Research on the effectiveness of educational inputs, particularly research on teacher effectiveness, typically overlooks teachers’ potential impact on behavioral outcomes such as student attendance. Using longitudinal data on teachers and students in North Carolina I estimate teacher effects...

States and school districts across the United States are increasingly using value-added models (VAMs) to evaluate teachers. In practice, VAMs typically rely on lagged test scores from the previous academic year, which necessarily conflate summer learning with school-year gains. These...

We develop and estimate a joint model of the education and teacher-expectation production functions that identifies both the distribution of biases in teacher expectations and the impact of those biases on student outcomes via self-fulfilling prophecies. Our approach leverages a unique feature...

We examine the impact of having a same-race teacher on students' long-run educational attainment. Leveraging random student-teacher pairings in the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment, we find that black students randomly assigned to a black teacher in grades K-3 are 5 percentage points (7%)...

The effect of commute time on labor supply is estimated in a unique labor market in which workers are subject to daily exogenous variation in commute time and are free to make daily labor supply decisions: substitute teaching. Data on both accepted and rejected job offers received by substitute...

The US teaching force remains disproportionately white while the student body grows more diverse. It is therefore important to understand how and under what conditions white teachers learn racial competency. This study applies a mixed-methods approach to investigate the hypothesis that Black...

Do white teachers learn racial competency from their Black peers? We answer this question using a mixed-methods approach. Longitudinal administrative data from North Carolina show that having a Black same-grade peer significantly improves the achievement and reduces the suspension rates of white...

Workers learn on the job from both repetition and peers. Less understood is how specific types of experience and peer characteristics affect on-the-job learning. This likely differs by context (e.g., occupation, tasks, or roles). Absent such knowledge, it is unclear how to optimally assign...

Teachers are among the most important school-provided determinants of student success. Effective teachers improve students' test scores as well as their attendance, behavior, and earnings as adults. However, students do not enjoy equal access to effective teachers. This article reviews some of...