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.
We present new estimates of the importance of teachers in early grades for later grade outcomes, but unlike the existing literature that examines teacher “fade-out,” we directly compare the contribution of early-grade teachers to later year outcomes against the contributions of later year teachers to the same later year outcomes. Where the prior literature finds that much of the contribution of early teachers fades away, we find that the contributions of early-year teachers remain important in later grades. The difference in contributions to eighth-grade outcomes between an effective and ineffective fourth-grade teacher is about half the difference among eighth-grade teachers. The effect on eighth-grade outcomes of replacing a fourth-grade teacher who is below the 5th percentile with a median teacher is about half the underrepresented minority (URM)/non-URM achievement gap. Our results reinforce earlier conclusions in the literature that teachers in all grades are important for student achievement.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Zeyu Jin, Richard Startz (2022). How Much Do Early Teachers Matter?. CALDER Working Paper No. 264-0422
Prior work on teacher candidates in Washington State has shown that about two thirds of individuals who trained to become teachers between 2005 and 2015 and received a teaching credential did not enter the state’s public teaching workforce immediately after graduation, while about one third never entered a public teaching job in the state at all. In this analysis, we link data on these teacher candidates to unemployment insurance data in the state to provide a descriptive portrait of the future earnings and wages of these individuals inside and outside of public schools. Candidates who initially became public school teachers earned considerably more, on average, than candidates who were initially employed either in other education positions or in other sectors of the state’s workforce. These differences persisted at least 10 years into the average career and across transitions into and out of teaching. There is therefore little evidence that teacher candidates who did not become teachers were lured into other professions by higher compensation. Instead, the patterns are consistent with demand-side constraints on teacher hiring during this time period that resulted in individuals who wanted to become teachers taking positions that offered lower wages but could lead to future teaching positions.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, John Krieg, Stephanie Liddle, Roddy Theobald (2022). Out of the Gate, but Not Necessarily Teaching: A Descriptive Portrait of Early-Career Earnings for Those Who Are Credentialed to Teach. CALDER Working Paper No. 263-0422
Over the last two decades, twenty-two states have moved away from traditional defined benefit (DB) pension systems and toward pension plan structures like the defined contribution (DC) plans now prevalent in the private sector. Others are considering such a reform as it is seen as a means of limiting future pension funding risk. It is important to understand the implications of such reforms for end-of-career exit patterns and workforce composition. Empirical evidence on the relationship between pension plan structure and retirement timing is currently limited, primarily because most state pension reforms are so new that few employees enrolled in those alternative plans have reached retirement age. An exception, and the subject of our analysis, is the teacher retirement system in Washington State, which introduced a hybrid DB-DC plan in 1996 and allowed employees in its traditional DB plan to transfer into the new plan. Our analysis focuses on a years-of-service threshold, the crossing of which grants employees early retirement eligibility and, in many cases, a large upward shift in retirement wealth. The financial implications of crossing this threshold are far greater under the state’s traditional DB plan than under the hybrid plan. We find that employees are responsive to crossing the years-of-service threshold, but we fail to find significant evidence that the propensity to exit the workforce varies according to plan enrollment.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Kristian Holden, Josh McGee (2022). Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? An Analysis of Pension Structure and Retirement Timing. CALDER Working Paper No. 262-0322
Two recent CALDER studies published in Exceptional Children provide new evidence about special education teacher preparation and its implications for students with disabilities. The first study (Theobald et al., 2021) shows that special educators who received dual endorsements in special education and another subject had lower rates of workforce entry and retention in special education classrooms. The second study (Theobald et al., 2022) demonstrates that students with disabilities experienced greater reading gains when their district and their special education teacher’s preparation program both used/emphasized evidence-based literacy practices. Together, these papers suggest caution around state-level policies that seek to use dual licensure to address special education teacher shortages, but also suggest potential promise around better aligning special educator literacy preparation and practice as a policy lever for improving reading outcomes for students with disabilities. Future research could study specific policy interventions to design dual-license programs, address special educator shortages, and better align special educator preparation and practice.
