality can be imposed in teacher evaluation systems without efficiency costs under a wide range of evaluation and estimation conditions. Proportionality is efficiency-enhancing in some cases. These findings are notable given that proportional teacher evaluations offer a number of other policy benefits.
Citation: Cory Koedel, Jiaxi Li (2014). The Efficiency Implications of Using Proportional Evaluations to Shape the Teaching Workforce. CALDER Working Paper No. 106
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Measures of teachers’ “value added” to student achievement play an increasingly central role in k-12 teacher policy and practice, in part because they have been shown to predict teachers’ long-term impacts on students’ life outcomes. However, little research has examined variation in the long-term effects of teachers with similar value-added performance. In this study, we investigate variation in the persistence of teachers’ value-added effects on student achievement in New York City. We separate persistent effects into general effects that improve both the subject taught (math or English language arts (ELA)) and the other area of measured achievement and subject-specific effects which improve only the subject taught. Two findings emerge. First, a teacher’s value-added to ELA achievement has substantial crossover effects on long-term math performance. That is, having a better ELA teacher affects both math and ELA performance in a future year. Conversely, math teachers have only minimal long-term effects on ELA performance; their effects are far more subject-specific. Second, we identify substantial heterogeneity in the persistence of English Language Arts (ELA) teachers’ effects across observable student, teacher, and school characteristics. In particular, teachers in schools serving more poor, minority, and previously low-scoring students have less persistence than other teachers with the same value-added scores. Moreover, ELA teachers with stronger academic backgrounds have more persistent effects on student achievement, as do schools staffed with a higher proportion of such teachers. The results indicate that teachers’ effects on students’ long-term skills can vary as a function of instructional content and quality in ways that are not fully captured by value-added measures of teacher effectiveness.
Citation: Ben Master, Susanna Loeb, James Wyckoff (2014). Learning that Lasts: Unpacking Variation in Teachers’ Effects on Students’ Long-Term Knowledge. CALDER Working Paper No. 104
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We use a unique longitudinal sample of student teachers (“interns”) from six Washington state teacher training institutions to investigate patterns of entry into the teaching workforce. Specifically, we estimate split population models that simultaneously estimate the impact of individual characteristics and student teaching experiences on the timing and probability of initial hiring as a public school teacher. Not surprisingly, we find that interns endorsed to teach in “difficult-to-staff” areas are more likely to be hired as teachers than interns endorsed in other areas. Younger interns, white interns, and interns who did their student teaching in suburban schools are also more likely to find a teaching job. Prospective teachers who do their internships at schools that have more teacher turnover are more likely to find employment, often at those schools. Finally, interns with higher credential exam scores are more likely to be hired by the school where they did their student teaching. Contrary to expectations, few of the measures of the quality or the experience of an intern’s cooperating teacher are predictive of workforce entry in the expected direction.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Roddy Theobald (2013). Knocking on the Door to the Teaching Profession? Modeling the Entry of Prospective Teachers into the Workforce. CALDER Working Paper No. 105
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Teachers in the United States are compensated largely on the basis of fixed schedules that reward experience and credentials. However, there is a growing interest in whether performance-based incentives based on rigorous teacher evaluations can improve teacher retention and performance. The evidence available to date has been mixed at best. This study presents novel evidence on this topic based on IMPACT, the controversial teacher-evaluation system introduced in the District of Columbia Public Schools by then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee. IMPACT implemented uniquely high-powered incentives linked to multiple measures of teacher performance (i.e., several structured observational measures as well as test performance). We present regression-discontinuity (RD) estimates that compare the retention and performance outcomes among low-performing teachers whose ratings placed them near the threshold that implied a strong dismissal threat. We also compare outcomes among high-performing teachers whose rating placed them near a threshold that implied an unusually large financial incentive. Our RD results indicate that dismissal threats increased the voluntary attrition of low-performing teachers by 11 percentage points (i.e., more than 50 percent) and improved the performance of teachers who remained by 0.27 of a teacher-level standard deviation. We also find evidence that financial incentives further improved the performance of high-performing teachers (effect size = 0.24).
