This study uses administrative data linking students and teachers at the classroom level to evaluate teacher quality and joint production in secondary school. Teacher quality is measured by value-added to student test scores in math and reading. Although empirical research has struggled to link...

Value-added modeling continues to gain traction as a tool for measuring teacher performance. However, recent research (Rothstein, 2009, forthcoming) questions the validity of the value-added approach by showing that it does not mitigate student-teacher sorting bias (its presumed primary...

This study uses administrative data linking students and teachers at the classroom level to estimate teacher value-added to student test scores. We find that variation in teacher quality is an important contributor to student achievement more important than has been implied by previous work....

Value-added measures of teacher quality may be sensitive to the quantitative properties of the testing instruments upon which they are based. This paper focuses on the sensitivity of value-added to a particularly relevant testing-instrument property test-score-ceiling effects. Test-score...

We evaluate the integrating and segregating effects of school choice in a large, urban school district. Our findings, based on applications for fall 2001, suggest that open enrollment, a school-choice program that does not have explicit integrative objectives and does not provide busing,...

We compare teacher preparation programs in Missouri based on the effectiveness of their graduates in the classroom. The differences in effectiveness between teachers from different preparation programs are very small. In fact, virtually all of the variation in teacher effectiveness comes from...

We construct a large panel dataset of schools and districts in Florida to evaluate curricular effectiveness in elementary mathematics. A key innovation of our study is that we allow for curriculum quality to be non-uniform across various mathematics subtopics. We find evidence of variability in...

There is increased policy interest in extending the test-based evaluation framework in K-12 education to include student achievement in high school. High school achievement is typically measured by performance on end-of-course exams (EOCs), which test course-specific standards in subjects...

We estimate positional "wins above replacement" (WAR) in the National Football League (NFL). Positional WAR measures the value of players in the NFL, by position, in terms of generating wins. WAR is a commonly used metric to evaluate individual players in professional baseball and basketball in...

During the late 1990s public pension funds across the United States accrued large actuarial surpluses. The seemingly flush conditions of the pension funds led legislators in most states to substantially improve retirement benefits for public workers, including teachers. In this study we examine...