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• Teachers and School Climate: Effects on Student Outcomes and Academic Disparities

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• School District Job Postings and Staffing Challenges Throughout the Second School Year During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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• How Well Do Professional Reference Ratings Predict Teacher Performance?

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• A Comprehensive Picture of Achievement Across the COVID-19 Pandemic Years: Examining Variation in Test Levels and Growth Across Districts, Schools, Grades, and Students

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• The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic

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• How Much Do Early Teachers Matter?

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• Out of the Gate, but Not Necessarily Teaching: A Descriptive Portrait of Early-Career Earnings for Those Who Are Credentialed to Teach

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• Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? An Analysis of Pension Structure and Retirement Timing

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• Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the Pandemic

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• School District Staffing Challenges in a Rapidly Recovering Economy

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• CALDER Explainers: Re-Framing the Discussion about Teacher Education

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  This CALDER Explainer reviews empirical evidence about the relationship between specific aspects of...

• Missing Elements in the Discussion of Teacher Shortages

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• The Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity: What States and Districts Can Do Now to Learn From American Rescue Plan ESSER Interventions

  CALDER Policy Brief No. 27-0921

   

• Reflections on What Pandemic-Related State Test Waiver Requests Suggest About the Priorities for the Use of Tests

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• Using Longitudinal Student Mobility Across Schools and Districts to Identify At-Risk Students

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• Examining the Dimensions of Teacher Turnover

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• Re-Thinking the Geography of Student Teaching Placements in a Post-COVID World

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• Understanding the Early Teacher Pipeline: What We Can (and, Importantly, Can't) Learn from National Data

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• The COVID-19 Crisis and Teacher Layoffs: Research on How to Mitigate Harm

  CALDER Policy Brief No. 20-0620

  One of the unfortunate consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the sharp downturn in tax...

• What Do We Know About the Effects of Clinical Practice Experiences and Teacher Performance?

  CALDER Policy Brief No. 19-1119

• Making the Most of Student Teaching: The Importance of Mentors and Scope for Change

  A growing literature documents the importance of student teaching placements for teacher development. Emerging evidence from this literature...

• How Much Should We Rely on Student Test Achievement as a Measure of Success?

  CALDER Policy Brief No. 12-1118-1

• Appropriate Standards of Evidence for Education Policy Decision-Making

  CALDER Policy Brief No. 4-0918-2

• What Makes for a "Gifted" Education? Exploring How Participation in Gifted Programs Affects Students' Learning Environments

  What does it mean for students to be in a gifted program? While about 7% of students nationally participate in gifted programs, relatively little...

• Transition Intervention in High School and Pathway Through College

  A number of school districts and states have implemented transition intervention programs designed to help high school students graduate ready for...

• The Front End of the STEM Teacher Pipeline: Early Career STEM Teachers' Field Experiences and Perceptions of Preparation

  A growing quantitative literature finds evidence that student teaching placements predict later outcomes of teacher candidates and their students...

• Special Education Teacher Preparation, Literacy Instructional Alignment, and Reading Achievement for Students with High-Incidence Disabilities

  We used survey and administrative data from Washington State to assess the degree to which special education teacher preparation, district...

• Lost to the System? A Descriptive Exploration of Where Teacher Candidates Find Employment and How Much They Earn

  We use data on over 14,000 teacher candidates in Washington state, merged with employment data from the state’s public schools and Unemployment...

• State Ratings of Educator Preparation Programs: Connecting Program Review to Teacher Effectiveness

  States are responsible for setting and evaluating the standards that teacher preparation programs (TPPs) must meet for accreditation. Despite the...

• To What Extent Does In-Person Schooling Contribute to the Spread of COVID-19? Evidence from Michigan and Washington

  In this paper we use data from two states—Michigan and Washington—on COVID case rates at the county level linked to information on the type of...

• Front End to Back End: Teacher Preparation, Workforce Entry, and Attrition

  We use a novel database of over 15,000 teacher candidates from 15 teacher education programs in Washington state to investigate the connections...

• Teacher Licensure Tests: Barrier or Predictive Tool?

  We use teacher candidate test scores on the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure (MTEL), linked to student and teacher outcomes in the state...

• How Much do Teachers Value Compensation Deferred for Retirement? Evidence from Defined Contribution Rate Choices

  How much do teachers value compensation deferred for retirement (CDR)? This question is important because the vast majority of public school...

• How Much do Teachers Value Compensation Deferred for Retirement? Evidence from Defined Contribution Rate Choices

  How much do teachers value compensation deferred for retirement (CDR)? This question is important because the vast majority of public school...

• Room for Improvement? Mentor Teachers and the Evolution of Teacher Preservice Clinical Evaluations

  The clinical teaching experience is one of the most important components of teacher preparation. Prior observational research has found that more...