Citation: Thomas Dee, James Wyckoff (2013). Incentives, Selection, and Teacher Performance: Evidence from IMPACT. CALDER Working Paper No. 102
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This study explores whether teacher performance trajectory over time differs by school poverty settings. Focusing on elementary school mathematics teachers in North Carolina and Florida, we find no systematic relationship between school student poverty rates and teacher performance trajectories. In both high (>=60% FRL) and lower-poverty (<60% FRL) schools, teacher performance improves the fastest in the first five years and then flattens out in years five to ten. Teacher performance growth resumes between year ten and 15 in North Carolina but remains flat in Florida. In both school poverty settings, there is significant variation in teacher performance trajectories. At all career stages, the fastest-growing teachers (75th percentile) improve by .02-.04 standard deviations more in student gain scores annually than slower teachers (25th percentile). Our findings suggest that the lack of productivity “return” to experience in high-poverty schools reported in the literature is unlikely to be the result of differential teacher learning in high and lower-poverty schools.
Citation: Zeyu Xu, Umut Özek, Michael Hansen (2013). Teacher Performance Trajectories in High and Lower-Poverty Schools. CALDER Working Paper No. 101
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A critical element in the sustainability of any public policy is the fair treatment of ‘similar’ individuals. This paper introduces a new dimension of merit to evaluate public school assignment mechanisms based on this notion of horizontal equity. The findings reveal that all of the prominent assignment mechanisms discussed in the literature fail to satisfy this ‘equal treatment’ criterion. I also show that there exists no student-optimal stable mechanism that also satisfies equal treatment, illustrating the tradeoff between constrained efficiency and horizontal equity. These findings surface a serious cause for concern about the public school assignment procedures used in major school districts.
Citation: Umut Özek (2013). Equal Treatment as a Means of Evaluating Public School Assignment Mechanisms. CALDER Working Paper No. 99
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Current federal policy emphasizes a focus on turning around schools that consistently fail to serve their students and communities. At first glance, the identification of chronically low-performing schools and successful turnarounds may seem straightforward. Characterizing school performance, however, requires resolving multiple dilemmas about schools that have not been previously addressed within the literature on turnaround. Furthermore, the literature lacks empirical evidence on the frequency of turnaround in these low-performing schools. This paper addresses these issues involved in identifying low performance and turnaround among schools. Additionally, it examines the long-term performance trajectories of chronically low-performing (CLP) elementary and middle schools in multiple states to identify schools that have shown rapid improvement (designated turn around [TA] schools), schools that have shown moderate improvement (MI), and schools that are persistently not improving (NI). The findings indicate school turnaround is an uncommon event in these low-performing schools, though not rare—approximately 10 to 30 percent of CLP schools, depending on the state and school level, are identified as TA schools based on improvements in performance.
Citation: Michael Hansen, Kilchan Choi (2013). Chronically Low-performing Schools and Turnaround: Evidence from Three State. CALDER Working Paper No. 60
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The specifics of how growth models should be constructed and used to evaluate schools and teachers is a topic of lively policy debate in states and school districts nationwide. In this paper we take up the question of model choice and examine three competing approaches. The first approach, reflected in the popular student growth percentiles (SGPs) framework, eschews all controls for student covariates and schooling environments. The second approach, typically associated with value-added models (VAMs), controls for student background characteristics and under some conditions can be used to identify the causal effects of schools and teachers. The third approach, also VAM-based, fully levels the playing field so that the correlation between school- and teacher-level growth measures and student demographics is essentially zero. We argue that the third approach is the most desirable for use in educational evaluation systems. Our case rests on personnel economics, incentive-design theory, and the potential role that growth measures can play in improving instruction in K-12 schools.
Citation: Mark Ehlert, Cory Koedel, Eric Parsons, Michael Podgursky (2013). Selecting Growth Models for School and Teacher Evaluations: Should Proportionality Matter?. CALDER Working Paper No. 80
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Test-based accountability has become the new norm in public education over the last decade. In many states and school districts nationwide, student performance on standardized tests plays an important role in high-stakes decisions such as grade retention. This study examines the effects of grade retention on student misbehavior in Florida, which requires students with reading skills below grade level to be retained in the 3rd grade. The regression discontinuity estimates suggest that grade retention increases the likelihood of disciplinary incidents and suspensions in the short run, yet these effects dissipate over time. The findings also suggest that these short term adverse effects are concentrated among economically disadvantaged and male students.
