Showing 1 - 10 of 22
Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), which combines community investments with reform minded charter schools, is one of the most ambitious social experiments to alleviate poverty of our time. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ on educational outcomes, with an eye toward...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463176
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' test scores into components attributed to student...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464205
It is difficult to measure teaching quality at the postsecondary level because students typically "self-select" their coursework and their professors. Despite this, student evaluations of professors are widely used in faculty promotion and tenure decisions. We exploit the random assignment of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464563
This paper uses a new administrative dataset of students at a large university matched to courses and instructors to analyze the importance of teacher quality at the postsecondary level. Instructors are matched to both objective and subjective characteristics of teacher quality to estimate the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012466065
This paper investigates the effects of California's class size reduction program on teacher quality and student achievement in an effort to gain a comprehensive understanding of the impact of a large-scale decrease in class size. It uses year-to-year differences in class size generated by...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012469504
A growing number of states are using annual school-level test scores as part of their school accountability systems. We highlight an under-appreciated weakness of that approach the imprecision of school-level test score means -- and propose a method for better discerning signal from noise in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012470570
Despite recent theoretical work and proposals from educational reformers, there is little empirical work on the effects of higher grading standards. In this paper we use data from the High School and Beyond survey to estimate the effects of grading standards on student achievement, educational...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012470862
Considerable controversy surrounds the impact of schools and teachers on the achievement of students. This paper disentangles the separate factors influencing achievement with special attention given to the role of teacher differences and other aspects of schools. Unique matched panel data from...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012472122
This paper documents a new empirical regularity: teacher value-added increases within-teacher when accountability incentives are strengthened. That finding motivates a strategy to separate value-added into incentive-varying teacher effort and incentive-invariant teacher ability, combining rich...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012452973
Improving the nutritional content of public school meals is a topic of intense policy interest. A main motivation is the health of school children, and, in particular, the rising childhood obesity rate. Medical and nutrition literature has long argued that a healthy diet can have a second...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012455463