• Identifying Teacher Salary Spiking and Assessing the Impact of Pensionable Compensation Reforms in Illinois

  Defined benefit (DB) pension plans incentivize “salary spiking,” where sharp increases in pay are leveraged into significantly higher levels of...

• Evidence on the Dimensionality and Reliability of Professional References’ Ratings of Teacher Applicants

  There is growing interest in using measures of teacher applicant quality to improve hiring decisions, but the statistical properties of such...

• Disconnected Development? The Importance of Specific Human Capital in the Transition from Student Teaching to the Classroom

  We use a novel database of student teaching placements in Washington State to investigate teachers’ transitions from student teaching classrooms...

• Assessing the Accuracy of Elementary School Test Scores as Predictors of Students’ High School Outcomes

  Testing students and using test information to hold schools and, in some cases, teachers accountable for student achievement has arguably been the...

• Targeted Interventions in High School: Preparing Students for College

  This study adds to the currently limited evidence base on the efficacy of interventions targeting non-college-ready high school students by...

• The Special Education Teacher Pipeline: Teacher Preparation, Workforce Entry, and Retention

  We use data on the teacher preparation experiences and workforce outcomes of more than 1,300 graduates of special education teacher education...

• Academic Mobility in U.S. Public Schools: Evidence from Nearly 3 Million Students

  We use administrative panel data from seven states covering nearly 3 million students to document and explore variation in “academic mobility,” a...

• Career and Technical Education in High School and Postsecondary Pathways in Washington State

  We describe the postsecondary transitions of students taking CTE courses in high school using administrative data on one cohort of high school...

• Student Teaching and the Geography of Teacher Shortages

  Prior research has shown that about 15% of teachers are hired into the same school in which they student taught, about 40% are hired into their...

• Washington’s College Bound Scholarship Program and its Effect on College Entry, Persistence, and Completion

  Indiana, Oklahoma, and Washington have programs designed to address college enrollment and completion gaps by offering a promise of state-based...

• Sometimes Less, Sometimes More: Trends in Career and Technical Education Participation for Students With Disabilities

  We leverage nationally representative data and statewide data from Washington to investigate trends in occupational career and technical education...

• From the Clinical Experience to the Classroom: Assessing the Predictive Validity of the Massachusetts Candidate Assessment of Performance

  We evaluate the predictive validity of the Massachusetts Candidate Assessment of Performance (CAP), a practice-based assessment of teaching skills...

• Do More Effective Teachers Become More Effective Principals?

  Principals are widely seen as a key influence on the educational environment of schools, and nearly all principals have experience as teachers....

• Does Regulating Entry Requirements Lead to More Effective Principals?

  Anecdotal evidence points to the importance of school principals, but the limited existing research has neither provided consistent results nor...

• Collective Bargaining and State-Level Reforms: Assessing Changes to the Restrictiveness of Collective Bargaining Agreements across Three States

  In many school districts the policies that regulate personnel are governed by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) negotiated between teachers...

• How Did It Get This Way? Disentangling the Sources of Teacher Quality Gaps Across Two States

  We use longitudinal data from North Carolina and Washington to study the extent to which four processes—teacher attrition from each state...

• Effective Like Me? Does Having a More Productive Mentor Improve the Productivity of Mentees?

  We use a novel database of the preservice apprenticeships (“student teaching placements”) of teachers in Washington State to investigate the...

• Exploring the Impact of Student Teaching Apprenticeships on Student Achievement and Mentor Teachers

  We exploit within-teacher variation in the years that teachers host an apprentice (“student teacher”) in Washington State to estimate the causal...

• Teacher Candidate Apprenticeships: Assessing the Who and Where of Student Teaching

  We use comprehensive data on student teaching placements from 14 teacher education programs (TEPs) in Washington State to explore the sorting of...

• A Practical Guide to Challenges and Opportunities in Student Teaching: A School District’s Perspective

  A burgeoning literature investigates the importance of student teaching placements for teacher candidate development, but an important perspective...

• How the Match Gets Made: Exploring Student Teacher Placements Across Teacher Education Programs, Districts, and Schools

  Student teaching has long been considered the most important component of an effective teacher education program. Recently, new research is...

• Public Pensions and Salary Spiking: A Cautionary Tale of Data Inaccuracy Leading to Erroneous Results

  Analyses of public policy issues often rely on administrative data collected by state and local governments. The reliability of such analyses is...

• High School English Language Arts Teachers and Postsecondary Outcomes for Students With and Without Disabilities

  We use longitudinal data on high school students in Washington State to assess the relationships between English Language Arts (ELA) teacher value...