Citation: Roddy Theobald (2022). New Evidence on Special Education Teacher Preparation. CALDER Policy Brief No. 31
In this flash brief, we frame the magnitude of teacher attrition during the pandemic, including from the 2020–2021 school year to the 2021–22 school year, using publicly available data on the public teaching workforce in Washington. Specifically, we compare attrition rates during the pandemic to attrition during pre-pandemic years, spanning the 1984–1985 school year to the 2018–2019 school year. We also report the relationship between attrition rates and district vacancies and compare changes in teacher turnover rates to differences in these rates between different kinds of schools.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald (2022). Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the Pandemic. CALDER Policy Brief No. 30
The COVID-19 pandemic initially resulted in an unanticipated and near-universal shift from in-person to virtual instruction in spring 2020. During the 2020-21 school year, schools began to re-open and families were faced with decisions regarding the instructional mode for their children. We leverage administrative, survey, and virtual-learning data to examine the determinants of family learning-mode choice and the effects of virtual education on student engagement and academic achievement. Family preference for virtual (versus face-to-face) instruction was most highly associated with school-level infection rates and appeared relatively uniform within schools. We find that students who were assigned a higher proportion of instructional days in virtual mode experienced higher rates of attendance, but also negative student achievement growth compared to students who were assigned a higher proportion of instructional days in face-to-face mode. Students belonging to marginalized groups experienced more positive associations with attendance but were also more likely to experience lower student achievement growth when assigned a greater proportion of instructional days in virtual mode. Insights from this study can be used to better understand family preference as well as to target and refine virtual learning in a post-COVID-19 society.
Citation: Jennifer Darling-Aduana, Henry T. Woodyard, Tim Sass, Sarah S. Barry (2022). Learning-Mode Choice, Student Engagement, and Achievement Growth During the COVID-19 Pandemic. CALDER Working Paper No. 260-0122
CALDER Policy Brief No. 29-0122
In this CALDER Flash brief, we describe what we have learned about the staffing challenges faced by various kinds of school districts endeavoring to hire different school personnel in Fall of 2021.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Trevor Gratz (2022). School District Staffing Challenges in a Rapidly Recovering Economy. CALDER Policy Brief No. 29
CALDER Policy Brief No. 28-1121
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Etai Mizrav (2021). The Prospective Teacher Pipeline: Simulation Evidence on Levers to Influence Teacher Diversity. CALDER Policy Brief No. 28
High school graduation rates in the United States are at an all-time high, yet many of these graduates are deemed not ready for postsecondary coursework when they enter college. This study examines the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of remedial courses in middle school using a regression discontinuity design. While the short-term test score benefits of taking a remedial course in English language arts in middle school fade quickly, I find significant positive effects on the likelihood of taking college credit-bearing courses in high school, college enrollment, enrolling in more selective colleges, persistence in college, and degree attainment.
Citation: Umut Özek (2021). The Effects of Middle School Remediation on Postsecondary Success: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Florida. CALDER Working Paper No. 258-0921
CALDER Policy Brief No. 27-0921
Citation: Heather Boughton, Jessica de Barros, Dan Goldhaber, Sydney Payne, Nathaniel Schwartz (2021). 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
We use statewide administrative data from Missouri to document the prevalence of Industry Recognized Credential (IRC) programs in public high schools and understand the characteristics of students who complete IRCs. We show that 9 percent of Missouri students complete an IRC during their senior year of high school. IRC completers have lower achievement and are more likely to be disadvantaged along several measurable dimensions relative to their peers who complete analog college-ready programs, on average. Noting these average relationships, there is substantial heterogeneity among individual IRCs in terms of the types of students served: some IRCs attract students with high test scores who mostly go on to attend college, whereas others serve low-scoring students who mostly forego college. There is strong gender segregation across individual IRCs that aligns with gender segregation across occupations in the labor market.
Citation: Joshua Eagan, Cory Koedel (2021). Career Readiness in Public High Schools: An Exploratory Analysis of Industry Recognized Credentials. CALDER Working Paper No. 257-0921
What does it mean for students to be in a gifted program? While about 7% of students nationally participate in gifted programs, relatively little is known about the experiences of students in these programs or how they vary across districts. Combining administrative and survey data, we describe the structure of gifted programs across nearly 300 school districts in Washington State. Using covariate adjustments and student fixed effects, we find that participation in gifted programs increases access to advanced courses, high-achieving peers, smaller classrooms, and more qualified teachers. These effects are largely concentrated in larger urban and suburban school districts that frequently run large, self-contained gifted programs. Effects of participation are much smaller for small school districts, rural or town school districts, and districts with small gifted programs. While gifted participation changes the educational environment for the average student in the state, the median school district program effect is near zero across the measures of educational environments we consider. This divergence is driven by a pattern of large school districts, high-income school districts, and urban and suburban school districts having programs with significantly larger effects on learning environments. Finally, we find that gifted program effects are larger for some student subgroups, but this is entirely due to district treatment effect heterogeneity, not differential effects on subgroups within districts.
