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.
Prior research has connected characteristics of cooperating teachers who supervise student teaching to performance measures of the teacher candidates they host, suggesting more effective teachers may also be better mentors. The specific measures of cooperating teacher effectiveness considered in this prior literature (value added and performance evaluations), however, are infrequently observable to individuals responsible for student teaching placements. In this paper, we consider a more easily observed proxy for mentor effectiveness: National Board (NB) Certification. We find that NB teachers are considerably more likely to host candidates than other teachers, candidates supervised by NB teachers are slightly more likely to be hired within three years, and these candidates have slightly lower value added in English language arts than their peers, all else being equal. We find no significant relationship between cooperating teacher NB certification and candidates’ later attrition and value added in math. We conclude that individuals and policies seeking to leverage student teaching placements to improve student and teacher outcomes may need to focus on less easily observable proxies of cooperating teacher quality than NB certification status.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Roddy Theobald, Grace Falken (2023). National Board Certification as a Signal of Cooperating Teacher Quality. CALDER Working Paper No. 284-0523
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 postsecondary outcomes. We find that both types of value-added have positive effects on student outcomes. Test-based teacher quality measures have more explanatory power for outcomes relevant for students at the top of the achievement distribution, such as attending a more selective college, while nontest measures have more explanatory power for whether students enroll in college at all.
This is an updated version of the paper originally titled "Teachers and Students’ Postsecondary Outcomes: Testing the Predictive Power of Test and Nontest Teacher Quality Measures" (WP 270-1022), released in October 2022.
Citation: Benjamin Backes, James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald (2023). How to Measure a Teacher: The Influence of Test and Nontest Value-Added on Long-Run Student Outcomes. CALDER Working Paper No. 270-0423-2
We use over 25 years of longitudinal data from Washington state to provide a descriptive portrait of the paraeducator workforce in the state. Paraeducators are more racially and ethnically diverse than special education teachers, particularly in the last decade, and tend to be less experienced. They also have full-time salaries that are about half of the average special education teacher salary. Paraeducator-to-student ratios have decreased over time in the state, but they are higher in schools serving more students of color. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, paraeducator attrition rates from the state’s public school workforce have increased dramatically over time; for example, the paraeducator attrition rate after the 2021-22 school year (23%) was over twice as high as the attrition rate after the 2008-09 school year (8%). These findings have implications for how policymakers and school leaders should approach decision-making related to the paraeducator workforce, as well as how researchers might approach further research with this group of educators.
Citation: Roddy Theobald, Lindsey Kaler, Elizabeth Bettini, Nathan Jones (2023). A Descriptive Portrait of the Paraeducator Workforce in Washington State. CALDER Working Paper No. 283-0423
Several decades of research using school administrative data show that teacher quality is inequitably distributed across schools. But these estimates may understate teacher-related inequities if they do not account for how teacher vacancies or late hires are distributed across schools. We investigate these hiring issues using data on a direct proxy of school hiring needs: teacher job postings collected from public school district websites. These data allow us to document how, over the course of the school year, hiring needs vary across districts, schools, and subject areas. We find that schools serving more students of color have greater hiring needs throughout the hiring cycle. We also find that hiring needs for special education and STEM positions are consistently higher than hiring needs for elementary positions. Schools with growing enrollments, as well as schools and subjects with higher prior attrition rates, also tend to have more job postings. Postings for schools in towns and rural areas tend to stay open longer than for schools in suburban and urban areas. Finally, we validate that job postings, which can be obtained quickly and inexpensively, are a good indicator of school and district needs in that they closely line up with eventual teacher hires.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Grace Falken, Roddy Theobald (2023). What Do Teacher Job Postings Tell Us about School Hiring Needs and Equity?. CALDER Working Paper No. 282-0323
A fundamental question for education policy is whether outcomes-based accountability, including comprehensive educator evaluations and a closer relationship between effectiveness and compensation, improves the quality of instruction and raises achievement. We use synthetic control methods to study the comprehensive teacher and principal evaluation and compensation systems introduced in the Dallas Independent School District (Dallas ISD) in 2013 for principals and 2015 for teachers. Under this far-reaching reform, educator evaluations that are used to support teacher growth and determine salary depend on a combination of supervisor evaluations, student achievement, and student or family survey responses. The reform replaced salary scales based on experience and educational attainment with those based on evaluation scores, a radical departure from decades of rigid salary schedules. The synthetic control estimates reveal positive and significant effects of the reforms on math and reading achievement that increase over time. From 2015 through 2019, the average achievement for the synthetic control district fluctuates narrowly between -0.27 s.d. and -0.3 s.d., while the Dallas ISD average increases steadily from -0.28 s.d. in 2015 to -0.08 s.d. in 2019, the final year of the sample. Though the increase for reading is roughly half as large, it is also highly significant.
