Education officials often use one assessment system both to create measures of student achievement and to create performance metrics for educators. However, modern standardized testing systems are not designed to produce performance metrics for teachers or principals. They are designed to...

We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or distance learning) on test scores. We combine Spring 2021 state standardized test score data with comprehensive data on schooling in the 2020-21 school year across 12 states. We find that pass rates declined...

We examine student, teacher, and peer perceptions of effort, ability, performance, and self-confidence in Romania's highly tracked schools. We find that: (1) students just above a cutoff--tracked into high-achieving classes--have less favorable self-perceptions than those just below...

Expansion of the use of student test score data to measure teacher performance has fueled recent policy interest in using those data to measure the effects of school administrators as well. However, little research has considered the capacity of student performance data to uncover principal...

High-dosage tutoring is an effective way to improve student learning (Nickow et al., 2024; Guryan et al., 2023). Finding ways to deliver high-dosage tutoring at large scale remains a challenge. Two primary challenges to scaling are cost and staffing. One possible solution is to reduce costs by...

The promise of randomized controlled trials is that evidence gathered through the evaluation of a specific program helps us--possibly after several rounds of fine-tuning and multiple replications in different contexts--to inform policy. However, critics have pointed out that a potential...

Motivated by the quantitative and qualitative analysis of these early attempts, we adapted the approach and designed large-scale experiments in the states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh to test two new scale-up models. In Haryana, teachers received support from government resource persons trained...

This paper is the first to explore the effects of school accountability systems on high-achieving students' long-term performance. Using exceptional data from a large highly-selective state university, we relate school accountability pressure in high school to a student's university-level grades...

In the United States, girls outperform boys in measures of reading achievement while generally underperforming in science and mathematics. One major class of explanations for these gaps involves the gender-based interactions between students and teachers (e.g., role-model and Pygmalion effects)....

The leading school reform policy in the United States revolves around strong accountability of schools with consequences for performance. The federal government's involvement through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 reinforces the prior movement of many states toward policies based on...