Citation: Benjamin Backes, James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber (2021). What Makes for a "Gifted" Education? Exploring How Participation in Gifted Programs Affects Students' Learning Environments. CALDER Working Paper No. 256-0821
A number of school districts and states have implemented transition intervention programs designed to help high school students graduate ready for college. This study estimates the effectiveness of a transition program implemented statewide in Kentucky for high school seniors called Targeted Interventions (TI). Using 11 years of linked panel data, this study tracks the college progression of seven cohorts of students as they move from high school into college. Using a difference-in-regression discontinuity design, we estimate the program’s impact on college credit attainment and transfer as well as the extent to which the program has helped reshape pathways through college. We find that the TI program significantly increased the likelihood that students would take at least 15 credits during the first term in college, a key measure that has been shown to be predictive of college completion. These early effects, however, do not translate into statistically significant impacts on the likelihood of transfers from a 2-year to a 4-year college, or the likelihood of earning enough credits to graduate from college. We discuss some possible explanations for why the TI program did not lead to observable improvements in college transfer or credit accumulation.
Citation: Zeyu Xu, Benjamin Backes, Dan Goldhaber (2021). Transition Intervention in High School and Pathway Through College. CALDER Working Paper No. 255-0821
Testing students and using test information to hold schools and, in some cases, teachers accountable for student achievement has arguably been the primary national strategy for school improvement over the past decade and a half. Tests are also used for diagnostic purposes, such as to predict students at-risk of dropping out of high school. But there is policy debate about the efficacy of this usage, in part because of disagreements about whether tests are an important schooling outcome. We use panel data from three states – North Carolina, Massachusetts and Washington State – to investigate how accurate early test scores are in predicting later high school outcomes: 10th grade test achievement, the probability of taking advanced math courses in high school, and graduation. We find 3rd grade tests predict all of these outcomes with a high degree of accuracy and relatively little diminishment from using 8th grade tests. We also find evidence that using a two-stage model estimated on separate cohorts (one predicting 8th grade information using 3rd grade information, and another predicting high school outcomes with 8th grade information) only slightly diminishes forecast accuracy. Finally, the use of machine learning techniques increases accuracy of predictions over widely used linear models, but only marginally.
Working Paper 235-0520 was originally released in May 2020. This is an updated version, released August 2021.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Malcolm Wolff, Timothy Daly (2021). Assessing the Accuracy of Elementary School Test Scores as Predictors of Students’ High School Outcomes. CALDER Working Paper No. 235-0821-2
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 instructional modality offered by local public school districts to assess the relationship between modality and COVID outcomes. We focus primarily on COVID case rates, but also provide estimates for hospitalizations (in Washington only) and deaths. Our preferred district and month fixed effects models exploit within district (over time) variation in instructional modality and account for time-invariant district factors. In both states, we find evidence that instructional modality does lead to increases in COVID spread in communities with moderate to high levels of pre-existing COVID cases, although the causal effect is small in magnitude.
Working Paper No. 247-1220 was originally released in December 2020 and has since been updated to Working Paper No. 247-1220-3, released in July 2021.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Scott A. Imberman, Katharine O. Strunk, Bryant Hopkins, Nate Brown, Erica Harbatkin, Tara Kilbride (2021). To What Extent Does In-Person Schooling Contribute to the Spread of COVID-19? Evidence from Michigan and Washington. CALDER Working Paper No. 247-0721-3
A growing quantitative literature finds evidence that student teaching placements predict later outcomes of teacher candidates and their students, but there is little large-scale quantitative evidence about the mechanisms for these estimated relationships. We use data from a survey of STEM teachers in Washington State to better understand how their perceptions of preparation are related to student teaching placements and current classroom environment. We find evidence that the composition of students in student teaching classrooms are predictive of STEM teachers’ perceptions of their preparation. For example, STEM teachers who student taught in classrooms with more English Language Learners and economically disadvantaged students reported feeling prepared to teach these specific student populations. Likewise, STEM teachers who student taught in high-poverty classrooms tended to report feeling better prepared to manage their current classroom, particularly if they were currently teaching in a high-poverty classroom.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald, Kathryn Choate, Nate Brown (2021). The Front End of the STEM Teacher Pipeline: Early Career STEM Teachers' Field Experiences and Perceptions of Preparation. CALDER Working Paper No. 254-0721
CALDER Policy Brief No. 26-0721
Students’ performance on standardized tests is clearly predictive of their later outcomes (Goldhaber & Özek, 2019) but whether the costs of administering tests are justified by the value of the tests for improving students’ outcomes is controversial. This controversy fuels heated debates over federal testing requirements, such as those instituted under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and continued under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). All ESSA-required tests were canceled in the 2019-20 school year due to COVID-19, and there was significant political debate about whether they ought to be required in 2020-21. Ultimately the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) allowed for some testing flexibility in the form of ESSA waivers.
