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...

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...

We examine the link between math skills and labor-market outcomes using a resume-based field experiment. Specifically, we send fictitious resumes in response to online job postings, randomly assigning some resumes to indicate stronger math skills, and measure employer responses. The resumes that...

Teacher pension systems impose large penalties on individuals who separate too soon or remain employed too long. The penalties result in the retention of some teachers who would otherwise choose to leave, and the premature exit of some teachers who would otherwise choose to stay. We examine how...

This paper follows a cohort of initially high-performing Missouri students from grade-3 through grade-9 and examines whether attending a low-achieving school impacts their subsequent standardized exam scores, as well as the grade in which they first take Algebra I. Two key findings emerge....

It is widely known that standardized tests are noisy measures of student learning, but value added models (VAMs) rarely take direct account of measurement error in student test scores. We examine the extent to which modifying VAMs to include information about test measurement error (TME) can...

Conditional on enrollment, African American entrants at 4-year public universities are much less likely to graduate, and graduate in STEM fields, than white entrants. Using administrative micro data from Missouri, we show that the success gaps between African-American and white students in...

We compare teacher preparation programs in Missouri based on the effectiveness of their graduates in the classroom. The differences in effectiveness between teachers from different preparation programs are very small. In fact, virtually all of the variation in teacher effectiveness comes from...