Citation: Eric Hanushek, Jin Luo, Andrew Morgan, Minh Nguyen, Ben Ost, Steven Rivkin, Ayman Shakeel (2023). The Effects of Comprehensive Educator Evaluation and Pay Reform on Achievement. CALDER Working Paper No. 281-0323
Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high-poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge with information produced by its evaluation system to offer large, compensating differentials to highly effective teachers willing to work in its lowest-achievement schools. The Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program resulted in immediate and sustained achievement increases. The improvements were dramatic, bringing average achievement in the previously lowest-performing schools close to the district average. When ACE stipends are largely eliminated, a substantial fraction of highly effective teachers leave, and test scores fall. This highlights the central importance of performance-based incentives.
Citation: Andrew Morgan, Minh Nguyen, Eric Hanushek, Ben Ost, Steven Rivkin (2023). Attracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Hard-to-Staff Schools. CALDER Working Paper No. 280-0323
Anecdotal evidence points to the importance of school principals, but the limited existing research has neither provided consistent results nor indicated any set of essential characteristics of effective principals. This paper exploits extensive student-level panel data across six states to investigate both variations in principal performance and the relationship between effectiveness and key certification factors. While principal effectiveness varies widely across states, there is little indication that regulation of the background and training of principals yields consistently effective performance. Having prior teaching or management experience is not related to our estimates of principal value-added.
This is an updated version of the paper originally titled "Path to the Principalship and Value Added: A Cross-state Comparison of Elementary and Middle School Principals", released in January 2019.
Citation: Wes Austin, Bingjie Chen, Dan Goldhaber , Eric Hanushek, Kristian Holden, Cory Koedel, Helen Ladd, Jin Luo, Eric Parsons, Gregory Phelan, Steven Rivkin, Tim Sass, Mavzuna Turaeva (2023). Does Regulating Entry Requirements Lead to More Effective Principals?. CALDER Working Paper No. 213-0323-2
The decision to close schools in March 2020 was a massive disruption to public education. But pandemic-related closures did more than put in-person instruction on hold. School closures also meant that teacher candidates could not complete their student teaching experiences (Choate et al., 2021). And when licensure test centers closed, prospective teachers could not sit for the exams they needed to get credentialed. As COVID wreaked havoc on the school system—and worries over staffing shortages grew—most states responded to these disruptions by modifying and relaxing their requirements for becoming a teacher during the pandemic.
Three years later, the negative consequences of school closures for students are well known: learning declined and pre-existing inequities grew (Goldhaber et al., 2022). But how (if at all) changes to licensure requirements affected teachers and students is less clear. To provide an initial picture of what happened, this research brief describes the nature of pandemic-era licensure modifications, how many teachers they might have affected, and why we should care. Our rough estimate suggests that around 100,000 graduates of traditional preparation programs might have entered the profession under changed licensure rules in 2020-2021.
Citation: Michael DeArmond, Dan Goldhaber, Sydney Payne (2023). COVID's Under-the-Radar Experiment with Teacher Licensure. CALDER Policy Brief No. 33
We use administrative panel data from seven states covering nearly 3 million students to document and explore variation in “academic mobility,” a term we use to describe the extent to which students’ ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their public schooling careers. On average, we show that student ranks are highly persistent during elementary and secondary education—that is, academic mobility is limited in U.S. schools as a whole. Still, there is non-negligible variation in the degree of upward mobility across some student subgroups as well as individual school districts. On average, districts that exhibit the greatest upward academic mobility serve more socioeconomically advantaged populations and have higher value-added to student achievement.
This is an update of the August 2021 version of this paper, which was originally published February 2020 with the title "Where are Initially Low-performing Students the Most Likely to Succeed? A Multi-state Analysis of Academic Mobility".
Citation: Wes Austin, David Figlio, Dan Goldhaber, Eric Hanushek, Tara Kilbride, Cory Koedel, Jaeseok Sean Lee, Jin Luo, Umut Özek, Eric Parsons, Steven Rivkin, Tim Sass, Katharine O. Strunk (2023). Academic Mobility in U.S. Public Schools: Evidence from Nearly 3 Million Students. CALDER Working Paper No. 227-0323-3
Reading has been at the forefront of early-grade educational interventions, but addressing the educational needs of students in math early on is also critical given that early gaps in math skills widen further over the course of schooling. In this study, we examine the effects of Kentucky’s Math Achievement Fund – a unique state-level program that combines targeted interventions, peer-coaching, and close collaboration among teachers to improve math achievement in grades K-3 – on student outcomes and the costs associated with this policy. We find significant positive effects of the program not only on math achievement, but also on test scores in reading and non-test outcomes including student attendance and disciplinary incidents. The benefits exist across racial/ethnic groups and students from different socioeconomic statuses, and they are slightly higher for racial minorities. These findings, along with the cost estimate of the program, suggest that this program could provide a cost-effective blueprint to address the educational needs of students in math in early grades.
