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CALDER working papers have not undergone final formal review and should be cited as working papers. They are intended to encourage discussion and suggestions for revision before final publication. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in these papers are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of our funders. In addition to CALDER working papers, CALDER has also produced non-technical discussions called CALDER Conversations and CALDER Explainers on various education topics including teacher shortages, tenure reform, and teacher pensions.

 

Displaying 1 - 20 of 217
Collective Bargaining and State-Level Reforms: Assessing Changes to the Restrictiveness of Collective Bargaining Agreements across Three States
Author(s):
Katharine Strunk , Joshua Cowen, Dan Goldhaber , Bradley D. Marianno, Tara Kilbride, Roddy Theobald
Dec 2018

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In many school districts the policies that regulate personnel are governed by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) negotiated between teachers’ unions and school boards. While there is significant policy attention and, in some cases, legislative action that has affected the scope of these agreements, there is relatively little research that assesses how CBAs vary over time, or whether they change in response to states’ legislative reforms. In this paper we compare CBAs in three states at two points in time: before and after substantial reforms in Michigan and Washington impacting collective bargaining and in California where there were no major statutory changes affecting CBAs. We find that few district characteristics predict changes in CBA restrictiveness over time, other than institutional spillovers from local bargaining structures. However, we observe that reforms to the scope of bargaining in Michigan and Washington drastically reduced the restrictiveness of Michigan and Washington CBAs relative to California.

Citation: Katharine Strunk , Joshua Cowen, Dan Goldhaber , Bradley D. Marianno, Tara Kilbride, Roddy Theobald (2018). Collective Bargaining and State-Level Reforms: Assessing Changes to the Restrictiveness of Collective Bargaining Agreements across Three States. CALDER Working Paper No. 210-1218-1

How Did It Get This Way? Disentangling the Sources of Teacher Quality Gaps Across Two States
Author(s):
Dan Goldhaber, Vanessa Quince , Roddy Theobald
Nov 2018

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We use longitudinal data from North Carolina and Washington to study the extent to which four processes—teacher attrition from each state workforce, teacher mobility within districts, teacher mobility across districts, and teacher hiring—contribute to “teacher quality gaps” (TQGs) between advantaged and disadvantaged schools. We first replicate prior findings documenting inequities in each of these processes using different measures of student disadvantage (race and poverty) and teacher quality (experience, licensure test scores, and value added) and then develop and implement a simulation to assess the extent to which each process contributes to observed TQGs in each state. We find that all four processes contribute to TQGs but also document considerable heterogeneity in the extent to which each process contributes to the different TQG measures. For example, patterns in teacher attrition and mobility contribute more to TQGs measured by teacher experience, while patterns in teacher hiring explain the majority of TQGs measured by teacher licensure test scores and value added.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Vanessa Quince , Roddy Theobald (2018). How Did It Get This Way? Disentangling the Sources of Teacher Quality Gaps Across Two States. CALDER Working Paper No. 209-1118-1

Effective Like Me? Does Having a More Productive Mentor Improve the Productivity of Mentees?
Author(s):
Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Roddy Theobald
Nov 2018

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We use a novel database of the preservice apprenticeships (“student teaching placements”) of teachers in Washington State to investigate the relationship between mentor effectiveness (as measured by value added) and the future effectiveness of their mentees. We find a strong, positive relationship between the effectiveness of a teacher’s mentor and their own effectiveness in math and a more modest relationship in English Language Arts. The relationship in math is strongest early in a teacher’s career, decays significantly over time, and would be positive and statistically significant even in the presence of nonrandom sorting on unobservables of the same magnitude as the sorting on observables. Put together, this suggests that at least some of this relationship reflects a causal relationship between mentor effectiveness and the future effectiveness of their mentees in math.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Roddy Theobald (2018). Effective Like Me? Does Having a More Productive Mentor Improve the Productivity of Mentees? . CALDER Working Paper No. 208-1118-1

Exploring the Impact of Student Teaching Apprenticeships on Student Achievement and Mentor Teachers
Author(s):
Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Roddy Theobald
Nov 2018

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We exploit within-teacher variation in the years that teachers host an apprentice (“student teacher”) in Washington State to estimate the causal effect of these apprenticeships on student achievement, both during the apprenticeship and afterwards. The average causal effect of hosting a student teacher on student performance in the year of the apprenticeship is precisely estimated and indistinguishable from zero in both math and reading, though effects are large and negative in math when ineffective teachers host an apprentice. Hosting a student teacher is also found to have modest positive impacts on student math and reading achievement in a teacher’s classroom in following years.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Roddy Theobald (2018). Exploring the Impact of Student Teaching Apprenticeships on Student Achievement and Mentor Teachers . CALDER Working Paper No. 207-1118-1