Citation: Umut Özek (2013). Hold Back to Move Forward? Early Grade Retention and Student Misbehavior. CALDER Working Paper No. 100
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Current federal education policies promote learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) and the participation of minority students in these fields. Using longitudinal data on students in Florida and North Carolina, value-added estimates in math and science are generated to categorize schools into performance levels and identify differences in school STEM measures by performance levels. Several STEM-relevant variables show a significant association with effectiveness in math and science, including STEM teacher turnover, calculus and early algebra participation, and math and science instructional indices created from survey items in the data. Surprisingly, a negative association between students’ STEM course participation and success in STEM is consistently documented across both states, in addition to low participation of underrepresented minority students in successful schools in STEM.
Citation: Michael Hansen (2013). Characteristics of Schools Successful in STEM: Evidence from Two States’ Longitudinal Data. CALDER Working Paper No. 97
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This paper studies the pension preferences of Washington State public school teachers by examining two periods of time during which teachers were able to choose between enrolling in a traditional defined benefit plan and a hybrid plan with defined benefit and defined contribution components. Our findings suggest that a large share of teachers are willing to transfer from a traditional DB plan to a hybrid pension plan, and that the probability that a teacher will choose to transfer is related to financial incentives and factors related to risk preferences. Among new hires, observable teacher and job characteristics explain little of the pension decision, but there is some evidence that more effective teachers are more likely to enroll in the hybrid pension plan. The general popularity of the hybrid plan suggests that states could reduce the financial risk associated with DB pensions without sacrificing the desirability of pension plans to employees.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout (2013). Which Plan to Choose? The Determinants of Pension System Choice for Public School Teachers. CALDER Working Paper No. 98
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This paper examines the effects of policies that increase the number of students who take the first course in algebra in 8th grade, rather than waiting until 9th grade. Extending previous research that focused on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system, we use data for the 10 largest districts in North Carolina. We identify the effects of accelerating the timetable for taking algebra by using data on multiple cohorts grouped by decile of prior achievement and exploiting the fact that policy-induced shifts in the timing of algebra occur at different times in different districts to different deciles of students. The expanded data make it possible to examine heterogeneity across students in the effect of taking algebra early. We find negative effects among students in the bottom 60% of the prior achievement distribution. In addition, we find other sources of heterogeneity in effect
Citation: Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, Jacob Vigdor (2013). Algebra for 8th Graders: Evidence on its Effects from 10 North Carolina Districts. CALDER Working Paper No. 87
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We use North Carolina data to explore whether the quality of teachers in the lower elementary grades (K-2) falls short of teacher quality in the upper grades (3-5) and to examine the hypothesis that school accountability pressures contribute to such quality shortfalls. Our concern with the early grades arises from recent studies highlighting how children’s experiences in those years have lasting effects on their later outcomes. Using two credentials-based measures of teacher quality, we document within-school quality shortfalls in the lower grades, and show that the shortfalls increased with the introduction of No Child Left Behind. Consistent with that pattern, we find that schools responded to accountability pressures by moving their weaker teachers down to the lower grades and stronger teachers up to the higher grades. These findings support the view that accountability pressure induces schools to pursue actions that work to the disadvantage of children in the lower grades.
Citation: Sarah C. Fuller, Helen Ladd (2013). School Based Accountability and the Distribution of Teacher Quality Across Grades in Elementary Schools. CALDER Working Paper No. 75
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Using longitudinal data on spanning the 2002-03 through 2007-08 school years in Florida and North Carolina, this paper decomposes the workforce dynamics among teachers and principals in low-performing schools that significantly improved their performance. In general, I find strong, consistent evidence of human capital development (i.e., improvements in the productivity of the teachers and principals already in the school) accounting for the increased performance in turnaround schools. These findings are robust to the inclusion of school random effects, alternative categorizations of both teachers and turnaround schools, and are observed across elementary and middle school samples in both states. There is also general evidence of productive incoming teachers helping to improve these turnaround schools, but little evidence to support negative attrition specific to these schools played a role. These findings are important as they document large improvements in the joint productivity of teachers in low-performing schools, a finding which is out of step with current federal efforts to improve schools that implicitly assume teacher productivity is essentially fixed over time.