Citation: Zeyu Xu, Umut Özek, Jesse Levin, Dong Hoon Lee (2023). Effects of Large-Scale Early Math Interventions on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Kentucky’s Math Achievement Fund. CALDER Working Paper No. 279-0323
This study examines the extent to which students obtain postsecondary credentials in the CTE fields of focus they choose in high school. Using school fixed effects models, we find that focusing on a particular CTE field in high school is associated with an increased probability of enrolling and obtaining a postsecondary credential in that field. The secondary-postsecondary relationship varies across focus areas, and it is strongest in health (increase of 12.5 percentage points), which is disproportionately chosen by females. Across all fields of focus, however, most students enroll and obtain a postsecondary credential in fields that are different from what they focused on in high school.
This is an updated version of the paper originally released in July 2022.
Citation: Zeyu Xu, Benjamin Backes (2023). Linkage Between Fields of Concentration in High School Career-Technical Education and College Majors. CALDER Working Paper No. 269-0323-2
We examine the potential to expand and diversify the production of university STEM degrees by shifting the margin of initial enrollment between community colleges and 4-year universities. Our analysis is based on statewide administrative microdata from the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development covering enrollees in all public postsecondary institutions statewide. We find that the potential for shifting the enrollment margin to expand degree production in STEM fields is modest, even at an upper bound, because most community college students are not academically prepared for bachelor’s degree programs in STEM fields. We also find that shifting the enrollment margin is unlikely to improve racial/ethnic diversity among university STEM degree recipients. This is because community college students at the enrollment margin are less diverse than their peers who enter universities directly.
Citation: Cheng Qian, Cory Koedel (2023). Could Shifting the Margin between Community College and University Enrollment Expand and Diversify University Degree Production in STEM Fields?. CALDER Working Paper No. 244-0323-2
We use publicly available, longitudinal data from Washington state to study the extent to which three interrelated processes—teacher attrition from the state teaching workforce, teacher mobility between teaching positions, and teacher hiring for open positions—contribute to “teacher quality gaps” (TQGs) between students of color and other students in K–12 public schools. Specifically, we develop and implement an agent-based model simulation of decisions about attrition, mobility, and hiring to assess the extent to which each process contributes to observed TQGs. We find that eliminating inequities in teacher mobility and hiring across different schools would close TQGs within 5 years, while just eliminating inequities in teacher hiring would close gaps within 10 years. On the other hand, eliminating inequities in teacher attrition without addressing mobility and hiring does little to close gaps.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Matt Kasman, Vanessa Quince, Roddy Theobald, Malcolm Wolff (2023). How Did It Get This Way? Disentangling the Sources of Teacher Quality Gaps Through Agent-Based Modeling. CALDER Working Paper No. 259-0223
Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic era, concerns about teacher turnover and teacher shortages remain at the top of the education agenda. But contrary to media reports about a “wave of resignations and retirements” (e.g., Heller, 2021), early evidence from state databases showed a more nuanced picture: teacher attrition was actually down during the pandemic’s first year (teachers leaving after the 2019–2020 school year) before it increased somewhat in the next year (e.g., Bacher-Hicks et al., 2021, 2022; Bastian & Fuller, 2023; Camp et al., 2022; CERRA, 2022; Goldhaber & Theobald, 2022a,b).
In this policy brief, we follow-up and expand on our earlier analyses of teacher mobility and attrition in Washington state with an additional year of data from the 2022-23 school year. We draw on a longitudinal database of school staffing in Washington, the S-275, which now provides 39 years of annual data on teachers and other school employees in the state.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald (2023). Teacher Turnover Three Years into the Pandemic Era: Evidence from Washington State. CALDER Policy Brief No. 32
We use data on high school students and teachers from Washington state to connect the observable characteristics of career and technical education (CTE) teachers to various non-test outcomes (absences, disciplinary incidents, grade point average, grade progression, and on-time graduation) of students with and without disabilities in their classrooms. We find that students participating in CTE tend to have better non-test outcomes when they are assigned to a CTE teacher from the state’s Business and Industry pathway—designed for CTE teachers with 3 years of industry experience but no formal teacher preparation—relative to being assigned to a traditionally prepared CTE teacher. These results can inform efforts in Washington and across the country to develop and support similar alternative routes to CTE teacher licensure.
