Proponents of school choice argue that it improves educational outcomes by allowing parents to self-select into schools that are most effective for their children. Contrary to these arguments, empirical evidence suggests that parents may not incorporate school effectiveness or match quality when...

This paper presents the first causal evidence on the effects of school accountability systems on teacher labor markets. We exploit a 2002 change in Florida's school accountability system that exogenously shocked some schools to higher accountability grades and others to lower accountability...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Federal No Child Left Behind' legislation, which enables students of low-performing schools to exercise public school choice, exemplies a widespread belief that competing for students will spur public schools to higher achievement. We investigate how the introduction of school choice in North...

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...

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...

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...