In this policy brief, we outline some of the common ways states might use tests to improve student outcomes and the implications of requested and approved waivers on these uses. In particular, we highlight features of waiver requests that are especially important if tests are to be used by specific actors (e.g., families) to benefit students in specific ways. We conclude with a discussion of how testing policy needs to be designed if statewide tests are going to both be useful and maintain political support.
Citation: Paul Bruno, Dan Goldhaber (2021). Reflections on What Pandemic-Related State Test Waiver Requests Suggest About the Priorities for the Use of Tests. CALDER Policy Brief No. 26
We used survey and administrative data from Washington State to assess the degree to which special education teacher preparation, district literacy instructional practices, and the alignment between preparation and practice were associated with the reading test score gains of students with high-incidence disabilities taught by early-career special education teachers in grades 4-8. These students tended to have larger reading gains when their district emphasized evidence-based literacy decoding practices (e.g., phonological awareness, phonics, and reading fluency) and when their special education teacher graduated from a teacher education program that also emphasized these practices. Students with high-incidence disabilities in districts that emphasized balanced literacy practices tended to have lower reading gains. Finally, students with high-incidence disabilities taught by early-career special education teachers tended to have larger reading gains when their teacher’s student teaching placement was supervised by a more experienced cooperating teacher.
This paper has been published in Exceptional Children, March 2022, and can be found here.
Citation: Roddy Theobald, Dan Goldhaber, Kristian Holden, Marcy Stein (2021). Special Education Teacher Preparation, Literacy Instructional Alignment, and Reading Achievement for Students with High-Incidence Disabilities. CALDER Working Paper No. 253-0621
Free and reduced-price meal eligibility (FRM) is commonly used in education research and policy applications as an indicator of student poverty. However, using multiple data sources external to the school system, we show that FRM status is a poor proxy for poverty, with eligibility rates far exceeding what would be expected based on stated income thresholds for program participation. This is true even without accounting for community eligibility for free meals, although community eligibility has exacerbated the problem in recent years. Over the course of showing the limitations of using FRM data to measure poverty, we provide promising validity evidence for a new, publicly-available measure of school poverty based on local-area family incomes.
This Working Paper was orginally posted under the title "Free and Reduced-Price Meal Eligibility Does Not Measure Student Poverty"
Citation: Ishtiaque Fazlul, Cory Koedel, Eric Parsons (2021). Free and Reduced-Price Meal Eligibility Does Not Measure Student Poverty: Evidence and Policy Significance. CALDER Working Paper No. 252-0521
CALDER Policy Brief No. 25-0421
We use comprehensive administrative data from three states to document the relationships between geographic mobility and student outcomes during K-12 schooling. We focus specifically on nonstructural mobility events—which we define as school or district changes that do not occur naturally as the result of planned transitions between schools—and on longitudinal measures that capture these events cumulatively for students. We show that the number of nonstructural moves experienced by a student is a powerful indicator of low academic performance and graduation rates. Longitudinal information on student mobility is unlikely to be readily available to local practitioners—i.e., individual districts, schools, or teachers. However, due to recent investments in longitudinal data systems in most states, this information can be made available at low cost by state education agencies.
This paper has been published in AERA Open and can be found here, January 2022.
Citation: Dan Goldhaber, Cory Koedel, Umut Özek, Eric Parsons (2021). Using Longitudinal Student Mobility Across Schools and Districts to Identify At-Risk Students. CALDER Policy Brief No. 25