Teacher Candidate Apprenticeships: Assessing the Who and Where of Student Teaching
Author(s):
John Krieg , Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald
Nov 2018

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We use comprehensive data on student teaching placements from 14 teacher education programs (TEPs) in Washington State to explore the sorting of teacher candidates to the teachers who supervise their student teaching (“cooperating teachers”) and the schools in which student teaching occurs. We find that, all else equal, teachers with more experience, higher degree levels, and higher value added in math are more likely to serve as cooperating teachers, as are schools with lower levels of historical teacher turnover but with more open positions the following year. We also find that teacher candidates are more likely to be placed with cooperating teachers of the same gender and race/ethnicity, and are more likely to work with cooperating teachers and in schools with administrators who graduated from the candidate’s TEP.

Citation: John Krieg , Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald (2018). Teacher Candidate Apprenticeships: Assessing the Who and Where of Student Teaching. CALDER Working Paper No. 206-1118-1

A Practical Guide to Challenges and Opportunities in Student Teaching: A School District’s Perspective
Author(s):
Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Kim Harmon, Roddy Theobald
Oct 2018

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A burgeoning literature investigates the importance of student teaching placements for teacher candidate development, but an important perspective that is largely missing from the existing literature is that of the school districts that host student teachers. In this paper, we describe the student teaching process from the perspective of Spokane Public Schools (SPS), highlighting the challenges associated with the student teacher placement process and several initiatives SPS has undertaken to improve student teaching experiences for teacher candidates. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic effort by a school district to improve the student teaching process and study the effects on teacher candidate outcomes. The initiatives undertaken by SPS illustrate the potential for districts to take a leadership role in defining the student teaching process and highlight some of the challenges inherent in hosting student teachers.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Kim Harmon, Roddy Theobald (2018). A Practical Guide to Challenges and Opportunities in Student Teaching: A School District’s Perspective. CALDER Working Paper No. 205-1018-1

How the Match Gets Made: Exploring Student Teacher Placements Across Teacher Education Programs, Districts, and Schools
Author(s):
Elise St. John, Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Roddy Theobald
Oct 2018

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Student teaching has long been considered the most important component of an effective teacher education program. Recently, new research is finding links between these experiences and teacher candidates’ future effectiveness, yet relatively little is known about the student teacher placement process and, in particular, the processes that lead to the matching of teacher candidates to the in-service teachers who supervise their student teaching (“cooperating teachers”). In this study, we examine the match process as well as the factors that influence these placement decisions. We also explore how, if at all, practices vary across teacher education programs (TEPs), districts, and schools. We find that, in broad terms, the process for matching student teachers to mentor teachers is similar across educational institutions, although TEPs and school systems sometimes face competing priorities when placing student teachers in classrooms. We also identify a problem of information asymmetry in the placement process, which leaves TEPs with questions about how cooperating teachers are selected and districts and schools with limited information with which to make thoughtful and intentional matches between candidates and cooperating teachers. Finally, we document the important role of social networks in placements and how they can advantage some TEPs, districts, and schools in this process.

Citation: Elise St. John, Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Roddy Theobald (2018). How the Match Gets Made: Exploring Student Teacher Placements Across Teacher Education Programs, Districts, and Schools. CALDER Working Paper No. 204-1018-1

The Hidden Costs of Teacher Turnover
Author(s):
Lucy C. Sorensen, Helen Ladd
Sep 2018

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High teacher turnover imposes numerous costs on the schools and districts from which teachers depart. This study asks how schools respond to spells of high teacher turnover, and assesses organizational and human capital losses in terms of the changing composition of the teacher pool. Our analysis uses more than two decades of linked administrative data on math and ELA teachers at middle schools in North Carolina to determine the impacts of turnover across different policy environments and macroeconomic climates. We find that, even after accounting for school contexts and trends, turnover has marked, and lasting, negative consequences for teacher quality. Our results highlight the need for heightened policy attention to issues of teacher retention and working conditions.

