Internet-based educational resources are proliferating rapidly. One concern associated with these (potentially transformative) technological changes is that they will be disequalizing—as many technologies of the last several decades have been—creating superstar teachers and a winner-take-all...

We examine how employers learn about worker productivity in a randomized pilot experiment which provided objective estimates of teacher performance to school principals. We test several hypotheses that support a simple Bayesian learning model with imperfect information. First, the correlation...

Teacher contracts that condition pay and retention on demonstrated performance can improve selection into and out of teaching. I study alternative contracts in a simulated teacher labor market that incorporates dynamic self-selection and Bayesian learning. Bonus policies create only modest...

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value-added (VA) teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. Using school district and tax records for more...

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers' causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias in...

This paper presents evidence about the effect of individual monetary incentives on English and math teachers in Israel. Teachers were rewarded with cash bonuses for improving their students' performance in high-school matriculation exams. The main identification strategy is based on measurement...

Teacher performance evaluation has become a dominant theme in school reform efforts. Yet, whether evaluation changes the performance of teachers, the focus of this paper, is unknown. Instead, evaluation has largely been studied as an input to selective dismissal decisions. We study mid-career...