Annual student testing may make it possible to measure the contributions to student achievement made by individual teachers. But would these “teacher value-added” measures help to improve student achievement? I consider the statistical validity, purposes, and costs of teacher value-added...

We use North Carolina data to explore whether the quality of teachers in the lower elementary grades (K–2) falls short of teacher quality in the upper grades (3–5) and to examine the hypothesis that school accountability pressures contribute to such quality shortfalls. Our concern with the...

Florida's 1999 A-plus program was a consequential accountability program that embedded vouchers in an accountability regime. Under Florida rules, scores of students in several special education (ESE) and limited English proficient (LEP) categories were not included in the computation of school...