Citation: Lucy C. Sorensen, Helen Ladd (2018). The Hidden Costs of Teacher Turnover . CALDER Working Paper No. 203-0918-1

Public Pensions and Salary Spiking: A Cautionary Tale of Data Inaccuracy Leading to Erroneous Results
Author(s):
Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Kristian Holden
Sep 2018

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Analyses of public policy issues often rely on administrative data collected by state and local governments. The reliability of such analyses is contingent on the quality of the data and it is tempting for researchers to take the accuracy of administrative data for granted. In this paper we show how this can lead to spurious research findings. Specifically, we use two sets of administrative data on teacher compensation to study the issue of salary spiking (where end-of-career spikes in compensation are used to boost pension benefits) in Washington State. We illustrate how discrepancies in the reporting of pensionable compensation can lead one to strikingly different conclusions about the prevalence and financial implications of salary-spiking behavior. Our findings point to the importance of understanding how data collection processes and administrative uses of the data may (fail to) incentivize accuracy in reporting.

Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Kristian Holden (2018). Public Pensions and Salary Spiking: A Cautionary Tale of Data Inaccuracy Leading to Erroneous Results. CALDER Working Paper No. 202-0918-1

Accounting for Student Disadvantage in Value-Added Models (Update)
Author(s):
Eric Parsons, Cory Koedel, Li Tan
Sep 2018

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We study the relative performance of two policy relevant value-added models – a one-step fixed effect model and a two-step aggregated residuals model – using a simulated dataset well grounded in the value-added literature. A key feature of our data generating process is that student achievement depends on a continuous measure of economic disadvantage. This is a realistic condition that has implications for model performance because researchers typically have access to only a noisy, binary measure of disadvantage. We find that one- and two-step value-added models perform similarly across a wide range of student and teacher sorting conditions, with the two-step model modestly outperforming the one-step model in conditions that best match observed sorting in real data. A reason for the generally superior performance of the two-step model is that it better handles the use of an error-prone, dichotomous proxy for student disadvantage.

WP 179 was revised in September 2018. It was originally released in June 2017

Citation: Eric Parsons, Cory Koedel, Li Tan (2018). Accounting for Student Disadvantage in Value-Added Models (Update). CALDER Working Paper No. 179

Building Bridges to Life after High School: Contemporary Career Academies and Student Outcomes (Update)
Author(s):
Steven Hemelt, Matthew Lenard, Colleen Paeplow
Aug 2018

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Career academies serve an increasingly wide range of students. This paper examines the contemporary profile of students entering career academies in a large, diverse school district and estimates causal effects of participation in one of the district’s well-regarded academies on a range of high school and college outcomes. Exploiting the lottery-based admissions process of this technology-focused academy, we find that academy enrollment increases the likelihood of high school graduation by about 8 percentage points and boosts rates of college enrollment for males but not females. Analysis of intermediate outcomes suggests that effects on attendance and industry-relevant certification at least partially mediate the overall high school graduation effect.

JEL Codes: I21, I25

WP 176 was revised in August 2018. It was originally released in January 2017.

Citation: Steven Hemelt, Matthew Lenard, Colleen Paeplow (2018). Building Bridges to Life after High School: Contemporary Career Academies and Student Outcomes (Update). CALDER Working Paper No. 176

Do Students Benefit from Longer School Days? Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Florida's Additional Hour of Literacy Instruction
Author(s):
David Figlio, Kristian Holden, Umut Ozek
Aug 2018

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Instructional time is a fundamental educational input, yet we have little causal evidence about the effect of longer school days on student achievement. This paper uses a sharp regression discontinuity design to estimate the effects of lengthening the school day for low-performing schools in Florida by exploiting an administrative cutoff for eligibility. Our results indicate significant positive effects of additional literacy instruction on student reading achievement. In particular, we find effects of 0.05 standard deviations of improvement in reading test scores for program assignment in the first year, though long-run effects are difficult to assess.

Citation: David Figlio, Kristian Holden, Umut Ozek (2018). Do Students Benefit from Longer School Days? Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Florida's Additional Hour of Literacy Instruction. CALDER Working Paper No. 201-0818-1

Teacher Pension Plan Incentives, Retirement Decisions, and Workforce Quality
Author(s):
Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky, Xiqian Wang
Jul 2018

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As states attempt to staff public school classrooms with qualified teachers, primary attention has focused on educator preparation and early career retention. Far less research has examined the staffing consequences of turnover induced by teacher pension plans. This paper makes use of a unique longitudinal data file with performance measures for all public school teachers in Tennessee. Descriptive analysis finds that higher quality teachers are less likely to retire for a given age and experience. To better understand the effects of pension plan incentives on workforce quality, we estimate a structural retirement model that explicitly allows for different work-retirement preferences for high and low quality teachers. We find that high quality teachers have a lower disutility for teaching as compared to retirement. Given that it costs less to keep high as compared to low quality teachers on the job, we use the structural estimates to simulate the effect of retention bonuses targeted to the former. One year retention bonuses produce an additional year of high quality teaching at a cost of roughly $40,000.

