The paper evaluates math performance at four high-need middle schools during a four-year intervention, which was designed to help math teachers diagnose students' areas of need and to design lesson plans responsive to those needs. Before the intervention began, the researchers pre-selected four...

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...

We develop a multi-agent model of the education production function where investments of students, parents, and teachers are linked to the presence of minorities in the classroom. We then test the key implications of this model using rich survey data and a mandate to randomly assign students to...

We estimate the equilibrium effects of a public-school grant program administered through school councils in Pakistani villages with multiple public and private schools and clearly defined catchment boundaries. The program was randomized at the village-level, allowing us to estimate its causal...

Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge by using information produced by its evaluation and compensation reforms as the basis for effectiveness-adjusted payments that provided large...

Many personal and policy decisions turn on perceptions of school effectiveness, defined here as the causal effect of attendance at a particular school or set of schools on student test scores and other outcomes. Widely-disseminated school ratings frameworks compare average student achievement...

Using rich panel data from Pakistan, we compute test score based measures of quality (School Value-Addeds or SVAs) for more than 800 schools across 112 villages and verify that they are valid and unbiased. With the SVA measures, we then document three striking features of the schooling...

Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school...

This paper examines the impact of school accountability on adult crime and economic self-sufficiency. We employ a unique source of linked administrative data from a Southern state and exploit exogenous variation generated by the state's accountability regime. Our findings indicate that a...

To improve public services, public sector managers must encourage reticent civil servants to enact effective reforms. We show through a randomized controlled trial that school principals, i.e., school mangers, can act as leaders to improve Instructional Management (0.3SD) and student learning...