Urban school districts nationwide have increased within-district choice for families. In response, district policymakers are overhauling the systems for applying to and enrolling in schools, with the goal of making it easier and more equitable for students to enroll in schools that are a good...

The influx of immigrants has shifted the ethnic composition of public schools in many states including North Carolina. Recent evidence from North Carolina suggests that increases in Limited English students' concentration have led to a slight decline in performance solely for students at the top...

Do increased instruction hours improve the performance of all students? Using PISA scores of students in ninth grade, we analyse the effect of a German education reform that increased weekly instruction hours by two hours (6.5 percent) overalmost five years. In the additional time, students are...

There is a perception among native born parents in the U.S. that the increasing number of immigrant students in schools creates negative peer effects on their children. In North Carolina there has been a significant increase in immigrants especially those with limited English language skills and...

Numerous countries require teachers to assign comportment grades rating students' social and work behavior in the classroom. However, the impact of such policies on student outcomes remains unknown. We exploit the staggered introduction of comportment grading across German federal states to...

Due to increased financial pressures following the Great Recession, a growing number of school districts have switched from a traditional five-day school week to a four-day week schedule. While these shorter school weeks potentially help reduce costs, this study considers the implications these...

A large body of research has found that, by being better able to serve as cultural translators and role models, demographically-similar teachers can increase students' achievement. These studies have tended to focus on the role of race and gender similarities between student and teacher. This...

Information about teachers' effectiveness at the hiring stage is particularly scarce despite its importance for personnel decisions. Using the German setting of teacher training, I investigate the relationship of teachers' pre-service cognitive and pedagogical skills as measured by two state...

Using data from TIMSS 2015, an international large-scale assessment of student skills, I investigate the effect of teacher characteristics on students' science achievement. My identification strategy exploits the feature that in many education systems different science domains (physics, biology,...

Numerous economic studies have considered the relationship between class size and student achievement, the majority of which have focused on elementary schools in the US and Europe. While the general finding is that smaller classes are associated with increased student achievement, a few...