• Performance Evaluations as a Measure of Teacher Effectiveness when Standards Differ: Accounting for Variation across Classrooms, Schools, and Districts

  We use statewide data from Massachusetts to investigate teacher performance evaluations as a measure of teaching effectiveness....

• Performance Evaluations as a Measure of Teacher Effectiveness when Standards Differ: Accounting for Variation across Classrooms, Schools, and Districts

  We use statewide data from Massachusetts to investigate teacher performance evaluations as a measure of teaching effectiveness....

• Do Bonuses Affect Teacher Staffing and Student Achievement in High Poverty Schools? Evidence from an Incentive for National Board Certified Teachers in Washington State

  We study a teacher incentive policy in Washington State that awards a financial bonus to National Board certified teachers in high poverty schools...

• Identifying Promising Clinical Placements Using Administrative Data: Preliminary Results From ISTI Placement Initiative Pilot

  Improving the skill set of new teachers is a potentially important policy lever to increase student achievement. There are, however, doubts about...

• Public Accountability and Nudges: The Effect of an Information Intervention on the Responsiveness of Teacher Education Programs to External Ratings

  In the summer of 2013, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) issued public, highly-visible ratings of teacher education programs as part...

• The Costs of Mentorship? Exploring Student Teaching Placements and Their Impact on Student Achievement

  We use comprehensive data on student teaching placements from 14 teacher education programs (TEPs) in Washington State to explore the sorting of...

• Teacher Quality Gaps and Student Outcomes: Assessing the Association Between Teacher Assignments and Student Math Test Scores and High School Course Taking

  We use panel data in Washington State to study the extent to which teacher assignments between fourth and eighth grade explain gaps between...

• Pledging to Do "Good”: An Early Commitment Pledge Program, College Scholarships, and High School Outcomes in Washington State

  Indiana, Oklahoma, and Washington each have programs designed to address college enrollment gaps by offering a promise of state-based college...

• Career and Technical Education, Inclusion, and Postsecondary Outcomes for Students With Disabilities

  We use longitudinal data on all high school students in Washington State, including postsecondary education and workforce outcomes, to investigate...

• Reconciling Different Estimates of Teacher Quality Gaps Based on Value Added

  This policy brief reviews evidence about the extent to which disadvantaged students are taught by teachers with lower value-added estimates of...

• What Factors Predict Middle School Students Sign Up for Washington's College Bound Scholarship Program? A Mixed Methods Evaluation

  We investigate factors influencing student sign-ups for Washington State’s College Bound Scholarship (CBS) program and consider whether there is...

• Can UTeach? Assessing the Relative Effectiveness of STEM Teachers

  UTeach is a well-known, university-based program designed to increase the number of high-quality STEM teachers in the workforce. Despite...

• Time to Tenure: Does Tenure Reform Affect Teacher Absence Behavior and Mobility?

  We rely on natural experiments in North Carolina and Washington State, which previously extended time to tenure by one year, to estimate models...

• Has It Always Been This Way? Tracing the Evolution of Teacher Quality Gaps in U.S. Public Schools

  There is mounting evidence of substantial “teacher quality gaps” (TQGs) between advantaged and disadvantaged students, but practically no...

• Evaluating Prospective Teachers: Testing the Predictive Validity of the edTPA (Update)

  We use longitudinal data from Washington State to provide estimates of the extent to which performance on the edTPA, a performance-based, subject-...

• What’s in a Teacher Test? Assessing the Relationship between Teacher Licensure Test Scores and Student Secondary STEM Achievement

  We investigate the relationship between teacher licensure test scores and student test achievement and high school course-taking. We focus on...

• The Common Core Conundrum: To What Extent Should We Worry That Changes to Assessments and Standards Will Affect Test-Based Measures of Teacher Performance?

  Using administrative longitudinal data from five states, we study how value-added measures of teacher performance are affected...

• Does the Match Matter? Exploring Whether Student Teaching Experiences Affect Teacher Effectiveness and Attrition

  We find that teachers who student taught in...

• Benefit or Burden? On the Intergenerational Inequity of Teacher Pension Plans

  Most public school teachers in the United States are enrolled in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using administrative micro data from four...

• A Foot in the Door: Exploring the Role of Student Teaching Assignments in Teachers’ Initial Job Placements

  We use data from Washington state to examine two distinct stages of the teacher pipeline: the placement of prospective teachers in student...

• Crossing the Border? Exploring the Cross-State Mobility of the Teacher Workforce

  Due to data limitations, very little is known about patterns of teacher cross-state mobility. The issue is important because barriers to cross-...

• Crossing the Border? Exploring the Cross-State Mobility of the Teacher Workforce

  Due to data limitations, very little is known about patterns of teacher cross-state mobility. The issue is important because barriers to cross-...

