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...

The specifics of how growth models should be constructed and used to evaluate schools and teachers is a topic of lively policy debate in states and school districts nationwide. In this paper we take up the question of model choice and examine three competing approaches. The first approach,...

This paper reports results from a resume-based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives such as public community colleges being...

We sent nearly 9,000 fictitious resumes to advertisements for job openings in seven major cities in the United States across six occupational categories. We randomly assigned names to the resumes that convey race and gender but for which a strong socioeconomic connotation is not implicated. We...

Conditional on enrollment, African American students are substantially less likely to graduate from 4-year public universities than white students. Using administrative micro data from Missouri, we decompose the graduation gap between African Americans and whites into four factors: (1) racial...

States differ substantially in the structures of their public four-year university systems. This paper uses micro-level data to evaluate the effects of postsecondary education structure on individuals’ educational and labor-market outcomes. Postsecondary education structure affects...