Citation: Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky, Xiqian Wang (2018). Teacher Pension Plan Incentives, Retirement Decisions, and Workforce Quality. CALDER Working Paper No. 200-0718-1

High School English Language Arts Teachers and Postsecondary Outcomes for Students With and Without Disabilities
Author(s):
Roddy Theobald, Dan Goldhaber, Trevor Gratz, Kristian Holden
Jul 2018

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We use longitudinal data on high school students in Washington State to assess the relationships between English Language Arts (ELA) teacher value added and other qualifications and the high school and postsecondary outcomes of their students. We also investigate whether these relationships differ for students with and without disabilities. We find that students assigned to 10th grade ELA teachers with higher value added have better test scores, are more likely to graduate on-time, and are more likely to attend and graduate from a four-year college than observably similar students assigned to 10th grade ELA teachers with lower value added. We also find that many of these relationships vary for students with and without disabilities, as 10th grade ELA teacher value added is more positively predictive of on-time graduation and four-year college attendance for students without disabilities, but more positively predictive of two-year college attendance and employment within two years of graduation for students with disabilities. In contrast to value added, other teacher characteristics like experience, degree level, endorsement area, and licensure test scores do not consistently predict better outcomes for students with or without disabilities.

Citation: Roddy Theobald, Dan Goldhaber, Trevor Gratz, Kristian Holden (2018). High School English Language Arts Teachers and Postsecondary Outcomes for Students With and Without Disabilities. CALDER Working Paper No. 199-0718-1

School Segregation in The Era of Immigration and School Choice: North Carolina, 1998-2016
Author(s):
Charles Clotfelter, Steven Hemelt, Helen Ladd, Mavzuna Turaeva
Jun 2018

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We document patterns and trends in school segregation in North Carolina between 1998 and 2016, a period of rapid immigration in this racially diverse state. As in other states of the South, the period of court orders enforcing racial balance has given way not only to tacit acceptance of residentially based school segregation but also to policies that offer parents alternatives to traditional public schools. Most prominent among these alternatives in North Carolina are charter schools, which have expanded rapidly with the state’s blessing. Following the prevailing practice of social scientists, we measure segregation by the degree of imbalance across schools, using counties and metropolitan areas as basic geographical units. We differentiate students according to their racial/ethnic group and also to their family income. We take into account all students including those in private schools, charter schools and traditional public schools.

For the state as a whole, we find that white/nonwhite segregation increased over the period. Most of the increase was in urban areas. We also find that low-income students became more segregated from other students. Segregation measured either way increased sharply in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, which significantly changed its student assignment policy following a federal court order. Compared to metropolitan areas in other parts of the U.S., urban areas in the state have modest levels of segregation, because most districts are county-wide and thus large and diverse. We decompose metropolitan segregation, separating the portions due to private schools, charter schools, racial disparities between school districts, and racial disparities within districts. Charter schools and within-district disparities accounted for the increase in average segregation in metropolitan areas over the period. More generally, areas where school segregation increased the most tend to be large, growing, and marked by big increases in the share of students who are Hispanic.

Citation: Charles Clotfelter, Steven Hemelt, Helen Ladd, Mavzuna Turaeva (2018). School Segregation in The Era of Immigration and School Choice: North Carolina, 1998-2016. CALDER Working Paper No. 198-0618-1

An Exploration of Sources of Variation in Teacher Evaluation Ratings across Classrooms, Schools, and Districts
Author(s):
James Cowan , Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald
Jun 2018

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We investigate sources of variation in teacher evaluation ratings across classrooms, schools, and districts. We show that assignment to high achieving classrooms increases teacher evaluation ratings. We also document significant variation in the sensitivity of performance ratings to value-added measures of teacher effectiveness across districts. Consequently, the probability that high or low performing teachers, as measured by value added, receive the highest or lowest evaluation ratings differs considerably across school districts. Our findings suggest that statewide policies that attach high stakes to performance evaluations are likely to have different consequences across schools and districts.

