In early 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released the findings from a large, experimental evaluation of the Head Start program. A common interpretation of the findings is that they show "small" effects, which has lead to, among other things, calls to improve the efficacy...

This paper follows a cohort of initially high performing Missouri students from grade-3 through grade-9 and examines which school factors influence their academic success. Three key findings emerge. First, in terms of performance on standardized tests, schools that are effective in promoting...

Value-added modeling continues to gain traction as a tool for measuring teacher performance. However, recent research (Rothstein, 2009, forthcoming) questions the validity of the value-added approach by showing that it does not mitigate student-teacher sorting bias (its presumed primary...

We use data on workers in the largest public-sector occupation in the United States – teaching – to examine the effect of pension enhancements on employee retention. Specifically, we study a 1999 enhancement to the pension formula for public school teachers in St. Louis that...

We use data from one of the few states where information on curriculum adoptions is available – Indiana – to empirically evaluate differences in performance across three elementary-mathematics curricula. The three curricula that we evaluate were popular nationally during the time...

This paper reports results from a resume-based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives such as public community colleges being...

This paper uses administrative data from Missouri to examine the sensitivity of job training program impact estimates based on alternative nonexperimental methods. In addition to simple regression adjustment, we consider Mahalanobis distance matching and a variety of methods using propensity...

We examine the efficiency implications of imposing proportionality in teacher evaluation systems. Proportional evaluations force comparisons to be between equally-circumstanced teachers. We contrast proportional evaluations with global evaluations, which compare teachers to each other regardless...

This paper documents a startling difference in the grading standards between education departments and other academic departments at universities – undergraduate students in education classes receive significantly higher grades than students in all other classes. This phenomenon cannot be...

We examine agreeability between mothers and caregivers in their assessments of children’s non-cognitive development. We extend the standard agreeability framework and carefully consider systematic directional differences between mothers and caregivers across maternal subgroups. Minority...