Citation: Michael Hansen (2013). Investigating the Role of Human Resources in School Turnaround: A Decomposition of Improving Schools in Two States. CALDER Working Paper No. 89
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There is increasing agreement among researchers and policymakers that teachers vary widely in their ability to improve student achievement, and the difference between effective and ineffective teachers has substantial effects on standardized test outcomes as well as later life outcomes. However, there is not similar agreement about how to improve teacher effectiveness. Several research studies confirm that on average novice teachers show remarkable improvement in effectiveness over the first five years of their careers. In this paper we employ rich data from New York City to explore the variation among teachers in early career returns to experience. Our goal is to better understand the extent to which measures of teacher effectiveness during the first two years reliably predicts future performance. Our findings suggest that early career returns to experience may provide useful insights regarding future performance and offer opportunities to better understand how to improve teacher effectiveness. We present evidence not only about the predictive power of early value-added scores, but also on the limitations and imprecision of those predictions.
Citation: Allison Atteberry, Susanna Loeb, James Wyckoff (2013). Do First Impressions Matter? Improvement in Early Career Teacher Effectiveness. CALDER Working Paper No. 90
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How to incorporate mobile students, who enter schools/classrooms after the start of the school year, into educational performance evaluations remains to be a challenge. As mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), all states currently require that a school is accountable only if the student has been enrolled in the school for a full academic year. This paper investigates the school response to this eligibility requirement in a regression-discontinuity framework. Comparing students who enter schools right before and after the eligibility cutoff, I find no evidence that schools behave strategically in response to this requirement.
Citation: Umut Özek (2012). One Day Too Late? Mobile Students in an Era of Accountability. CALDER Working Paper No. 82
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In this descriptive paper we detail the structure of two Washington State teacher retirement plans: a traditional defined benefit plan and a hybrid defined benefit-defined contribution plan. We provide preliminary evidence on how retirement plan structures may relate to the choices that teachers make. Our analysis of the financial incentives offered to Washington State teachers under the two different plans reveals several patterns that may influence teacher behavior. Teachers experience large gains in their pension wealth by crossing key age and experience thresholds. The relative magnitude of expected pension wealth differs sharply between the plans depending on when a teacher anticipates exiting the position, and the magnitude of anticipated returns to investment. We observe teacher choices between the traditional defined benefit plan and the hybrid plan during two time periods: 1996–1997 and 2008–2010. In 1996–1997 teachers were offered a financial inducement to switch into the newly created hybrid plan and defaulted into staying in the traditional plan if no action was taken. Teachers hired during 2008–2010 defaulted into the hybrid plan if no action was taken. Most of the teachers who were given a choice opted for the hybrid plan. This preference for the hybrid plan is more pronounced among the 1996–1997 cohort, who received a financial incentive in the form of a transfer payment for switching. The notable exception is among teachers who were over 55, and or teachers with relatively high experience levels, who were more likely to choose the traditional defined benefit plan.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Annie Pennucci, Wesley Bignell (2012). Teacher Pension Choice: Surveying the Landscape in Washington State. CALDER Working Paper No. 81
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School closures are increasingly common among U.S. public schools, driven by both budgetary constraints and accountability pressures to turnaround low-performing schools. This paper contributes to the nascent literature on school closures by evaluating student achievement and mobility outcomes in a large-scale restructuring effort in Washington, D.C. in which 32 elementary and middle school campuses were closed or consolidated in the summer of 2008. Using longitudinal data, we investigate how student outcomes change in relation to this initiative with an instrumental variables strategy that counters the endogeneity of student assignment across schools before and after the restructuring occurred. The results show that the academic performance of students directly affected by the school restructuring experienced a temporary decline, but it rebounded by the second school year after restructuring occurred. Additionally, we find no evidence of closure adversely inducing further mobility among affected students.
Citation: Umut Özek, Michael Hansen, Thomas Gonzalez (2012). A Leg Up or a Boot Out?: Student Achievement and Mobility under School Restructuring. CALDER Working Paper No. 78