Citation: Roddy Theobald, Dan Goldhaber, Erica Mallett Moore (2023). CTE Teachers and Non-Test Outcomes for Students With and Without Disabilities. CALDER Working Paper No. 278-0123
This paper examines the impact of Teach For America (TFA) on following-year student test and non-test outcomes in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. This paper measures the extent to which exposure to TFA is followed by improved student outcomes in the future. In particular, this paper measures days missed due to absences or suspensions, course grades in each core subject, and progression in math courses. We find that students taught by TFA math teachers go on to have higher grades in math courses in the following year and are less likely to miss school due to being absent or suspended. However, while students in TFA classrooms score higher on math and ELA assessments in a given year, these test score gains fade out by the following year.
Citation: Benjamin Backes, Michael Hansen (2023). Persistent Teach for America Effects on Student Test and Non-Test Academic Outcomes. CALDER Working Paper No. 277-0123
The prevalence of school-based healthcare has increased markedly over the past decade. We study a modern mode of school-based healthcare, telemedicine, that offers the potential to reach places and populations with historically low access to such care. School-based telemedicine clinics (SBTCs) provide students with access to healthcare during the regular school day through private videoconferencing with a healthcare provider. We exploit variation over time in SBTC openings across schools in three rural districts in North Carolina. We find that school-level SBTC access reduces the likelihood that a student is chronically absent by 2.5 percentage points (29 percent) and reduces the number of days absent by about 0.8 days (10 percent). Relatedly, access to an SBTC increases the likelihood of math and reading test-taking by between 1.8-2.0 percentage points (about 2 percent). Heterogeneity analyses suggest that these effects are driven by male students. Finally, we see suggestive evidence that SBTC access reduces violent or weapons-related disciplinary infractions among students but has little influence on other forms of misbehavior.
Citation: Sarah Komisarow, Steven Hemelt (2023). School-Based Healthcare and Absenteeism: Evidence from Telemedicine. CALDER Working Paper No. 276-0123
In this paper we examine academic recovery in 12 mid- to large-sized school districts across 10 states during the 2021–22 school year. Our findings highlight the challenges that recovery efforts faced during the 2021–22 school year. Although, on average, math and reading test score gains during the school year reached the pace of pre-pandemic school years, they were not accelerated beyond that pace. This is not surprising given that we found that districts struggled to implement recovery programs at the scale they had planned. In the districts where we had detailed data on student participation in academic interventions, we found that recovery efforts often fell short of original expectations for program scale, intensity of treatment, and impact. Interviews with a subsample of district leaders revealed several implementation challenges, including difficulty engaging targeted students consistently across schools, issues with staffing and limitations to staff capacity, challenges with scheduling, and limited engagement of parents as partners in recovery initiatives. Our findings on the pace and trajectory of recovery and the challenges of implementing recovery initiatives raise important questions about the scale of district recovery efforts.
Citation: Maria V. Carbonari, Miles Davison, Michael DeArmond, Daniel Dewey, Elise Dizon-Ross, Dan Goldhaber, Ayesha Hashim, Thomas J. Kane, Andrew McEachin, Emily Morton, Tyler Patterson, Douglas O. Staiger (2022). The Challenges of Implementing Academic COVID Recovery Interventions: Evidence from the Road to Recovery Project. CALDER Working Paper No. 275-1222
Student-teacher relationships are at the core of student experiences in schools and, arguably, fundamental to influencing student outcomes. Using a statewide, student-level school climate survey from Massachusetts, we investigate teachers’ contributions to school climate, which we refer to as climate value added (VA), and how it varies by student race/ethnicity. We first show that climate VA contributes to student learning: Teachers whose students report positive feelings about climate also contribute more to student test scores and to an aggregate of nontest student outcomes (student absences, suspensions, and grade progression). And teachers identified by students of color as contributing to better school climate have outsize effects on learning gains for these students. Differences in teachers’ climate effects across racial/ethnic groups are largest on topics aligned with cultural competency, school participation, and comfort with faculty. Lastly, we find that Black students assigned to Black teachers report better school climate than Black students assigned to other teachers.
Citation: Benjamin Backes, James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald (2022). Teachers and School Climate: Effects on Student Outcomes and Academic Disparities. CALDER Working Paper No. 274-1022
We describe the extent and predictors of staffing challenges faced by school districts in Washington state throughout the 2021–22 school year using data collected from job posting websites for districts representing more than 98% of students in the state. These data suggest that school districts in the state faced considerable challenges filling paraeducator and, to a lesser extent, teaching positions at the beginning of the school year. When we focus specifically on teachers, we find that teacher staffing challenges were far more pronounced for special education positions and in schools serving more students of color, less pronounced for elementary positions, and highly correlated with teacher attrition from these types of positions after the prior school year. Accounting for these relationships, districts posted more teaching positions later in the school year when they had increasing student enrollments and received more Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds than nearby districts.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Nate Brown, Nathaniel Marcuson, Roddy Theobald (2022). School District Job Postings and Staffing Challenges Throughout the Second School Year During the COVID-19 Pandemic. CALDER Working Paper No. 273-1022