Citation: James Cowan , Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald (2018). An Exploration of Sources of Variation in Teacher Evaluation Ratings across Classrooms, Schools, and Districts. CALDER Working Paper No. 197-0618-1

Choosing Charter Schools in North Carolina: What Do Parents Value?
Author(s):
Helen Ladd, Charles Clotfelter, Mavzuna Turaeva
Jun 2018

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This paper examines what parents value as they make choices among available charter schools, with primary attention to the racial mix of a school’s students.  We estimate conditional logit models of the charter school choices made by all parents in North Carolina who switched their child from a traditional public school to a charter school in 2014/15. Our findings that parents care about the school’s racial mix of students and that such preferences differ by the race and income of the choosers highlight the pressures that lead charter schools to be racially imbalanced.  Our models also include other factors that parents may value such as the distance to the charter, the school’s academic performance, the services provided by the charter, such as subsidized lunch and transportation, and the school’s mission and approach.   

Citation: Helen Ladd, Charles Clotfelter, Mavzuna Turaeva (2018). Choosing Charter Schools in North Carolina: What Do Parents Value?. CALDER Working Paper No. 196-0618-1

Pension Enhancements and Teacher Retirement
Author(s):
Wei Kong, Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky, Weiwei Wu
Jun 2018

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We examine how pension rule changes affected teacher retirement by estimating an option-value retirement model on a large cohort of late career Missouri public school teachers from 1994 to 2008. In so doing we offer potential solutions to several statistical challenges that arise in estimating structural models of retirement on large panel data sets. The first concerns modelling the formation of teacher expectations of future pension rules. The second is bias induced by baseline sample selection: in baseline cohorts we only observe teachers who are still working. This bias also evolves with pension rule changes. A third challenge arises from maximum-likelihood estimation using large panels of micro-data on individual teachers. The teacher-level data can be difficult to obtain and the likelihood of teacher-data is costly to compute in large panels. We address these challenges by incorporating policy expecta- tions and sample selection directly into estimation of the likelihood. We also show that the likelihood can be efficiently estimated by using teacher data grouped by age and experience cells, which permits:  a) estimating structural models of teacher retirement with data that are more widely available, and b) dramatic reductions in computation cost. Counterfactual simulations of the estimated structural model suggest that Missouri’s pension enhancements led to earlier retirement by about 0.4 years on average for the 1994 cohort and by more than one year in a steady state. Enhancements increased steady state pension liabilities by 16 percent for senior teachers.

Citation: Wei Kong, Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky, Weiwei Wu (2018). Pension Enhancements and Teacher Retirement. CALDER Working Paper No. 195-0618-1

Do Bonuses Affect Teacher Staffing and Student Achievement in High Poverty Schools? Evidence from an Incentive for National Board Certified Teachers in Washington State
Author(s):
James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber
Jun 2018

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We study a teacher incentive policy in Washington State that awards a financial bonus to National Board certified teachers in high poverty schools. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the bonus policy increased the proportion of certified teachers in bonus-eligible schools by improving hiring, increasing certification rates of incumbent teachers, and reducing turnover. Depending on the method, we estimate that the proportion of NBCTs in treated schools increased by about four to eight percentage points over the first five years of eligibility. However, the improvement in certification rates corresponds to a change of about 0.2 to 0.3 percent of a standard deviation in teacher quality per year and we do not find evidence that the bonus resulted in detectible effects on student test achievement.

Citation: James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber (2018). Do Bonuses Affect Teacher Staffing and Student Achievement in High Poverty Schools? Evidence from an Incentive for National Board Certified Teachers in Washington State. CALDER Working Paper No. 194-0618-1

Socioeconomic Status and Genetic Influences on Cognitive Development
Author(s):
David Figlio, Jeremy Freese, Krzysztof Karbownik, Jeffrey Roth
Jun 2018

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Accurate understanding of environmental moderation of genetic influences is vital to advancing the science of cognitive development as well as for designing interventions. One widely- reported idea is increasing genetic influence on cognition for children raised in higher socioeconomic status families, including recent proposals that the pattern is a particularly US phenomenon. We use matched birth and school records from Florida siblings and twins born in 1994-2002 to provide the largest, most population-diverse consideration of this hypothesis to date. We find no evidence of SES moderation of genetic influence on test scores, suggesting that articulating gene-environment interactions for cognition is more complex and elusive than previously supposed.

Citation: David Figlio, Jeremy Freese, Krzysztof Karbownik, Jeffrey Roth (2018). Socioeconomic Status and Genetic Influences on Cognitive Development. CALDER Working Paper No. 193

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