• Pension Structure and Employee Turnover: Evidence from a Large Public Pension System

  Public pension systems in many U.S. states face large funding shortfalls. Movement toward defined contribution (DC) pension structures may reduce...

• Pension Structure and Employee Turnover: Evidence from a Large Public Pension System

  Public pension systems in many U.S. states face large funding shortfalls. Movement toward defined contribution (DC) pension structures may reduce...

• Are There Hidden Costs Associated With Conducting Layoffs? The Impact of RIFs and Layoffs on Teacher Effectiveness

  Few studies examine employee responses to layoff-induced unemployment risk; none that we know of quantify the impact of job insecurity on...

• Inconvenient Truth? Do Collective Bargaining Agreements Help Explain the Mobility of Teachers Within School Districts?

  We investigate patterns of teacher mobility in districts with different collective bargaining agreement (CBA) transfer provisions. We use detailed...

• Selection into Online Community College Courses and Their Effects on Persistence

  Online courses at the college level are growing in popularity, and nearly all community colleges offer online courses (Allen & Seaman, 2015)....

• College Curricular Dispersion: More Well Rounded or Less Well Trained?

  Students are typically given a large amount of freedom to choose the level of “curricular dispersion:” the tight focus or lack thereof in the...

• Lessons Learned from the Great Recession: Layoffs and the RIF-Induced Teacher Shuffle

  One consequence of the Great Recession is that teacher layoffs occurred at a scale previously unseen. In this paper we assess the effects of...

• Screen Twice, Cut Once: Assessing the Predictive Validity of Teacher Selection Tools

  Evidence suggests that teacher hiring in public schools is ad hoc and often fails to result in good selection among applicants. Some districts use...

• Which Plan to Choose? The Determinants of Pension System Choice for Public School Teachers

  This paper studies the pension preferences of Washington State public school teachers by examining two periods of time during which teachers were...

• Do Students’ College Major Choice Respond to Changes in Wages?

  We evaluate whether there is a causal connection between changes in wages by occupation and subsequent changes in the number of college majors...

• Knocking on the Door to the Teaching Profession? Modeling the Entry of Prospective Teachers into the Workforce

  We use a unique longitudinal sample of student teachers (“interns”) from six Washington state teacher training institutions to investigate...

• How Much of a “Running Start” do Dual Enrollment Programs Provide Students?

  We study a popular dual enrollment program in Washington State using a new administrative database linking high school and postsecondary...

• Teacher Pension Choice: Surveying the Landscape in Washington State

  In this descriptive paper we detail the structure of two Washington State teacher retirement plans: a traditional defined benefit plan and a...

• Scrambling the Nest Egg: How Well Do Teachers Understand their Pensions and What Do They Think about Alternative Pension Structures?

  This paper addresses two questions: How well do teachers understand their current pension plans? And, what do they think about alternative plan...

• Teacher Attitudes about Compensation Reform: Implications for Reform Implementation

  Reform advocates and policymakers concerned about the quality and distribution of teachers support proposals of alternative compensation for...

• Assessing the Potential of Using Value-Added Estimates of Teacher Job Performance for Making High-Stakes Personnel Decisions

  Reforming teacher tenure is an idea that appears to be gaining traction with the underlying assumption being that one can infer to a reasonable...

• Teacher Career Paths, Teacher Quality, and Persistence in the Classroom: Are Schools Keeping their Best?

  Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, even...

• Feeling the Florida Heat?: How Low-Performing Schools Respond to Voucher and Accountability Pressure

  This paper examines the effect of accountability policy on school practices and student outcomes with remarkably comprehensive and detailed data...

• Are Public Schools Really Losing Their Best? Assessing the Career Transitions of Teachers and Their Implications for the Quality of the Teacher Workforce

  Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of high-quality teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher...

• Everyone's Doing It, but What Does Teacher Testing Tell Us about Teacher Effectiveness?

  This paper explores the relationship between teacher testing and teacher effectiveness using a unique dataset that links teachers to their...

• Assessing the Determinants and Implications of Teacher Layoffs

  Over 2000 teachers in Washington state received reduction-in-force (RIF) notices in the past two years. Linking data on these RIF notices to a...

• The Gateway to the Profession: Assessing Teacher Preparation Programs Based on Student Achievement

  With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in...

• Assessing the “Rothstein Test”. Does it Really Show Teacher Value-Added Models are Biased?

  In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher...

• Is it Just a Bad Class? Assessing the Long-term Stability of Estimated Teacher Performance

  In this paper we report on work estimating the stability of value-added estimates of teacher effects, an important area of investigation given...

• Which Plan to Choose? The Determinants of Pension System Choice for Public School Teachers

  This paper studies the pension preferences of Washington State public school teachers by examining two periods of time during which teachers were...