Students starting at a two-year college are much less likely to graduate with a college degree than similar students … of peer ability for most two-year and four-year colleges in the United States- the average PSAT of enrolled students. We … between students who start at two-year versus four-year institutions is explained by differences in peers, leaving room for …

Growing concerns over the achievement of U.S. students have led to proposals to reward good teachers and penalize (or … fire) bad ones. The leading method for assessing teacher quality is "value added" modeling (VAM), which decomposes students … strong assumptions about the nature of the educational production function and the assignment of students to classrooms. In …

colleges, which serve higher percentages of lower-income and minority students, have implications for policy, impending … enrollment patterns and the academic outcomes of community college students using administrative college-level panel data … covering the universe of students in the 116-college California Community College system. We find that community college …

mapped into the observed 1-5 integer scores, for over 4.5 million students. Earning higher AP integer scores positively … that receiving a score of 3 over a 2 on junior year AP exams causes students to take between 0.06 and 0.14 more AP exams …

depends on whether students are the same race or ethnicity as their instructors. To identify racial interactions and address … potential biases from sorting by focusing on students with restricted course enrollment options due to low registration … priorities, students not getting first section choices, and on courses with no within-term or within-year racial variation in …

instruction to minority students in STEM fields. We explore minority student-TA interactions in an important course in the … sciences and STEM - introductory chemistry labs - at a large public university. The uncommon assignment method of students to … students are less likely to drop courses and are more likely to pass courses when assigned to minority TAs, but we do not find …

distinguish between the effects on students gaining access and on those losing access under alternative admissions policies. We … students. The first--highly ranked students at schools which previously sent few students to the flagship university …--gain access due to the policy; the second--students outside the top tier at traditional "feeder" high schools--tend to lose access …

Non-random assignment of students to teachers can bias value added estimates of teachers' causal effects. Rothstein … (2008a, b) shows that typical value added models indicate large counter-factual effects of 5th grade teachers on students' 4 …

indicate strong selectivity of test-takers in "ACT states," where most college-bound students take the ACT, and much less …